On Friday, the September jobs report was released. There's obviously a lot riding on it since it is the second-to-last jobs report before Election Day, and the White House wants you to believe that it's a great one, even though it isn't.
"Today, we received good news for American workers and families with more than 250,000 new jobs in September and unemployment back down at 4.1%. With today’s report, we’ve created 16 million jobs, unemployment remains low, and wages are growing faster than prices," Joe Biden claimed in a statement attributed to him. "Under my Administration, unemployment has been the lowest in 50 years, a record 19 million new businesses have been created, and inflation and interest rates are falling."
We’ve heard these talking points time and again. Biden insists that he’s responsible for creating millions of new jobs, even though the lion's share of them were simply pre-pandemic jobs returning, not newly created jobs. And despite repeated fact-checking — even from liberal media — he continues to push this narrative. At the same time, he keeps touting lower inflation, though it’s still higher today than it ever was under Trump.
Americans are still worse off today under Biden-Harris than they were under Trump.
"Over the past year alone, 825,000 American citizens LOST employment, while most jobs went to foreign-born workers. 1.2 million foreign-born workers GAINED employment. Full-time jobs are DOWN: 251,000 fewer full-time jobs, while part-time workers jumped," the Make America Great Again PAC said in a statement that PJ Media received. "Jobs reports like these almost always get revised down- we cannot trust this Administration to report the actual jobs data- in the last year alone they have manipulated these reports to reflect almost a MILLION FAKE jobs that have taken victory laps for and then later revised down."
The Biden-Harris administration is notorious for overestimating the number of jobs created in its monthly reports, only to revise them down later. In August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics infamously revised down its wildly inflated job numbers for March 2023 through March 2024 down a staggering 818,000 jobs.
"Kamala is trying to gaslight the American people into thinking the economy is slowly recovering. The American people are smarter than that—they see through these desperate tactics that Kamalanomics is failing them no matter how many times this Administration wants to cook the books and convince us to believe otherwise," MAGA PAC said.
Unemployment at 4.1% under Biden-Harris is sharply higher than Trump’s 3.5%. It’s that much harder today to find a job–especially for the 2.7 million unemployed White men and 700,000 unemployed Black women. Those groups have the suffered the biggest increase in unemployed rate. pic.twitter.com/lLE9pEuiDV
— Dan Kowalski (@budget_crank) October 4, 2024
Even on its face, the report isn't great news, but an analysis of the report suggests that the administration still had to manipulate the jobs numbers to get a mediocre report.
"It didn't take long to find what the BLS did this time to make the jobs appear much stronger than expected, a political imperative for the highly politicized agency tasked with making the Kamala/Biden economy appear stronger than it was exactly one month ahead of the election," explained Zero Hedge. "The answer, ironically, was in the number of government workers, which exploded higher, and were not only instrumental in pushing the Household Survey print much higher but meant the difference between a 4.1% and 4.5% unemployment rate."
Here is what happened.
In September, the number of government workers as tracked by the Household Survey soared by 785K, from 21.421 million to 22.216 million, both seasonally adjusted (source: Table A8 from the jobs report). This was the biggest monthly surge in government workers on record (excluding the outlier print in June 2020 which was a reversal of the record plunge from the Covid collapse months before).
While government workers soared by the most on record, private workers rose by just 133K, a far more believable number, and one which however would indicate that the recent labor market malaise continues.
What is odd is that while September traditionally sees a huge jump in not seasonally adjusted government workers (as teachers go back to school), the BLS has traditionally smoothed over this jump using seasonal adjustments.
So why inflate the job numbers by hiring a record number of government workers? Zero Hedge has the answer.
Two reasons: Unemployment rate drops to 4.1% instead of rising to 4.5%, assuring the Sahm Rule is indeed triggered and the US is officially in a recession, and also prevent the market from crashing. Both, one would say, pretty critical narrative pieces exactly one month before the election. As an aside, those wondering who is paying for all these government jobs, take one look at the US government debt which just soared to a record high, and that should answer all questions.
Anything to help Kamala win the election, right?
