YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Beach

lines on the record: 17
first: 2025-08-04
most recent: 2025-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In the direction that they take. So there will be a time when we need to recover, no matter who's appointed. I hope that it will be a short-lived time. And my guess is, given the reputation of BLS, if someone really reputable is appointed, then yeah, I don't think the period of transition will be that long.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“St. Peter probably influenced that number, and it's not as bad as it really is. So for a while that suspicion that the estimate that's announced is really not the real estimate will be in the minds of some people, not in my mind, because I know that these people who work there, the professionals, the full-time staff, the patriots that work there, the loyal Americans who are just extremely diligent in doing an absolutely objective job, those people are still in place. But if you don't have my level of knowledge or a reasonable level of knowledge of how internally BLS works, you're going to be subject to these falsehoods and accusations. And that will be damaging. That will reduce investment, that will reduce economic activity, that will make at least, that will create greater uncertainty about what's happening inside the U.S. economy. Policymakers will be less”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, St. Peter has a reputation for honesty and for clarity of thought. Still, it'll be the case because St. Peter won't have any control over the way that the data are collected or the data are assembled or the estimates that are done. That's all done outside of the knowledge of the commissioner. Commissioner has no control or that in fact you're locked out of that whole process. So it will be the case that St. Peter will have a month come when the unemployment rate will be disappointingly low, could even be negative but I think given what has just happened, people will say well”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there has been damage and it will take time to recover from that damage. The last time there was a serious political effort on BLASP was during the Nixon administration. And it took some time for BLS to recover from that. The action taken by the president at that time vis- ⁇-vis BLS was not, I think, as significant as this one. So just imagine that the president decides to appoint St. Peter as the new BLS commissioner.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the jobs report? Well, as soon as COVID was over, we started to get congressionally mandated programs that then sucked up all that couch money. If we had a little bit of extra, we, I mean BLS, a little bit of extra to do these things, just think of the innovation that would happen. I think we would quickly be out of the problems that we are facing from a methodological standpoint and that might then reduce the political pressure that we saw that was so evident on Friday.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More money than that on things that we might disagree with, but they need to allocate a little bit of money to CPS for that. Does it have the authority? Here's a really interesting story. During COVID, we canceled all travel, all conferences, you know, and I was surprised at how many millions of dollars went into travel and conferences and meetings. So this became for me couch money during the COVID years, and I was able to spend that money on important things, I thought. So I did a lot of things like I built a new data center to get us out of the basement of 104-year-old building and out to a wonderful above-ground local location. But I also started a number of research programs. I made 31 big modifications to the CPI. We started a whole new approach on looking at consumer expenditures, and I subsidized some experimentation.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to be really careful, right? You want to run tests. You want to test out your new idea. You don't want to have a, you know, count the number of geese in the air and that's the unemployment rate. You want to make sure that that is a particularly good indicator of the employment market. And you want to test it in real time as well as experimental time in real time. So run it parallel. Well, these tests expand the costs of your unemployment statistics program because you're running essentially two systems simultaneously. We think that to modify the current population survey, which is the survey of households, would cost around 15 million to 20 million in experimental costs over a two-year period. It's not great. The program itself costs about $45 million a year, but it does add to the cost for those two years or so. Congress could easily do that. I mean, my gosh, Congress is spending a lot.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has the authority to make the changes. It doesn't have the budget to do so. And it isn't that BLS just needs more money, right? Matter of fact, I think Congress, if it paid more attention, would say, well, what are you spending your money on now? And let's make sure that the low priority is canceled so that we can support the high priority. I think BLS would be very happy with that. But we do need more money. And why? Well, if you're going to change an official statistic, the unemployment rate, let's just take that.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At its first estimate than it was 30 years ago. In fact, it's really kind of almost a steady progress towards greater accuracy. So the big revisions are indicative of not error. They're indicative of more information. And the bigger the revisions, the more likely we are in a turning point.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turning points in the economy are accompanied by changes, larger changes in the revisions, particularly in this case where we suspect smaller businesses are feeling the effects of the supply shock coming from the tariff policy and from immigration and that these supply shocks are affecting smaller businesses more than they are larger businesses and state and local governments are being affected by yet another factor and that is the expiration of the COVID era money. I think that's was actually the root of a lot of the changes that you saw on Friday state and local governments are not able to hire at the levels they were going to hire at in previous years or did hire at in previous years because they did not have the subsidies that they had in previous years. So these are important revisions. Actually the research shows, and this may shock you, that BLS is getting much better”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completion, and they revised that number of the first month, and then by the third month, we're into the 90s. Usually end up around 93, 94% of all the sent out returns come back to us with information. So it's a wonderful survey. The revisions are done because we get more information from businesses. Oftentimes big businesses answer first. They have the capacity to do so, and then we get smaller entities, state and local governments, smaller businesses answer in those next two months. We always have revisions. Even when we say the number did not change, it doesn't mean we didn't have revisions. They just canceled each other out. There's just all these revisions are coming in. The revisions have been high recently, but this is not a typical of a period when the economy is either going back to growth or going down to subsidence. So oftentimes”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the employment survey, the jobs numbers come from a survey of businesses. The unemployment rate comes from a survey of households. So there's two surveys involved in every first Friday report. What we're talking about now is the survey that goes out to businesses, and it goes out to hundreds of thousands of businesses. Well, of course, there's still a probability sample since there's well in excess of 12 million businesses in our census of business, our business register. Well, those businesses are supposed to turn their surveys in at the end of the month, basically, but only about 68%. Usually that's the average do so, and so BLS keeps the window open for two more months. So 68% or so at the end of the first month, they make the first estimate, then at the end of the second month, we'd get about 83%.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data. The response rates on the surveys are falling dramatically. I've made that point on this program. And our costs are rising dramatically, which makes it really difficult to conduct those surveys in the future in the way we have in the past. And then the future is kind of a going in the direction of the employment survey. And I just said surveys are falling, but the employment survey is a little different. It's not an in-person survey. It is an electronic survey, and we need to invest more in the electronic side of statistical creation or production, blended data, et cetera. I could do a whole program on this, but your point was well made. BLS has had some challenges in front of it, as has the entire statistical system. Unfortunately, for this particular episode, those challenges were really not, I don't say relevant. They're relevant, of course, but they're really not the reason why we should have had a change.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was really honored to be the Commissioner of Labor Statistics from 2019 until 2023. So I served a little less than two years under President Trump. He nominated me. It is a presidential nomination, Senate confirmed positions. It has a statutory four-year term. And then I served the rest of my term under President Biden. So I was in both terms. I think that's kind of important because the BLS commissioner has been exempt from the normal turning over of the presidency by party and that's because the view is well these data are so important. They should not even be a part of the political appointment process except when they come due. Sort of like the Federal Reserve Chair or something of that nature. It's just seen as we want to keep it out of politics. So I served over that period of time that was the COVID period. So there were all kinds of real challenges from that. But I think the main thing that I drew from that period is how important it is, crucial almost where the crisis level to modernize the way we collect.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the dismissal, which I then subsequently said on Twitter or X that they were unfounded and I haven't dropped that position since. So happy to talk about it.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was dumbcast. I just finished a luncheon meeting at a very nice restaurant and I was sitting in my pickup truck and I just couldn't believe. And then I sat there for probably 30, 40 minutes, car running and answering emails people just sorting it out. It isn't that he didn't have the authority to do so. He does have the authority. We all, you know, everyone in the executive branch serves the pleasure of the president except those that have been specifically exempted by statute and where that statute has been signed by the president. I think what was shocking about this is not that she was dismissed. That's shocking enough. It was the possibility that we could have now a sustained attack on official economic statistics and that would undermine confidence in those statistics and put us in a path that other countries have followed. I mean, instantly people went to worst case. After a while that sort of settled down and we began to look at the reasons for the...”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just really a pleasure to be back with you. I wish we were talking about some other subject besides this termination. I mean, it's just.”
2025-08-04 · Odd Lots · Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source