Catherine Rampell

That may not be super comforting if you are among the 4.6%, obviously.

But it's rising.

And probably the reason why it's rising, the reason why we've had some job losses, and we can get into whether we should even take those numbers at face value.

They're probably overstating the health of the economy.

Part of the reason why all of that's happening is that we have some pretty destructive economic policies that are weighing on the economy.

Yeah.

So Fed Chair Jerome Powell last week said at his press conference that the Federal Reserve staff think these numbers are probably overstating the number of jobs we're adding each month by about 60,000.

So, what does that mean?

That means that if we had last month, as the number showed, about 60,000 jobs added, probably if you adjust it by what they think the error is, maybe we had no jobs added.

And in previous months when we had slight job losses, they might have been much bigger job losses.

To be clear, this is not an accusation that the Trump administration is cooking the books.

Rather, this is about some difficulties in measurement around the time that an economy might be turning.

Because based on the way that the surveys are administered, companies that are closing are no longer responding to surveys.

So maybe you're only getting responses from companies that are still doing okay.

And so if you were actually to adjust the data a little bit more,

In retrospect, they will do this.

They will do revisions.

If you were able to adjust the data accounting for all this stuff, the economy would probably look a little bit worse.

It's just it's a methodological challenge.

It's again, it's not about malfeasance.