It’s a good thing there’s no viable alternative to the dollar and US Treasurys, because if there were (an alternative), investors the world over would be defecting in droves.

Maybe that’s an overstatement, but it’s not an exaggeration to say America can scarcely go a day without doing something to undermine its institutional credibility. Monday was no exception.

Thanks to a partial government shutdown precipitated by the broad-day killing of a legally-armed protester by federal agents on a migrant round-up mission in Minneapolis, the BLS will postpone publication of the monthly jobs report. Again.

The bad news, delivered by the bureau’s deputy commissioner for publications, marked yet another blow to what used to be the world’s preeminent government statistics agency. Successive government shutdowns (the current closure’s the second in four months) have impacted four consecutive jobs reports.

Investors were already skeptical of the BLS’s data prior to Donald Trump’s second term given low response rates, large revisions and a generalized suspicion that pandemic dynamics might’ve forever altered the nature of the economy. Then Trump fired the bureau’s chief for — and there’s no way around this — reporting numbers he didn’t like. Three months later the shutdown hit, forcing the agency offline.

The January jobs report “will be rescheduled upon the resumption of government funding,” the BLS said Monday, adding that for now, it’s “suspend[ing] data collection, processing and dissemination.”

This is pitiful. Why mince words? America can’t even manage to produce timely economic statistics anymore because after years of increasingly bitter partisan rancor, the country’s elected representatives can’t keep the lights on from month to month.

This time, the proximate cause of the funding gap is a dispute over the occupation of American cities by immigration police deputized by the executive as de facto troops. What does that say about the country? Nothing good.

As discussed in this week’s macro preview, Friday’s jobs report was to be accompanied by the final run at the BLS’s annual benchmarking exercise. I don’t know what’ll become of that. It’s surely complete. I suppose it’s delayed as well.

Mike Johnson says the funding gap will be resolved in short order, and for once I believe him. But that’s not the point. The point, rather, is that the federal government can’t be depended upon for anything, even the most mundane of tasks, like crunching numbers.

This is part and parcel of America’s self-feeding institutional credibility crisis which I’ve warned on in these pages for years.

Americans are conditioned, more or less from birth, to distrust centralized authority. It’s embedded in our constitution, common noun, and it’s implicit in our Constitution, proper noun. (The right to keep and bear firearms in case of government tyranny’s second only to the right to voice an opinion in the hierarchy of American liberties.)

Suffice to say Americans don’t need an excuse to distrust the federal government. But voters get more evidence every, single day to support the contention it’s wholly inept, at best. The rest of the world sees this, and very much contrary to the notion that America’s “respected again,” other nations are aghast. The only way Trump’s able to extract compliments from foreign governments these days is at figurative (and in some cases literal) gunpoint.

Speaking of trust in centralized authorities and constitutional safeguards designed specifically to protect and promote the division and sharing of power between America’s national and state governments, Trump on Monday had a modest suggestion ahead of the mid-terms.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over the voting,'” he told Dan Bongino, who until four weeks ago was the deputy director of the FBI, but has since gone back to podcasting.

Worried, perhaps, that he hadn’t made himself clear enough, Trump continued: “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”