538: Trump already messing with data.

Is Trump Already Messing With Government Data?

When then-President Barack Obama promised, in his 2010 State of the Union address, to “double our exports over the next five years,” experts were skeptical — and with good reason. Obama didn’t even come close to achieving that goal. Even today, two years after Obama’s five-year deadline expired, exports are up only about 30 percent since early 2010.

So mark that down as a failure for Obama. But at least we know he failed — the data is right there on the Census Bureau’s website. There is reason to doubt whether the Trump administration will be equally transparent.

The Wall Street Journal this week reported that the White House was considering changing the way the government calculates the trade deficit. Specifically, the proposed change would affect how the government accounts for “re-exports” — products that are imported into the U.S. and then sold to customers overseas. Right now, re-exports are a wash for the trade deficit because they count on both sides of the equation (as both imports and exports). The Trump administration, according to the Journal, is weighing whether to count them as imports but not as exports, which would make the overall trade deficit look larger.

From an economic perspective, the change makes no sense — it’s the equivalent of Starbucks accounting for the cost of buying coffee but not the revenue from selling it. But politically, it could serve Trump’s purposes by making the deficit (and therefore U.S. trade policy) look worse than it really is. That could make it easier for Trump to push through protectionist trade policies.

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumpbeat-is-trump-already-messing-with-government-data/?ex_cid=SigDig