Truly unbelievable dishonesty coming from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki here.
It looks like the job report for January is going to be bad for Biden (following a steady trend), and Psaki is already hedging by blaming Omicron for the negative numbers.
Because Omicron was so highly transmissible, nearly 9 million people called out sick in early January when the jobs data was being collected, so during that same period of time. And the week that survey was take, the week of January 12, was at the height of the Omicron spike. So we just wanted to kind of prepare people to understand how the data is taken, what they're looking at, and what is an assessment of, and as a result the month's job report may show job losses in a large part because workers were out sick from Omicron at the point when it was peaking, on the week when the data was taken.
Yeah, so Psaki wants you to believe that the jobs report, which has been dismal since Biden took office, is going to show more unemployment because people were out sick with Covid.
There's only one little problem with that...
The people who are calling out sick aren't unemployed!
They're on sick leave. But the Biden admin is counting those on unpaid sick time as "unemployed."
As Axios notes,
- In early January, 8.75 million people Americans said they were not working because they were sick with COVID or caring for someone who was sick with COVID, according to a Census survey, up from 2.96 million in early December.
More from The Blaze:
While it is completely fair for the White House to explain why the forthcoming jobs report may be skewed to appear worse than it actually is, the White House is engaging in a sly double standard.
The Biden administration worked overtime to take responsibility for allegedly creating more jobs in 2021 than any previous presidential administration. For example, Biden said in early January, "We added 6.4 million jobs last year. That's the most jobs in any calendar year by any president in history."
In promoting the alleged accomplishment, the Biden administration obscured the fact that most of those jobs were not new — but instead were Americans returning to the workforce after the COVID lockdowns ended. Now, however, the White House wants to absolve itself from dismal jobs numbers by blaming the pandemic.
The good outcomes are attributed to Biden, while the bad ones are blamed on the pandemic.
The truth, according to ADP chief economist Nela Richardson, is that Biden has not created "one single job" when measured against the "high-water mark" in late 2019.
