Will Trump cook the books? Why assume he won’t?

I know that this may sound as if I’m getting into tinfoil-hat territory. Worse, I may be sounding like a Republican — because whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House, right-wing “inflation truthers” come out of the woodwork, claiming that official numbers are hiding the terrible reality of soaring prices. And, of course, Trump spent the whole campaign making utterly false claims about how much prices — for example, the price of bacon, with which he seemed oddly obsessed — had risen.

In fact, U.S. statistical agencies have a long record of being scrupulously honest. But the same can’t be said of every country. There are, for example, some well-known cases of populist regimes falsifying the numbers to make inflation look lower than it really is. Most famously, Argentina’s statistical agency systematically and massively understated inflation from 2007 to 2015: