Maybe now Nevada’s stubbornly high unemployment rate will finally go down (except not really)

Wants fake BLS reports. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Nevada has had either the highest or one of the highest unemployment rates in the U.S. over most of the 21st century. In the latest report Nevada has the nation’s second highest jobless rate, behind only the Musk-ravaged District of Columbia.

Occasionally Nevada’s notoriously persistent high unemployment rate is attributed to almost optimistic factors, like an economy in transition that is diversifying away from service sector jobs.

But for all the state tax breaks ladled to pretty much any expanding or relocating company that asks for one, before Trump killed it earlier this year Canadian tourism still supported more jobs in Southern Nevada than manufacturing does. Statewide, manufacturing only accounts for less than 4% of the state’s total employment. Nevada remains primarily a service sector economy with a service sector workforce.

From 9-11 to the Great Recession to the pandemic and now the tariff chaos, every time Nevada’s service economy starts to emerge from a crisis, it gets hammered by another one. (And through it all, the state’s primary industry has taken advantage of the carnage to trim its workforce. In the summer of 2000, 210,000 people were employed in Nevada’s casino hotels; in June of this year, 157,000 were.)

Trump threw one of his trademark Queen of Hearts “off with her head” tantrums Friday and fired U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, because Friday’s BLS jobs report indicated the Trump economy hasn’t been creating anywhere near as many jobs as were being created nearly every month during the Biden years.

Trump insists on government employees who are more dedicated to toadying up to him than faithfully executing the legitimate duties required in their jobs.

So now presumably monthly jobs reports won’t be determined by the Current Employment Statistics survey of more than 100,000 private and public employers, along with analysis and modeling of additional tools used by the BLS. Instead, official employment statistics will be corruptly determined by whatever numbers Trump jots on a poster board with his beloved Sharpie.

Which brings us back to Nevada’s unemployment rate.

Monthly state unemployment rates basically mirror those reported by the BLS. So with Trump now insisting that federal employment data must reflect positively on him, it’s possible Nevada’s official unemployment rate could drop substantially. Not because of an improving Nevada economy, or because fewer people are unemployed, but because of the aforementioned Sharpie.

There are at least two scenarios by which Nevada’s unemployment rate could officially (but not really) drop.

First, Trump could take a break from his busy schedule of tariff madness, Texas gerrymandering, and Epstein nostalgia and notice that Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo is on the ballot next year. Trump could order his loyalists installed in the BLS to start lowering Nevada’s unemployment rate month by month. Then, when Democrats point out Lombardo has no economic policy to speak of, Campaign Joe could cite official data indicating the unemployment rate is dropping thanks to his economic mad skills.

Or, echoing his tariff-setting methodology, Trump could just pronounce arbitrary unemployment rates depending on how he feels about some state or other that day.

California? Ewww, a 9% unemployment rate because Gavin Newscum and woke, so Californians need to elect Republicans, Sharpie says.

Nevada? Oh, perhaps a little below the national average, just like Lombardo’s net approval rating. At least until the election. After that, it depends. If Lombardo remains governor and very nicely and publicly proclaims that his reelection was only possible thanks to Trump’s benevolent magnificence, Sharpie will say Nevada’s unemployment is super low. If Lombardo loses, only California’s is higher, or something along those lines.

“When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science,” reads a statement on Trump firing the BLS commissioner issued by a group led by the person Trump named to head the BLS during his first term.

Destroying public trust? Nothing is more dear to Trump’s heart. (See: Democracy and elections, Trump’s undermining of and assaults on.)

“Policymakers themselves are induced to undertake mistaken interventions in the economy if the data upon which decisions are taken is incorrect,” write the authors of a 2024 academic article on governments manipulating economic statistics.

Hmm, guess that’s one way to get the Fed to lower interest rates — trick it with bogus data. What could possibly go wrong?

Closer to home, imagine Nevada’s budget forecasters trying to determine how much money the state can budget for education, public safety, Medicaid and all the other state programs and services if official economic data isn’t worth the poster board it was scribbled on.

Business and industry and banks and investors of course rely on government economic data when making all manner of decisions, so it would be in their interest to see credible research instead of Sharpie jottings. But U.S. corporate and financial powers have been brought to heel, and dare not say a discouraging word, lest Trump unconstitutionally crush them while the U.S. Supreme Court aggressively looks the other way.

“When I become president, it will mark the end of credible, reliable government data, which will be terrible for many, many households, and the history of economic disturbances in this century suggest the effects will be even more damaging in long-struggling Nevada” is not a promise Trump made while campaigning last year.

But if he had, he’d be on his way to keeping it.

A version of this column originally appeared in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.