Hold ex-Census pooh-bah down for the count
P RESIDENT Trump has been filling a lot of jobs lately, some not too easily and others a bit clumsily. I want to talk about one clumsy job appointment in particular. Just days before his inauguration, Nancy Potok was named chief statistician of the US.
The appointment of Potok, who was second in charge at the Census Bureau, wasn’t made by Trump. The job does, however, fall under the jurisdiction of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which reports to the White House.
The president needs to review this one.
For one thing, Potok was instrumental at the Census Bureau when it was producing economic statistics that Trump has long questioned, especially the unemployment rate. Now her role has been expanded.
Second, why was she given her new job just days before Trump took office? And who was responsible for that appointment?
I asked those questions of the OMB but didn’t get an answer.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the problem of Census employees hopping from their government jobs to private sector jobs with companies that get Census contracts — and then returning to a Census job.
Potok is one of those job-hoppers — and shouldn’t be rewarded with a better job.
At best, she should remain at the bureau, which is gearing up for its 2020 decennial census. According to a January report by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, the 2020 census isn’t starting out well.
The GAO last week held a hearing on “High Risk: Government Operations Susceptible to Waste, Fraud and Mismanagement.” Census Bureau head John Thompson was one of the featured guests.
If Potok wants to jump back into a government job, it should be at the Census Bureau. She’s been one of the people who has been helping to steer the bureau for years, and she should be around to suffer the consequences.
There are too many questions surrounding this job change for Trump not to get answers. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday released the minutes of its last policymaking meeting, and it wanted the world to know that the next interest rate increase could come “fairly soon.”
So, there’s a good chance of a midMarch hike, especially since the Fed says there is “considerable uncertainty” about the Trump administration’s fiscal policy.
Things are about to get interesting between the Fed and the White House.
On the one hand, Trump wants rates higher because savers have been punished by the Fed’s extremely low interest rates.
But on the other hand, the new president doesn’t want the Fed to impede the economy with higher rates at a time when he’s trying to get pathetic growth higher.
Aggressive rate hikes will likely be seen by Trump as political.
Fed Chair Janet Yellen will get the boot from her job next year — but in the meantime, she and the White House, which already despises the Fed, are going to tangle.
Funny how this works out, but now it will be Trump’s turn to make the economy look better than it actually is.
The economy is growing at a 2.4 percent annual rate, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. That’s only slightly better than the anemic growth of 1.9 percent in the last quarter of 2016.
And growth for all four quarters of 2016 was just 1.6 percent, which is pathetic and a big reason the Democrats lost the last election.
Ordinarily, this would be great news for a new president — low bar to hurdle, low expectations.
But there’s something else afoot right now.
Trump has promised a “phenomenal” tax reform plan, which he says will be unveiled very shortly. And I have no doubt the plan will be eyepopping.
The problem is, no tax reform of any sort will pass even a Republican-controlled Congress if it makes the nation’s deficit explode.
And Trump’s plan, no matter what it consists of, will do just that unless there is a boost in revenue to the US Treasury.
And the only way revenue can look as though it’s soaring is if Trump’s financial advisers make outrageously optimistic assumptions about the future of the US economy, which has been crawling along at subpar growth for more than a decade.
Making the situation even more complicated is that Trump wants to cut taxes and boost government spending on infrastructure projects simultaneously.
Like tax reform, infrastructure replacement is a worthy cause. But like Trump’s “phenomenal” plan on taxes, rebuilding America will spike US government debt — to more than $20 trillion any day now.
My best guess is that very little gets done on taxes or infrastructure.
I’m going to let the Trump administration spin its wheels for a few months before I attempt to present the president with the only logical pplan to improve the economy. My strategy, in short, calls for changing the way people can use money they have stashed in retirement plans. If enacted, my plan will see the US economy get a $1 trillion boost. And my plan won’t cause the federal deficit to explode. Plus it will slow down the expansion of Washington’s debt.
I’ve written about my plan many times before. And since Trump reads this column, I’m sure he is already familiar with the basics.