Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) throws a Rubik’s cube at the public and asks us to solve it. It is called the jobs report. The headline is always the same: a spectacular rate of job creation. And every month, the public reaction is the same: incredulity. Where are these jobs? It’s not obvious.
Each month, the sophistication of these reports has grown such that it is increasingly more difficult to find the problems. We’ve learned to look carefully at the underlying data, while disregarding the press release.
We’ve looked at the growing gap between the two surveys, establishment payrolls vs household numbers. We’ve looked at the types of jobs, part-time or full-time and the specific sectors being affected. We’ve learned to look at the labor participation rates and the labor population rates. We turn to the deep numbers for so-called U-6 or long-term unemployed. We’ve examined what’s called nativity: foreign-born or born in the United States.
It’s not only a Rubik’s Cube but a shell game. You can never anticipate precisely where the data release will hide the bad news. You have to discover that on your own.
The September jobs report was released last week, the last one before the election. Without knowing anything else, you could anticipate that there would be some hidden problem. An easy prediction is that the job creation numbers would be wonderful. Indeed they were, and the corporation press went wild with celebration before forgetting about the report by the afternoon.
This much I promise you: No major financial or economic report shows any evidence of having examined the underlying data. They only reported huge job creation and a decline in the unemployment rate. End of story.
I started digging in right away, and immediately noticed several features. First, nearly half of the new jobs were part-time jobs. Second, government employment made up a substantial number of the new hires. Third, there has been no net job creation among native-born workers, but rather an overall loss of half a million, even as 1.4 million foreign-born workers had been hired.
When NTD asked me to comment on the report, that is what I knew. My suspicions were further aroused by the anomalous unity between the payroll and household numbers, thus wiping around a trend of divergence over two years. How did that magically disappear? I did not know, and we still do not know. But there it is.
As the day progressed, others added to solving the great mysteries.
A site called Truflation reran the numbers minus government jobs. The result: the unemployment rate did not fall but rose. The sheer number of government jobs was far beyond my initial eye-balling. The result is not good. The real unemployment rate rose from 4.2 percent to 4.5 percent. Could it be that the government hired vast numbers of people solely to boost the employment numbers prior to the election? If so, that’s the first time I’ve seen this particular trick being deployed.
In fact, we’ve never seen government hirings for government increase at this pace. It was not only the largest ever increase; it was the key reason why the unemployment rate fell last month. Without it, the media would have reported a dramatic increase in unemployment.
Of course all of this happens as the United States is in the throes of a migration crisis. The federal government is paying the housing, health care, and food bills of millions of people who have made it across the border claiming refugee status, and being granted asylum, while being housed in scarce living quarters in major American cities. This is proving to be a potent problem driving voting registration rates.
Based on data on quits and hires, the labor market in general in the private sector has already seized up, with people clinging to the jobs they have as they struggle to pay their existing bills and debts.
Putting the picture together gives us nothing like the good news initially reported in the press release from the BLS. Instead of a healthy jobs market, we have a preponderance of the following. Could it be that government is enabling mass migration at taxpayer expense, even hiring many of these people to work for government itself, and counting those jobs as job creation to forestall reporting the reality of increasing unemployment?
If you have been paying attention to the realities all around you, none of this will surprise you. Sadly, however, the reality is even worse.
Over the weekend, I had a first look at a report commissioned by two top economists by Brownstone Institute. The idea was to look at the inflation index inclusive of a variety of factors excluded by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and measure that against the data on economic output (GDP). We commissioned the study with absolutely no predetermined conclusions.
The report documents that inflation has run twice the rate of government numbers. Instead of losing 20 percent of value over four years, the dollar has lost fully 40 percent of value. Once you merge those numbers with existing GDP data to come up with real output, it turns out that the U.S. economy has been in recession since the first quarter of 2022.
In just three of those 10 quarters since 2019 did adjusted real GDP increase (with one being only a marginal increase) and none of the increases occurred in consecutive quarters. That means exactly what I’ve long suspected. The U.S. economy never really recovered from lockdowns and has been sinking for two years.
Once you combine this with a more realistic look at jobs numbers, the result is grim but also somewhat satisfying. It means that you are not crazy. There is no economic boom going on at all but just the opposite. Everything to the contrary really just amounts to some extremely fancy data manipulation.
The good news is that all of this is fixable with deregulation, balanced budgets, a better monetary policy, and dramatic cuts. The only question is whether Washington will gain the courage to implement such reforms in time to save the United States from what could come to be known as the Greater Depression.
