Labor Statistics, Tariffs, Texas Redistricting

The Politics Guys

Michael Baranowski

Politics, News

4.4 • 783 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, Justin Holmes and Ken Katkin are host. They start off with the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which seems bad all around, but perhaps won't give Trump what he wants in the end. Next, they move on to trade, as some of Trump's tariffs took effect this week, while China's were delayed yet again. They finish by talking about developments in the fight over Texas redistricting, and Trump’s social media posts about the census, and the likelihood there could be an extra census before 2030, and of excluding non-citizens. The Politics Guys on Facebook | X Mike’s Substack: What Fresh Hell is This? Check out the excellent Sustainable Planet podcast. Listener support helps make The Politics Guys possible. You can support us or change your level of support atpatreon.com/politicsguys or politicsguys.com/support. On Venmo, we’re @PoliticsGuys. The Politics Guys is part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Atheists, agnostics, long-haired, weirdos, short-haired winners, bandwooligans.
0:06.0	I'm the government, hug the government, love, the government, the government, how the government, love, the government.
0:11.9	Hello, and welcome to the politics, guys, a podcast that is a place for rational debate on the issues of the day.
0:23.8	I am Justin Holmes, a political science professor at the University of Northern Iowa, and I'm joined today by Ken Katkin, a professor of law at the Chase
0:29.7	College of Law at Northern Kentucky University. So we're all northern today. Welcome, Ken. Good to talk to
0:35.3	you. Oh, it's great to be back. Great to see you again, Justin.
0:40.1	All right. Well, we've got a lot going on. So let's dig in. Where should we start?
0:48.1	We've got a lot of things this week thinking Bureau of Labor Statistics, not maybe the most
0:53.8	exciting topic in normal times,
0:55.6	but this week we've got some news there.
0:58.8	So this week after a lukewarm jobs report followed by some revisions of previous jobs report,
1:07.5	Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erica McEnterfer, who had been in the position for quite some time, arguing that, gosh, they just don't get the numbers right and we'll get somebody in there that can make good make correct numbers if you will
1:29.0	particularly citing the issue of the revisions clearly there's a lot of pushback
1:37.1	about that although I don't know that there's pushback that's going to be particularly
1:40.1	workable because certainly this is an agency that is generally supposed to be above politics,
1:49.4	etc. And the suspicion is, and I'd say it's probably more of a suspicion, that Trump is not
1:56.6	particularly impressed with the integrity of data, but more interested in what those numbers say
2:02.5	about him. So Ken, thoughts on this situation? Yeah, well, there's a lot of different aspects
2:09.3	of it to think about. I mean, I guess, you know, the official who was fired, Ms. Erica, I think I've heard it pronounced McIntarfer, although I don't know if that's right.
2:21.9	That could be, too.
2:23.2	I have this problem of only reading things.
2:25.5	So, yeah, when you get names like that, it's a little.
	...

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