President Trump has appointed E.J. Antoni, an economist from the Heritage Foundation, to head up the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This is an extremely challenging job because the traditional approach -- not going back months, but decades -- has always been terribly partisan. It is, almost by definition, based more on a ton of subjective opinions than on any actual objective facts.

The press -- even the allegedly business-minded publications, which ought to know better -- is slamming President Trump for firing the last BLS chief, claiming that she was fired only “because last month's numbers weren't to his liking.”

It's a lie.

In fact, the BLS has been producing objectively bad reports for decades, routinely exaggerating the good news during Democrat administrations and exaggerating the bad news during Republican administrations. They're always quietly adjusting the numbers weeks or months after the fact -- and it's funny, isn't it, how the adjustments always seem to favor the Democrats and hurt the GOP?

E.J. Antoni is a great numbers guy. To the extent that this job can be done well, in a nation this huge and an economy this diverse, he'll be fine.

But, just as we have learned to expect more creativity from this administration in areas of foreign policy and bureaucratic oversight, let’s hope too for more creativity in this statistics-gathering role.

The really important challenge is going to be in establishing rational expectations in defining the real meaning of these statistics.

When the BLS reports on job growth and unemployment changes, to be really helpful they need to provide more precise definitions so that we can better........

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