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Catherine Rampell: The Trump administration’s war on statistics is now threatening lives

First, they came for the unemployment rate, and we brushed it off as tinfoil-hat nonsense.

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.