First, they came for the unemployment rate, and we brushed it off as tinfoil-hat nonsense.
Then they came for crowd sizes, and we laughed at the absurdity.
The next victim was the deficit, which they said was shrinking even as we saw it rising; also climate data, which they denigrated, doctored or disappeared without a trace. But we said, eh, they always do that, no big deal.
They purged the data-crunchers who tabulate crop prices and other agricultural statistics, and we ignored it because we weren’t farmers. They even came for the yield curve, which they said hadn’t inverted when it had, but also that even if it did invert, the inversion would mean the opposite of what everyone knows it means.
Now, they’ve come for the weather forecast. And if earlier episodes in President Trump’s war on statistics threatened livelihoods, this one threatens lives.
