RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Biden White House bragged in July that the economy added more than 1.1 million jobs in the second quarter. The Scatter Brain in Chief said that from April through June “we created more jobs than in any quarter under any of my predecessors in the nearly 40 years before the pandemic.” Now we learn that the real number of jobs added was only about 1% of that.

Maff are hard.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia, “in the aggregate, 10,500 net new jobs were added during the period rather than the 1.12 million jobs estimated by the sum of the states.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics estimate of a little more than 1 million new jobs was also a bit off, says the Philly Fed.

Not only did the administration celebrate the “new” jobs in the spring, Biden’s allies were so excited they could hardly keep their pants on. In October, the headline of a Center for American Progress post promised “The Swift Jobs Recovery Under Biden Will Have Long-Lasting Benefits for Workers.” At roughly the same time, The New Yorker gushed that “Biden Heads To The Midterms With 10 Million New Jobs,” while Yahoo senior columnist claimed in October “no other president comes close to matching his record on jobs.”

Now it’s possible the Philly Fed is wrong and the higher numbers are more accurate. If so, it would be a miracle. Biden’s policies are not designed to create jobs.

On his first day at work as president, Biden killed 70,000 jobs by pulling the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. In doing so, he might “have set a single-day record for the number of jobs killed by an American president.” He then went on to shut down other gas and oil projects and rejoined “the American job-whacking” Paris Climate Accords. His wished-for overhaul of the energy sector would murder a million jobs and cost the economy more than $7 trillion dollars in just two decades, says the Heritage Foundation – and it wouldn’t even achieve “the administration’s climate targets.”

Biden is, of course, a tax-hiker by temperament, and if we’ve learned nothing else, we should know by now that higher taxes mean fewer jobs. It’s the same with regulations. Biden is a standard Democrat who believes one of the primary functions of the federal government is to make rules. But those rules, almost without exception, wipe out jobs. As would a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, which Biden supports.

If he had his way, if he could just enact a law with a pen and a phone, Biden would abolish millions of gig jobs. In fact, he’s already tried. Reclassifying independent contractors (freelancers) as full-time employees would mean the death of gig work across the country. Businesses that rely on independent workers aren’t going to hire them as full-timers with all the costs that go with that. Unions are hoping they will so they can organize them. They’ll get a few. The rest will go to the unemployment line.

Biden has also discouraged work by paying Americans to stay home. Why bother climbing off the couch and finding a job when doing nothing is just as lucrative if not more so? What Biden’s policies do encourage is dependence on government, the absolute opposite of job creation.

There’s not a single measure that can show that the Biden years have been anything other than a disaster. But the jobs and economic record is especially grim. It will be nice to see him go in two years, replaced, we hope, by a president who understands how economies grow. That rules out every Democrat we can think of.