When Joe Biden was president, he often boasted about the jobs he was “creating” – jobs we now know did not exist.
Bottom line, quoting Fox’s Elizabeth McDonald: “Biden spent $7.2T but created 1.5M fewer jobs than initially reported, virtually all the inflated jobs vanished out of the private sector in the BLS revisions, not the government sector. And Biden touted 186K jobs a month in 2024 when it was only 47K after revisions.”
To Liz’ point, of the 911,000 downward revision, the private sector lost 880,000 and the government lost only 31,000.
In other words, the entire labor and economic picture under Biden was false. He oversaw an explosion of federal spending – much of it on green boondoggles – which drove inflation to more than 9%, recklessly hired gazillions of government workers, and despite all the spending had the private sector struggling.
Here’s a link to a piece I wrote last year about the blockbuster May jobs report, when we supposedly added 272,000 new jobs; it sums up the lack of confidence that I and others had about the BLS reporting back then.
I don’t think the Bureau of Labor Statistics was cooking the books; I think they were doing a lousy job of collecting the data. Data, by the way, that is very important for policy-makers like the Federal Reserve.
But don’t think there might not have been some “creative accounting” along the way. In addition to Biden crowing about jobs, he also talked very proudly about the number of new businesses that were starting up while he was in the Oval Office. I remember at one point, having heard him talk about a record number of new business formations, trying to track down the numbers and check on the accuracy of his claims.
Come to find out that the new business numbers are entirely made up. Presumably there is some consistent formula by which the estimates are created, but estimates they are. That is the kind of data that for sure could be easily manipulated to make a president look good…or bad.’
Here’s how you know the jobs revision is a problem for Democrats: they’re all over social media blasting the “slowdown” in jobs engineered by Trump over the past several months.
Earlier today, Elizabeth Warren posted: “Donald Trump is failing to create American jobs. In the last 8 months with Trump in office, the U.S. economy added less than 600,000 jobs – the LOWEST JOB CREATION in a year since the Great Recession in 2009.” She quotes the WSJ to substantiate this claim; I’m guessing the article predates the revisions today.
And, Warren from last Friday: “Today’s jobs report makes one thing clear: Trump’s economic agenda is wrecking the labor market.”
Here’s House Democrats posting “Nearly 1 MILLION fewer jobs”; “Trump and Republicans are crashing the U.S. economy.” They provided a helpful link to a NY Times story saying, accurately, “U.S. employers added nearly 1 million fewer jobs than originally reported for the year through March. It’s the latest sign that the labor market may be weaker than it initially appeared.” Nine of those months, for the record, were when Biden was in the Oval Office.
They say the best defense is a good offense. You almost feel sorry for the Democrats. They were soooo sure that the Trump record on jobs would pale compared to Joe Biden’s.
In coming months, we may get more clarity on why the BLS has such problems. I’m going to venture it goes back to incompetence. One of the problems certainly is the response rate. For instance, the percentage of establishments answering questions for the JOLTS survey (job openings and labor turnover) I, March was only 35%, down from 64% in March 2018. That’s a dramatic decline, and one which should have been addressed by BLS officials. If you are not collecting sufficient data, your information and the policies that flow from that are going to be faulty. Here’s a link to the charts.
BLS officials should have worked to turn these declining survey response rates around. And, for the record, Jay Powell should have been on top of the problem as well. After the BLS reported that the blockbuster May 2024 number of 272,000 new jobs, Powell admitted at a press conference, “There’s an argument that they may be a bit overstated…”
At least he got that one right.
