Edward Lotterman

“Why did he do such a stupid thing?”

That was the question economist John Maynard Keynes asked in 1925 after Winston Churchill, then Secretary of the Exchequer, Britain’s treasury, decreed returning the pound sterling to its pre-WWI value against other currencies.

But the quote applies even more strongly to President Donald Trump’s lying about the validity of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ job numbers released last week and then firing its very capable commissioner.

Churchill’s numbskull move immediately made all the exports of his highly export-dependent nation more expensive to buyers in other countries. Within weeks, tens of thousands of British workers were out in the street. In months it was many hundreds of thousands. The United Kingdom had created its own Great Depression five years before the rest of the world.

Trump’s action is equally boneheaded, but the harm won’t be as immediate or dramatic. Yet, in great part because he and minions like Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, keep doubling down, the damage may be broader, longer-lasting, and perhaps irreversible. However, few voters or members of the Republican party seem to appreciate the gravity of what is happening.

What is even more frustrating is that Trump is too obtuse to see how his lack of self control is self-sabotaging of his own goals.

Start with some simple facts and contradictions:

1. Trump wants lower interest rates, especially on politically critical ones like mortgages.

2. Trump wants to claim a booming economy with high employment and output.

3. Central banks, like our Federal Reserve, cut rates when an economy slows, with falling output and employment.

4. Central banks raise interest rates when an economy booms, with high and rising employment and output.

Therefore, Trump cannot have both 1 and 2 at the same time.

Now consider:

• The Fed targets interest rates but can only change them by increasing or decreasing the money supply.

• Changes in the money supply have great and immediate effects on very short-term interest rates, not mortgages.

• Long-term interest rates, however, especially for home mortgages or U.S. government debt maturing in 10 years or more, depend greatly on financial market expectations of the future, not Fed money supply jockeying today.

• If there is a great deal of uncertainty about what is happening in the economy and growth of the money supply reaches inflationary levels, markets will force long-term interest rates higher even if the Fed’s short-term target is lowered.

• Asserting without any factual basis that long-trusted employment numbers have been falsified for political purposes creates great uncertainty for financial markets, households and businesses.

• Uncertainty lowers the value of stocks, bonds, retirement accounts and other assets. It raises interest rates. It lowers the desirability of the dollar as a safe reserve for foreigners. It causes the value of the U.S. dollar to fall relative to other currencies.

• So Trump’s spontaneous outbursts are going to end up harming him more than helping. Unfortunately, most households and businesses will also be harmed.

Some background may be helpful.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics makes many tabulations of indicators each month. Two, the “household survey” and the “establishment survey,” focus on the most basic labor metrics with ones from the establishment survey at the center of the current brouhaha.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City does nothing in conducting or analyzing these surveys. It does, however, maintain a rich and highly used database of economic data that includes series derived from decades of these BLS surveys.

To better understand this week’s affair search online for: FRED Current Employment Statistics (Establishment Survey) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/10; FRED Current Population Survey (Household Survey) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/12.

(The first, a survey of employers is the source for about 700 data series. The second, contacting households, yields nearly 7,000 breakdowns by all sorts of criteria. After opening each of these pages, click the “Read More” link in the second line for explanations.)

Now for the big damage Trump’s little hissy fit will cause.

Start by understanding that information about our economy and society writ broadly is a “public good” in the sense of the term in economics. This is something of value that spills over to benefit others beyond the person, business or government entity that generates it. A public good is “non-rival,” again in economics terms: One person benefiting from it does not reduce anyone else benefiting. And it is “non-excludable:” Once produced, it is difficult to keep others from using it for their own good.

Given these factors, free markets do not provide sufficient incentives to produce information in quantities that are optimal for economic efficiency. If governments do not act to generate it, use of resources will be less efficient, and the people will be poorer.

It is not just private financial markets that benefit from, and depend on, government generated output, employment and price-level statistics. So do businesses in planning spending on new facilities or machines or hiring. So do local governments.

And farmers also need federally produced data. They rely on USDA stats on crop plantings and progress, grain stocks and exports and much other data, including from other nations beside ours. So do ag processors, trucking and rail firms, export elevators and others.

So what does this “public good” issue have to do with an impulsive president’s wild assertions about employment numbers?

Well, as Trump and sycophants like Hassett and Republican members of Congress continue to repeat these lies, they back themselves into a corner: Key people in business who depend on accurate data know that there was no BLS manipulation. But the more often the charges are repeated, the more pressure is placed on any loyal acolyte named to head the BLS to do exactly what Trump says shouldn’t be done: actually manipulate the numbers for political purposes to please a mercurial president’s ego.

And therein lies the crux of the problem: Trump says the trusted numbers can’t be trusted, so he creates a situation where everyone knows the numbers can’t be trusted.

If numbers released this month were, indeed, faked, will there be a revision raising them? How will that be calculated and explained? There are hundreds of BLS employees for whom the integrity of the system is part of their self-identity. Will none of them leak any nefarious actions of a Trump puppet?

Moreover, any political revisions of employment numbers long accepted as accurate by key users will taint confidence in other data series.

If employment data is untrustworthy, what about the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimate due out this Tuesday or the subsequent one on Sept. 12? Farmers, grain handlers and shippers, input suppliers and others, not just in our nation but around the world, depend on the accuracy of this report. They make decisions accordingly. If they cannot trust it, decisions will be riskier and resource use therefore less efficient. Someone’s food will cost more.

One can go on and on. A loss of faith in oil and gas data would have similar effects.

Mistrust will spread across all indicators. We got the “flash,” or Advance Estimate, of GDP for April through June from the Department of Commerce on July 30. Everyone in business knows that this first cut at output of goods and services is based on limited data. There always are revisions. But if the second estimate due out on Aug. 28 shows higher numbers than the first, who now will accept them unquestioningly?

The Consumer and Producer Price Indexes for July are due out this Tuesday and Thursday. It would be hard to fudge them. Yet if they are up, will we get more presidential denunciations?

With a new BLS commissioner in place, who will trust these same indicators for August when they come out in September? Some 70 million Social Security beneficiaries and another 8 million SSI recipients will get a cost-of-living adjustment for 2026 based on consumer prices for July, August and September. If the new BLS director is seen as dancing to the tune of a president who demands rosy numbers, can nearly 80 million of us count on a correct number?

What Trump fails to realize is that after this week’s outbursts, tens of millions of Americans, even many who voted for him, will suspect that their household budgets for next year will suffer because of an egotistical fear of any indication that tariffs or Trump policies are driving up living costs.

Overall, important outcomes are not always dramatic. They happen at the margins, often slowly. What happened this week will raise interest rates and the costs of borrowing for families, businesses and government. It thus will lower the value of physical and financial assets. It will reduce the value of our dollar, already down 6% or 10% relative to other currencies depending on the index used, even more.

None of this is good for the country and, ironically, not good for President Trump.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

By Daniel Miller, Los Angeles Times

Ever since watches began bringing order to the ephemeral passage of time, they also started doing something else: breaking.

Own one long enough and something will probably go wrong. It’ll run slow. Or fast. Or stop altogether.

Decades ago, watch repair shops across the country were staffed with technicians who could service almost any mechanical timepiece when its intricate innards — tiny gears, wheels and springs — failed. But when the U.S. watchmaking industry declined in the mid-20th century, the number of craftspeople who could fix or fabricate timepieces began dwindling too.

There were 1,880 U.S. watch and clock repairers in 2023, down from 2,430 just three years earlier, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That 23% decline, on top of previous losses, has led some in this niche industry to label the situation a workforce crisis. It comes amid renewed interest in mechanical timepieces and a modest rebirth of the American watchmaking industry — despite the omnipresence of cellphones and their effortless timekeeping. Rolex, the Swiss behemoth, alone makes more than 1 million watches a year.

Who will be able to service all of them as they age? Or make the new ones being dreamed up?

A dearth of new watchmaking schools — where students learn about repairs, fabrication or both — is central to the problem. After the closure of several programs in recent decades, only four full-time, independent watchmaking schools remain in the U.S.

One watch company, Torrance, California-based J.N. Shapiro Watches — maker of the $70,000 Resurgence model — is among the handful of U.S.-based firms that has struggled to hire watchmakers.

Rolex has a solution on the repair side.

Popular Rolex models include a green Submariner dive watch that collectors have nicknamed“ the Hulk,” and the GMT-Master II at Gamzo and Co. in Los Angeles, California on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

In September, the Geneva-based company debuted a new watchmaking school at the Rolex Watch Training Center in Dallas. The program’s 18-month curriculum is focused on training students to service watches made by the brand. The last six months of schooling include an immersion component in which students repair Rolex timekeepers under the supervision of instructors.

Upon graduation, participants can work for a Rolex-affiliated jeweler or for the company itself. Most of the school’s first class, which graduates next February, have already secured jobs, a Rolex spokesperson said. They can expect annual salaries starting in the range of $75,000 to $85,000, depending on location.

The school is free. The company spokesperson said in a statement that the Dallas program, which welcomes just 27 students per class, represents the company’s “commitment at a larger scale to meet the industry demand.”

Rolex’s focus on training watchmakers to work solely on its timepieces differentiates its program from independent schools, which typically teach students how to work on all sorts of watches, turning out graduates with expertise in subjects including micro-mechanics and repairs.

“I think we need a balance of technicians and then more full-service watchmakers,” said Tony Traina, who publishes Unpolished Watches, an industry newsletter. “The way in which the profession is evolving right now — it seems like we’re headed in that direction. There are the Shapiros of the world, along with the Rolexes of the world. I think we’ll reach an equilibrium.”

Rolex opened a more traditional watchmaking school in the U.S. in 2001 — the Lititz Watch Technicum in Pennsylvania, but closed it after its final class graduated this summer. The Rolex school in Dallas is in high demand, with 400 applicants for its inaugural class and 560 more for the second one starting in September.

Among the applicants, the spokesperson said, were Texans who’d initially been surprised that fixing watches could be “a viable career with an established educational track.”

The average student age among the first two classes is 28; some have been admitted straight out of high school and others have a college degree. Students have backgrounds in areas such as engineering and accounting, and have had careers as musicians, teachers and communications professionals.

As head of an independent watch company, Joshua Shapiro said it was extremely difficult to find the six watchmakers who now work for him in Torrance.

“It took a lot of networking,” said Shapiro, who added that his team was assembled over several years, and that three of his watchmakers came from the Lititz school.

One of those watchmakers is Spencer Torok, 25, who graduated from Lititz three years ago. After high school, the Hilliard, Ohio, native attended Ohio Dominican University, where he took accounting classes. But Torok realized during the COVID-19 pandemic that he wanted to make a change. He’d long been interested in watches, he said, and enrolled at Lititz.

Shapiro Watches, inspects the inner workings of an Insurgence series watch in Torrance, California on Thursday, July 24, 2025. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Torok said that the schooling only stoked his passion — and that he would never have gotten hired by Shapiro if not for the education he received at Lititz. “No way,” he said with a laugh. “It takes a lot of resources to train someone.”

Some American watch companies have had to go abroad to make hires.

Cameron Weiss, whose eponymous watch company was founded in L.A. in 2013 and later moved to Nashville, said he had to turn to Switzerland to recruit a watchmaker. “I’d been looking for someone with that skill level for the last 12 years,” said Weiss.

In July, Weiss traveled again to Switzerland to scout for workers. He hopes the Rolex program in Dallas will help invigorate watch education in the U.S.

One of the last remaining full-service watchmaking schools in America is at Paris Junior College in Texas. Program coordinator Garrin Fraze, 24, graduated from it in 2019. He was enticed back last year by a former instructor, who asked him to take over.

“Because we are independent, we have a little bit of openness in the curriculum,” said Fraze, who also serves as head instructor of the program.

Like the Rolex school in Dallas, the Paris program is small, accommodating about 20 students. But Fraze hopes to expand it — he knows how strong demand is for watchmakers, including those who can repair Rolexes.

After his graduation from the Paris program, he got a job as the in-house watchmaker of a Fort Worth jeweler.

It was an authorized Rolex dealer.

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Katheryn Houghton, Bram Sable-Smith, KFF Health News

When President Donald Trump signed a law adding work requirements for some Medicaid recipients, he may have undercut lawmakers in at least 14 states who were designing their own plans, according to health industry observers.

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Georgia is the only state with a work requirement in place for Medicaid, but several states have been pursuing such a policy for years, only to be blocked by courts or, most recently, the Biden administration. Some seek state-specific touches to the new rules. Others aim to implement work requirements before the federal law takes effect at the end of 2026.

These states’ moves and Trump’s massive tax-and-spending law share one demand: To keep their Medicaid health coverage, adults who can work must prove they’re logging a minimum number of hours at a job or school, or else qualify for one of the few exemptions.

But now, states that jumped ahead need to ensure their proposals, which require federal approval, don’t stray too far from Trump’s law.

“The statute sets both the floor and ceiling” for work requirements, said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor with George Washington University.

South Dakota, for example, announced in July that it would not submit an application for work requirements as previously planned amid concerns that the state’s laxer rules would not be allowed under the new federal law. The state’s Department of Social Services secretary had warned that working on a state proposal while the federal rules are being hashed out could be “an exercise in futility.”

Arkansas’ plan, on the other hand, is more stringent than the federal law. There are no exemptions to its work requirements in the application, which is pending with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Arizona’s proposal also includes something that’s not in the federal law: a ban on “able-bodied adults” receiving Medicaid benefits for longer than five years total in their lives.

Arkansas and Arizona government officials said they were working with federal officials to square their plans with the new standards.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the department is analyzing how the new federal standards interact with state waivers.

The federal health department must release rules by next June that outline how states are to implement work requirements, according to Elizabeth Hinton, who has been tracking such waivers as part of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

“We don’t exactly know what that will cover,” Hinton said.

It’s unclear how federal officials will respond to the states’ requests, she added, but “we are aware that some folks think there is no wiggle room here.”

States can tweak their Medicaid programs through what are known as demonstration waivers, which are subject to federal approval. The waivers are designed to test new ideas in policy gray areas.

The states that have filed or plan to file such applications with work requirements include Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah.

Congressional Republicans who passed the budget reconciliation bill left room for states to use waivers to fast-track the national standards. Tara Sklar, a professor leading the University of Arizona’s Health Law & Policy Program, said she expects states seeking certain stricter requirements to have a chance of approval, while more lenient ones may face denials.

Federal officials may look favorably on Arizona’s plan, Sklar said, as a five-year lifetime Medicaid limit is different from work requirements. Even if the federal government greenlights stricter work requirements than the federal law calls for, those programs are likely to face legal challenges, she added.

The federal law includes an 80-hour-per-month minimum for work or education, with exemptions for certain adults, including people who are medically frail and parents with young, dependent children.

Montana is the first state to draft a waiver application since Congress finalized national work requirements. State lawmakers first approved work requirements — called “community engagement” standards under the state plan — in 2019, but the state’s application stalled through the end of the first Trump term and the Biden administration.

After Trump was elected again, Montana lawmakers lifted the 2025 expiration date of its Medicaid expansion program, making permanent the program that covered more than 76,000 adults in April, with the expectation that the Trump administration would approve work requirements. In mid-July, state officials released their draft plan to make that a reality “as soon as is practicable.”

The Montana plan largely aligns with the federal law, but it would create additional exemptions, including for people who are homeless or fleeing domestic violence.

Republican state Sen. Gayle Lammers said work requirements that also protect such people who need Medicaid were a big part of persuading legislators to keep the expansion program. At the time, officials didn’t know where the federal government would land on work requirements. And now, Lammers said, it makes sense for Montana to stick to its plan.

“The state should have a say,” Lammers said. “We’re very independent, and everyone is different.”

In South Carolina, state officials are seeking to roll out work requirements for a limited number of newly eligible Medicaid beneficiaries. South Carolina is one of 10 states that has not expanded Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, and yet the state submitted a request with the federal government in June for a partial Medicaid expansion that includes a work requirement component that largely reflects the new federal standards.

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, called South Carolina’s proposal “a state-specific solution.”

The only state with an active work requirement program now wants to scale it back and awaits federal approval to do so. “Georgia Pathways to Coverage” expires at the end of September unless CMS greenlights an extension of the program with a key change: requiring enrollees to document once a year that they’re working, not monthly. That’s a pivot away from the program’s initial design but also differs from the new federal rules, which call for checks every six months.

Fiona Roberts, a spokesperson for Georgia’s Medicaid agency, said the state is still waiting to hear whether it needs to alter its plan.

So Georgia is among the states in limbo, awaiting guidance from the federal government.

KFF Health News correspondents Sam Whitehead and Lauren Sausser contributed to this report.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Amanda Hernández, Stateline.org

Police officers may face hundreds of traumatic incidents over the course of their careers, but many still hesitate to seek mental health support when they need it.

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Despite growing investments in wellness programs by law enforcement agencies across the country, a recent study of just over 100 surveyed officers from the Fargo Police Department in North Dakota found that stigma remains a major barrier to mental health care for officers.

The study found that 60% of surveyed officers said most of their peers wouldn’t disclose a mental health condition to a colleague, and nearly three-quarters believed officers wouldn’t tell a supervisor. Slightly more than half agreed that most officers would expect to face discrimination at work if they disclosed they were experiencing mental illness.

Carol Archbold, the study’s author and a criminal justice professor at North Dakota State University, said officers may avoid disclosing mental health struggles because doing so also conflicts with societal expectations that they remain strong and unemotional.

“The nature of [police officers’] work really, really makes it difficult and important for them to have services available and for them to actually utilize them,” Archbold told Stateline, adding that departments also need to foster a culture where officers feel comfortable using the support available to them.

Departments across the country have expanded access to services like counseling, peer support, therapy, substance use programs, and on-site gyms in response to growing concerns about post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, depression, and suicide among officers. The Fargo Police Department, for example, hired its first-ever health and wellness coordinator last year.

While the department offers a wide range of mental health-related services and programs, the study found that relatively few officers are using them.

Eighty-four percent of surveyed officers were aware of the department’s new health and wellness coordinator, but only 22 had interacted with them, and 19 found the interaction helpful. About 68% knew about the Employee Assistance Program; 20 had used it, with 17 reporting it was helpful. Awareness of the peer support program was higher at 93%, yet only 42 officers had used it, and 36 said it was helpful.

Still, stigma and fears about career repercussions may discourage some officers from using such services.

About half of all U.S. adults will experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetimes, though most will not develop PTSD, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. For police officers, the rate of exposure is significantly higher. Research suggests police officers may experience about three traumatic events every six months, or roughly 180 over a 30-year career.

Repeated exposure to traumatic events has been linked to a wide range of health issues in first responders, including poor sleep quality, depression, alcohol misuse and a heightened risk of PTSD.

In the Fargo survey, 53% of officers agreed that most police officers view being treated for a mental illness as a sign of personal weakness and would not seek professional help if they were experiencing mental health issues.

Forty percent believed that having a history of mental illness would negatively affect an officer’s chances for promotion. Many officers also disagreed with the idea that mental illness would lead to mistrust or social exclusion among peers. Sixty-four percent of officers disagreed with statements suggesting that most officers would avoid partnering with or think less of a colleague who had experienced a mental illness.

While agencies have expanded mental health resources in recent years, the study’s findings suggest that organizational culture remains a key factor in whether officers feel comfortable using those services.

The U.S. law enforcement system includes more than 17,000 federal, state, county and local agencies. While smaller and rural departments may be less likely to offer robust mental health services, Archbold said that does not reflect a lack of interest from leadership. Many departments — regardless of size — struggle to meet officer wellness needs within existing budgets and often must seek additional funding to support mental health programs.

“It’s likely that police chiefs would like to have these services available, but they just don’t have the money to be able to do that –– to provide those services,” Archbold said.

Stateline reporter Amanda Hernández can be reached at ahernandez@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.