By I & I Editorial Board, Issues & Insights | November 04, 2024
President Donald Trump gave fact checkers a run for their money over the weekend when he claimed on Saturday that the latest jobs report – showing just 12,000 jobs created – was “depression-type numbers.”
We can almost hear fact-checking heads exploding.
But if these “fact checkers” are really after the truth, why do they repeatedly let Joe Biden and Kamala Harris off the hook for false claims about jobs?
Biden continues to claim that he “created” 16 million jobs. Not even close.
As of October, there were 6.7 million more jobs than at the previous peak in March 2020 – which happened before the COVID lockdowns. That’s the proper way to measure how many jobs were created.
The 6.7 million figure is nothing to brag about, given that the working-age population increased by 9.7 million since March 2020.
And why aren’t fact checkers alerting readers to the fact that the 12,000 jobs created October was more likely job loss? For the past 12 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has played this game where it announces job gains one month, then quietly cuts the number after the fact.
The initial number gets all the press, the revised number gets buried. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been playing this game for two years now, revising the number down in all but four of the past 22 months. The result is that the administration exaggerated job gains by a total of 684,000 since January 2023.
Over the course of the year, the Biden administration overestimated job growth by a total of 406,000 using this form of legerdemain. (See chart below.)
That happened again with Friday’s report, when the BLS announced it was taking back 112,000 jobs it claimed had been created in August and September.
Biden says that this month’s jobs number – which is based on a sampling of business payrolls – was low because of the Boeing strike and the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene.
Those played a part. But the jobs report for October would have been lousy regardless because the only reason there was any job growth at all was because the government added 40,000 jobs.
Meanwhile, the number of people who say they have jobs – which is based on a much broader survey of households – plunged 386,000 in October. The number of people with jobs hasn’t budged since last August.
And while fact-checkers pour over every utterance Trump makes about the economy, they somehow fail to notice that all the jobs created in the past year went to foreign-born workers. American citizens lost 800,000 jobs.
Or that all these net new jobs were part-time work. The number of full-time jobs plunged by 1 million.
If Trump wins the election Tuesday, you can bet that the press will suddenly “discover” how lousy the job market has been these past three and half years, and find a way to blame Trump for it.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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