OPINION:
The Labor Department in 2023 announced robust new employment numbers each month, garnering splashy pro-Biden headlines.
By year’s end, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which does the numbers gymnastics, revised those bulletins downward by 360,000.
Another item: The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said on March 14 that the BLS greatly overestimated job growth in the third quarter of that year. The BLS said 640,000 jobs were created. The Fed said 187,000.
Another blemish is the types of jobs. The number of full-time jobs is shrinking. Part-time employees are increasing, suggesting that people need multiple jobs to keep pace with high inflation for such things as the food we eat.
The Heritage Foundation’s economics guru, E.J. Antoni, looked at the December jobs report and warned: “They’re all part time. Last month, the economy shed a whopping 1.5 million full-time jobs, the biggest monthly plunge since 2020, when the government made it illegal for people to go to work. That wiped out essentially all the full-time jobs that had been gained in 2023.”
Then, there is the seminal question of how many jobs were actually created in the Biden era. President Biden is not just running on convicting former President Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 supporters while trying to put his chief political opponent in prison for life. The president is also campaigning on a false claim that he created 14 million jobs. The true number is much less: about 4 million.
I’ll explain.
Post-February 2020, the harsh decisions by state governments to force employers to shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic took away, temporarily, roughly 22 million jobs in March and April, BLS estimates show.
By May, people started going back to work at a limited pace.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis began staggered reopenings on May 4.
“We will get Florida back on its feet by using an approach that is safe, smart, and step-by-step,” the Republican governor said.
Likewise, Texas, the biggest red state, also started phased reopenings.
These were brave moves. The liberal press and Democrats were in an all-out offensive to shut down the country. They condemned anyone, meaning Republicans, for dissenting from their COVID-19 martial law. For Democrats, with the November presidential election ahead, it meant controlling people’s movements, which was parlayed into more voting days, more drop boxes and more mailed ballots.
By January 2021, as Mr. Biden took the oath, about 12 million Americans had broken out of government-induced unemployment and were earning a paycheck again. This left 10 million still locked out. They, too, began rejoining the workforce as more industries, offices, schools and government agencies reanimated.
These 10 million, in other words, were add-back jobs. Total national employment today is 157.8 million. Subtracting those 10 million, Mr. Biden can say accurately that he oversaw the creation of about 4 million new jobs, starting in January 2021, with 143 million total employment.
As a cartoon posted by Ivan Bayoukhi (@WallStreetSilver) illustrated, with placards, “Close Small Businesses 2020” — “Force Them to Lay Off Their Employees 2021” — “Reopen Business and Rehire Employees” — “Call It ‘Record Job Growth.’”
Looking at it another way, 153 million people were employed in February 2020 before state governments in March and April drove millions to the sidelines to collect unemployment checks. Total employment today is 4 million higher — the true Biden number.
Now, for the Biden-era jobs themselves. In many months, government jobs, as opposed to those in the private sector, led all other categories, with health care, a government-dependent industry, coming in second.
Democrats and Mr. Biden enacted giant spending bills chock-full of goodies for various bureaucracies, subsidies for chosen industries and payoffs for party supporters such as labor unions. Democrats designed all of this to juice the Biden economy into his reelection year.
The spending, along with jumps in per-barrel oil after Mr. Biden killed a major pipeline and made government land off-limits for exploration, drove the inflation rate to a 40-year high. Today, grocery prices are up nearly 30% since Mr. Biden took the oath.
Then, there are the eye-catching downward job revisions reported by the Labor Department’s BLS in 2023.
My calculations show the BLS overcounted jobs by 360,000 or 11% of its initially announced, month by month, 3.1 million, taking the official total to 2.7 million. Subtract 453,000 based on the Philly Fed survey, which sends the grand total under 2.3 million.
“There’s something wrong with previous U.S. jobs reports,” Fox Business online said.
This is after, of course, the White House enjoys the headlines: “Better Than Expected” and “Hiring Surges.”
Last year’s revisions were an aberration from Mr. Biden’s first two years when add-back jobs were rolling in. The Labor Department attributes the revision process to fine-tuning survey results.
There you have “Bidenomics” job growth.
Count people the government shut out and then allowed to return to work, ignore a Fed report that estimated much lower employment growth, announce big job numbers, and take a lot back the next month.
By the way, Google, creator of the laughably “woke” Gemini artificial intelligence program, responds to online searches for the word “Bidenomics” with glowing liberal media explanations.
Here is what Mr. Biden can legitimately claim: 4 million jobs, not 14 million, and government cash pumping to create 40-year-high inflation.
And, as 2024 began, the BLS continued 2023’s downward revision trend. It pared January’s 353,000 new jobs by one-third, to 229,000.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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