Can We Trust What the Government Says Under Trump?

When FDR came into the White House in 1933 and began planning the New Deal, he had plenty of help from a whole host of experts as to what kinds of programs needed to be put in place in order to get the country’s economy moving again.

The biggest and most immediate problem he faced, however, was that he had absolutely no idea how to judge the effectiveness of any of the New Deal programs that he wanted to get started because he had no data which could be used to determine whether any of these programs would actually work.

The federal government didn’t pay out unemployment insurance, so nobody knew how many Americans were out of work. The banks were all chartered and regulated by individual states, so nobody knew how many banks were still open versus how many banks had closed. There were homeless people living all over the place in shantytowns, but nobody knew exactly how many people had lost their homes.

Today we take all that kind of information for granted because it’s published by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the OECD, just to name a few of the many agencies and organizations -public and private — which measure the various trends that we use to determine just about everything that’s going on.