It’s been a tough adjustment for all of us to realize that government economic data can no longer be trusted. It’s one thing to have a different methodology or counting errors along the way. That’s understandable.
This is different. This is manipulating the numbers solely to produce political spin. The problem has become terrible under the Biden administration.
Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) puts out the jobs report. Each month, the protocol is the same. The statement appears, announcing wonderful news of job creation. The mainstream press races to reprint large parts of the official release. Wall Street reacts. Two hours later, the whole subject is forgotten. Hardly anyone seriously looks below the surface.
The increased unemployment number wasn’t news—no one cares unless it gets above 6 percent—but the new 275,000 led to widespread cheers. Plus, this traditional number has been rendered nearly worthless given the low levels of population-wide labor participation, which never recovered from lockdowns.
Behind the scenes is where you find the fakery. There are two sets of books, one called establishment (employers) and the other called household (actual people). Neither one is accurate, but the household numbers at least avoid the obvious problems of double counting. Think of it this way. Bob’s Burgers and Jim’s Tacos both tell the Department of Labor that they hired an employee. It turns out to be one guy working two jobs. Only the household survey would pick that up.
The household numbers this month showed a decline of 184,000 jobs!
Historically, both numbers have moved together almost as mirrors. That means that businesses have reported essentially what households have reported. Starting with the Biden administration and following the chaos of lockdowns, these numbers started to diverge, more and more dramatically, to the point that they seem not related to each other at all in terms of trends.
There is another factor. Each month, the previous numbers in the old establishment survey are revised downward. That allows the new numbers to report higher increases.
It’s a fascinating case of statistical trickery. Let’s say you want to see how much money you have in your bank account and each month, it grows. But the bank says it overestimated how much you had last month and continually revises it downward. That’s not really growth, then, is it?
Zerohedge notes that the BLS has revived “what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K, a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!”
Then you have the problem of composition: part-time versus full-time. ZeroHedge states: “Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that’s great ... until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it did one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).”
Believe me, it gets crazier.
The BLS tracks jobs based on migration status: native-born or not. Here, again there is a shock: “And we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the COVID crash was worse)!” Moreover, “a record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!”
Have you read how immigration is the key to keeping the economy growing? Maybe that sounds good, but this is what these stories are referring to: Natives are losing jobs while immigrants, legal and illegal (even those in the process of being deported) are experiencing massive job gains.
So here is the real kicker, from ZeroHedge: “Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years been exclusively for foreign-born workers, but there has been zero job creation for native-born workers since June 2018!”
Considering this whole picture, we have come a very long way from a beautiful jobs report, haven’t we? To reduce it to the grim reality, U.S. citizens are losing full-time positions, and these are being consistently replaced by part-time jobs held by new immigrants, many of whom face delayed deportations. This is the reality we are facing now.
And by the way, I routinely check all these numbers posted by ZeroHedge and have found them to be completely accurate. It’s not as if the BLS is not reporting these numbers. The trouble is that only a handful of outlets even bother to check them or even click below the press release to look more carefully.
These are very strange times in which we live. The American jobs machine is being systematically dismantled month by month and yet, the mainstream corporate media sells it to the American public as a glorious triumph of the Biden administration. Truly, I never thought I would live in such times.
And it gets even worse when you consider the motivations behind the uncontrolled border crisis. These people are being stuffed into labor markets to make them look pretty, and later, these will be counted in the Census to prevent a reapportionment of political power that would otherwise have favored red states. On top of that, the Biden administration has already sworn to sue any state with strict voter ID laws, which strongly suggests that they are also recruiting new people to vote for President Joe Biden as early as November.
As for Wall Street, no one particularly cares. Traders are only interested in public perceptions of the data, not the data itself. Money tends to be cynical that way. No one sells the lie if most everyone is willing to go along with it.
The narrative you just read pertains to job numbers. But the same story pertains to inflation data and output data with regard to the gross domestic product. The U.S. economy is in grave trouble as is American prosperity generally.
It seems emblematic of our times—even if I never could have predicted it—that when the great American system of enterprise stops producing authentic jobs and wealth, it would never be in the mainstream news. Quite the contrary, the corruption would run so deep that the messaging would be the opposite.
