What? Trump's Cooking The Books Just Like Everyone Predicted? Who Could Have Seen ...

[Zorro]

Oh, right, everyone, we just said.

After Donald Trump made a habit of insisting that any good economic news coming from the Biden and Obama administrations had to be fake, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that there’s now evidence that Trump’s administration might be cooking the books to hide just how bad the Great Leader’s tariffs are. As Politico reports, political appointees held back a scheduled Department of Agriculture forecast and stripped out its accompanying written analysis “because it predicts an increase in the nation’s trade deficit in farm goods.”

After all, Trump says his tariffs are wonderful, and that they’ll force other countries to move their factories here, so it would be rather inconvenient for a report to come right out and predict the exact opposite, because those are really inconvenient facts. So instead, the quarterly report was released a week late, and officials decided to “block publication of the written analysis normally attached to the report because they disliked what it said about the [trade] deficit.”

But don’t you go accusing the administration of fudging the numbers — hey, that would make for a yummy photo illustration! — because as Politico notes, the actual data is no different from how they appeared in the unredacted original. They’re just shorn of the goddamned words that would have put tariffs in a bad light. Any embarrassing conclusions about what they meant will have to come from third party analysts, who could then be accused of lying because they hate America.

This is hardly trivial stuff, either, because these quarterly forecasts and their analysis of farm imports and experts are used by commodities traders and agricultural groups to make real-world decisions. It is very serious agribusiness, man. And even without the usual written analysis, it ain’t great news, projecting the current fiscal year’s agricultural trade deficit at $49.5 billion, a new record that dwarfs last year’s also-record $31.8 billion. That’s an increase of 55 percent over the farm-trade deficit that Republicans said last year showed Joe Biden was terrible for farmers.

So why does the agriculture department think that’s happening? Shut up, none of your business. That analysis was determined to be bad for America, so down the memory hole it went.

https://www.wonkette.com/p/what-trumps-cooking-the-books-just

[pandr32]

1. It's all just 'numbers' to him.

They are easy to rearrange because they don't mean anything to him.

[uponit7771]

2. Even China just stops reporting on numbers instead of blocking them, Trump is worse than them