I & I Editorial BoardAs it has done every month this year, the Biden administration continues to gaslight the public about job growth. Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports headline-grabbing job-creation numbers, then quietly cuts that number in subsequent months – often by huge amounts.
The latest report is no exception. The headline Friday is that the economy created 142,000 jobs in August – a figure that is close to economists’ expectations and that prompted CNN to cheer “The sky is not falling.”
But buried in the report is the fact that the BLS sharply cut the number of jobs created in both June and July.
Where the BLS had initially claimed that 206,000 jobs were created in June – which was treated as good news because it beat economists’ expectations – after two subsequent downward revisions it now says job growth in June was just 118,000.
In other words, it had overestimated job growth in June by 42%! Did anyone see a headline announcing that?
And while the BLS first claimed that 114,000 jobs were created in July, it slashed that down to 89,000 – a 22% cut.
It has done the same thing all year. It first claimed that 353,000 jobs were created in January. Now it says that number was 256,000. In April, it reported 175,000 new jobs. Now it says there were only 108,000.
In just the first seven months of the year, this scam inflated job growth by 365,000. And given the track record, we fully expect the BLS to eventually cut back the August job creation number.
But it’s much worse than that. Last month, the BLS released its preliminary “benchmark” revision, in which it matches up its job estimates over the course of the previous year to other, more reliable data.
The result: 818,000 jobs the BLS claimed existed in March 2024 simply vanished — which means it had been exaggerating job growth for all of 2023 as well.
And the benchmark revision before that showed the BLS had exaggerated job growth by 306,000 in 2022.
Add it all up and it appears that nearly 1.5 million jobs the Biden-Harris administration had claimed to exist did not, in fact, exist.
Of course, we’d never in a million years suggest that the number crunchers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics were, as Donald Trump claimed, “fraudulently manipulating the jobs statistics” for political reasons. Sure, virtually every federal bureaucrat is a Democrat-supporting big-government liberal. But they’d never, ever bend the rules or fudge the numbers to help out their party, would they?
Then again, when every mistake is in one direction – a direction that just happens to benefit the Biden-Harris administration – it does make you wonder.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
One unfortunate fact is that most people have such a short-term bias, and only take note of those preliminary numbers. And the Bureau of Lying Statisticians wants to be in a rush to produce numbers. I admit that you do a great job of presenting the revisions and their overall effect; I just wish more people would notice, and evaluate those revisions instead of the preliminary numbers.