If you spent the last few years being repeatedly told that the economy was soaring to massive, stratospheric new levels of employment ...
... only to be constantly looking around wondering, you know, "Where are all the jobs?"
Don't worry: According to one study, you're not crazy:
Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports how many nonfarm payrolls have been added across the country. These figures come from a survey of 666,000 businesses and offer timely updates on important economic data.
Unfortunately, these monthly reports are subject to a variety of statistical problems that can sometimes produce significant errors. One example seen in 2023 was with preliminary data consistently being revised down in subsequent reports.
Biden's economic wizards crossing out all those jobs like:
Of course, one expects numbers to be revised to some extent. They're dealing with an entire country's worth of data. Preliminary reports are often changed on the way to becoming final reports. It happens.
But this much?
Job growth was overestimated by more than 770,000 last year. Put differently, about 1 in 4 jobs that were supposedly added last year never existed. That's like eliminating all of the jobs gained in three whole months of 2023.
Overestimating jobs by even 5% might be understandable. Doing it by 25% feels a bit more egregious!
The study indicates why "polling of people's perceptions of the economy has been so terrible yet the official data from the Biden administration has looked so robust." The Potemkin data from the White House haven't matched up with on-the-ground reality experienced by real, actual Americans.
And once you strip those rosy inflated job numbers from the equation, the U.S. economy begins to look that much more grim:
With prices rising faster than earnings, the average worker's weekly paycheck buys 4.4% less today than when President Biden took office. Homeownership affordability has plummeted because the monthly mortgage payment on a median-price home has more than doubled. Three-quarters of Americans now view fast food as a luxury they can't afford. Gasoline prices are up 46%.
In a word:
You can understand why the White House would want those job numbers to look as good as possible.
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