Every month, the problem seems to get worse. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) comes out with a big headline number of utter joy, and the news media repeats it like parrots. Wall Street, consumed by traders desperate to be first, buys like mad in light of the news, even though the smart people know it’s likely fake news.
But we live in times when perceptions are more real than reality itself, so who cares?
It takes time to go through the numbers carefully to find out what’s really going on. By the time that astute observers have done that, the supposed good news is already woven into the fabric of the public mind. It’s broadcast thousands of times on CNN, along with a banner that says “Bidenomics is working.” We’re inundated with this stuff 24/7. The underlying data doesn’t support it, but that hardly matters.
Part of this habit is understandable. Traditionally, these statistical reporting agencies have been seen as nonpolitical. Their numbers might not be entirely accurate, but they do their best. Regardless of who or what is in control of the White House, these people are supposed to be consummate professionals who would never tweak the messaging to please the party in power. For the most part in the postwar period, this has been largely true.
The Biden administration has changed that.
Gradually and month by month, it has somehow gotten through the wall of separation between the stodgy world of statistical reporting by the administrative agencies and the highly political spin doctors at the White House. The breach seems to have happened in the past two years.
Now, it’s getting worse than ever, to the point that one can distrust all of the headline messaging of most statistical reports, especially as it pertains to jobs (where data can be very complicated) and inflation (which is very difficult to reduce to a single number).
To top it off, the BLS itself seems to be getting better at hiding data that contradicts the messaging. A year ago, it was more obvious with a few clicks deeper in the data releases. Now, it takes a real specialist downloading raw data and reassembling it in different packages to reveal what’s really taking place.
Let’s see what they say.
Mr. Antoni begins with the headline number: Nonfarm payrolls jumped 336,000, and unemployment is still at 3.8 percent, which is incredibly low. He begins with the obvious point that this rate is skewed by low labor participation in the first place, with those not in the labor force amounting to 5 million people. If you drop out and vanish, you aren’t considered unemployed; you simply aren’t worth counting. That’s why the unemployment number simply doesn’t have the cachet that it once did.
It tells us only that those actively looking can find a job of some sort.
If you include all of those dropouts, the real unemployment rate is 6.3 percent to 6.8 percent. This is extremely high and a more realistic presentation of reality.
As for the new jobs themselves, fully 22 percent of the supposed new ones are government jobs, which isn’t productivity but wealth extraction from the private sector itself. That’s not good news. As for the private sector, he writes:
“What kinds of jobs were added? Entirely part-time (up 151,000); in fact, we LOST full-time jobs (down 22,000); the past three months have seen part-time jump 1.2 million while full-time fell 700,000 (most since lockdowns); double-counting of multiple jobholders (123,000) was 37 percent of job gains.”
There we have it: They’re double-counting, as if every new side-hustle gig is a triumph of job creation.
Lastly, he writes, “The loss of full-time jobs and their replacement with part-time work is helping slow wage growth, which is then negative after adjusting for inflation—real weekly earnings fell dramatically until June 2022 and have moved sideways since.”
Now let’s see what ZeroHedge says about all of this statistical trickery. It takes on the headline number of 336,000 jobs.
“Let’s start with the Household survey: Here instead of a number anywhere close to the 336,000 jobs gained (as the far less accurate Establishment survey reports), the number of newly employed workers was just 86,000, the lowest since May, and the second lowest of 2023.”
Well, that’s one way to reveal the good news as bad news! To reinforce the point, it observes that full-time workers are down 22,000 while part-time workers are up by 151,000. There’s no sense in which this is cause for celebration. Indeed, this is truly terrible and a sign of dramatically declining prosperity.
ZeroHedge then takes on an interesting task. Noting the “chronic issues with the BLS’ seasonal adjustments in the post-[COVID-19] era,” it looks instead at the unadjusted numbers. Here it finds that “in September, the number of unadjusted full-time workers collapsed by 885,000. This was the biggest monthly drop since—drumroll—April 2020 when the economy was shut down.”
Doesn’t this fit a bit more with your intuition? As I’ve pointed out many times, there’s no strong evidence that we’ve really ever and authentically recovered from the lockdowns of March 2020. There won’t be a soft landing because the aircraft never really took flight. Here we see evidence that we’re sinking further into the ground.
In short, we’ve seen a massive loss in full-time jobs, comparable to lockdowns. One can only marvel that the BLS managed to hide all of this. It’s no wonder that it tried so hard.
But there’s one more piece of data that you should see. It concerns multiple jobholders—people scrambling in whatever way that they can for money to feed the family and pay the bills. Here’s a very messy situation. Whereas in the 1950s, the average family needed only one income to live a comfortable life, with current levels of debt and inflation, it increasingly requires three and even four to provide.
ZeroHedge computes that “in September, the subset of multiple jobholders who held both a primary and secondary full-time job just hit an all-time high.”
None of this fits with the CNN tale of how “Bidenomics is working.” Indeed, the facts belie every bit of disinformation we heard for 48 hours from the time of the news release. The blizzard of propaganda is really overwhelming.
“As it happens,” he writes, “this all-important measure of labor input to the Main Street economy is up just 0.19 percent from January. That amounts to less than 0.3 percent at an annual rate, which is close enough to flat for government work.”
The usual gain of this statistic in the course of the 20th century was 2 percent per annum. For all practical purposes, then, this means no job growth and zero contribution to national prosperity.
Perhaps this is why The Wall Street Journal ran a series of backpedaling stories for days, following its trumpeting of the initial release. “Don’t get too comfortable with a good job market,” the newspaper wrote. And “If the job market is so great, why do I feel so stuck?”
As for the second question, we have to address the mortgage problem. People are sitting on fixed-rate mortgages right now of 2 percent and 3 percent. If they move, they will have to buy again at 8 percent, which means a house half as big and a huge downgrade of living standards.
As a result, people are prisoners in their own homes, trapped in a job to which they’re holding on for dear life, taking an extra job to pay the rising costs of living, canceling travel plans for next year, and otherwise wondering what happened to what seemed like prosperity only a few years ago.
And we can add to the growing frustration that the mainstream media tells you every day that Bidenomics is working. If this is working, I would hate to see what broken looks like!
