00:00Let me just end with this. Studies show that BLS is getting a, doing a better job now than they did 20 years ago, 20 and 30 years ago, in estimating the first number. So even though it's revised two more times, that 73,000 will be revised two more times. And that's, they're more accurate now than they were 30 years ago.
00:24So I said, groundless. I don't think there's any grounds at all for this, for this firing. And it really hurts the statistical system. It undermines credibility in BLS. Suppose that they get a new commissioner and this person, male or female, are just the best people possible, right? And they do a bad number. Well, everybody's going to think, well, it's not as bad as it probably really is because they're going to suspect political influence. So this is, this is damaging. This is not what we need to have.
00:49So a couple follow-ups for you, but let's start on the revisions piece. One of the things that the president posted about, he says this, this is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the jobs growth in March, 2004 by approximately 818,000 jobs. And then again, right before the presidential election. Now he's talking about the overall year in that first bigger number, right?
01:14Does he have any point here when he says that, well, things looked politically better for my opponent back at the time than they actually were?
01:27Well, I don't think the timing is right, even if that were a good argument.
01:31The first revisions were announced, the preliminary estimates were announced in August.
01:37And in August, right in the middle of the campaign, the Democratic candidate was faced with much fewer job growths than expected.
01:49I suspect the candidate Harris would have liked to have run on 818,000 more jobs in the economy.
01:55And then the final revision came out as 600,000. And here's another thing. We always revise and every year we revise the numbers.
02:03When I was commissioner, we had a 500,000 job revision during President Trump's first term.
02:09And why do we do that? Because firms are created or firms go out of business.
02:14And we don't really know that during the course of the year until we reconcile against a real full count of all the businesses.
02:25We do that once a year. Once we do the reconciliation, like reconciling your checkbook, you find out whether you've got as much money or you have less.
