President Donald Trump hosted Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore to present alternative economic data, after President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in response to a massive revision of jobs numbers for the past few months. Moore claimed the Biden administration’s BLS overestimated job creation by 1.5 million jobs over the past two years. “I think they did it purposely,” said Trump. “I don’t think it’s an error.”

STEPHEN MOORE: So I called the president because I had some very good news from some new data that we’ve been able to put together that no one has ever seen before – and I’ll just quickly go through these. I was telling the president that he did the right thing in calling for a new head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because this shows that over the last two years of the Biden administration, the BLS overestimated job creation by 1.5 million jobs. That’s a gigantic error. TRUMP: I don’t think it’s an error. MOORE: You may well be right – even if it wasn’t purposeful, it’s incompetence. Right? So, 1.5 million jobs overestimated. We also have access to some data that no one else does on what has happened month-by-month with median household income. This is based on unpublished Census Bureau data. It will be released sometime in the next six months, but we get an advance look at it. So I was telling the president: in his first five months in office – starting in January through June – the median household income, adjusted for inflation, for the average family in America is already up $ 1,174. That’s an incredible number. TRUMP: That’s a giant gain. Just came out. And if I would have said this, nobody would have believed it. There’s your number. We’re doing well! MOORE: The next one compares – we finally have the 2024 data on what happened with real family income in the United States. What I did was compare Donald Trump’s first term with Joe Biden’s first term. By the way, these dotted lines here, Mr. President – that’s COVID. If it had not been for COVID, these numbers would have been substantially better. But even taking into account President Trump’s last year in 2020, we saw a $ 6,400 real, after-inflation gain in income for the average family. That compares with Joe Biden’s measly $ 551. TRUMP: We were almost $ 8,000 in total – look at that number. MOORE: Then we looked at which families did the best. We have data from the Census Bureau that shows by income percentile – the 25th percentile is the lowest income, the 75th percentile is the highest income. What’s fascinating about this, Mr. President, is every income group did better under Trump. The red is President Trump, the blue is President Biden. Every single income group did better under Trump. What’s really amazing is that under Biden, the lowest income group lost income. They were poorer after four years of Biden’s presidency. There was virtually no gain for the middle class, and the rich were the only group that did better under Biden – which is ironic, because Biden keeps saying he was trying to get rid of income inequality. He made income inequality worse, not better. It was President Trump that reduced income inequality. These numbers just came out. And here they are in dollar terms: – Even the lowest income 25% gained about $ 4,000 under Trump. – The middle class gained $ 6,400. – The richest gained almost $ 10,000. So you can see – every income group did better under Trump than Biden, by a wide margin.

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