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Last week, President Donald Trump fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Her transgression? The bureau reported that recent job growth was much lower than expected.

Trump said he didn’t think the numbers were true, so he fired her. He accused the bureau’s commissioner, Erika McEntarfer , of rigging the numbers “to make Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

Here’s the problem: Firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics director and pretending that job growth is stellar doesn’t make it so. The number of jobs created in the U.S. in recent months was lower than expected , no matter how

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