In Washington’s War on Data, the Economy and Public Will Lose

We have a saying here at Bloomberg, and it’s one we brought with us to New York City Hall: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The federal government is now in danger of proving just how much truth those words hold.

For more than a century, Republicans and Democrats have agreed on the need for objective data to inform their debates. In the 1890s, when the Senate commissioned a novel study of prices and wages — partly to assess the impact of the McKinley Tariff Act — Senator Nelson Aldrich, a Republican and staunch protectionist, explained the rationale: