RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s note: This has been revised and updated from an editorial that ran over the weekend.

President Joe Biden might think that last week’s jobs report shows that “the great American comeback continues.” Democrats might believe that “the numbers don’t lie – things are great,’ Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost put it. And leftist media mavens have no doubt convinced themselves that “the American job market is so good, Republicans have literally found themselves speechless — again.”

So why aren’t Americans themselves celebrating? Why is Biden’s claim that he created 15.6 million jobs — “more than any president in U.S. history” — that the unemployment rate is at historic lows, and that wages are rising, all falling on deaf ears? It’s a head-scratcher, right?

Well, not if you dig just a tiny bit deeper into the employment data, then you realize that all the hoopla about jobs under Biden is entirely statistical fiction, one happily repeated by Biden’s media vanguard.

Let’s break it down:

15.6 Million New Jobs? Not Even Close

Take Biden’s claim that 15.6 million more people have jobs. This is wildly misleading because the measure he’s using doesn’t count the number of people with jobs, it counts how many paying jobs there are.

The number Biden cites comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “establishment survey.” This survey asks a sampling of businesses how many people they employ. The BLS uses statistical modeling to account for new business formations each month.

Meanwhile, the BLS does a separate “household survey,” which asks actual people if they have a job or not.

These might diverge in any given month, but they normally run in tandem. That hasn’t been happening under Biden as the chart below makes plain.

The latest report continued the trend. The establishment survey showed a “blockbuster” gain of 272,000 jobs. But the “household survey” saw a loss of 408,000 jobs.

Why this divergence? Thank Bidenflation. More people are moonlighting to make ends meet. Each counts as a new “job” in the establishment survey, but not the household survey.

Using the household survey, you find that 11.3 million people got jobs under Biden, not 15.6 million. That’s a huge difference.

More Like 6.2 Million New Jobs

But even that number is a massive exaggeration. That’s because the right way to measure growth in the labor market is to compare it to the previous peak, which occured in February 2020, before the COVID lockdowns threw millions out of work. When Biden took office, the economy was still regaining those lost jobs. It wasn’t until June 2022 that the first truly new job was created.

For Biden to say he created 15.6 million jobs would be like a hiker bragging that he climbed a mountain when all he did was crawl out of a ditch.

Heck, by Biden’s logic, Trump could claim that he “created” 12.5 million jobs in just the last nine months of his presidency. That’s how many jobs the economy had “created” after the COVID trough when he stepped down.

So, measured correctly, there have only been 6.2 million net new jobs created under Biden. For the math-challenged, that’s less than half of what Biden claims.

Make That 2.4 Million New Jobs

But this, too, is an exaggeration because it relies on the establishment survey data. When you look at the household survey data, you find that, before COVID, the number of people with jobs peaked in February 2020 at 158.7 million.

In the last month, that number was 161.1 million.

That’s a gain of just 2.4 million.

And this measure of jobs hasn’t been growing at all in the last year. As a matter of fact, there are fewer people employed now than there were in July 2023.

Jobs Haven’t Kept Up with Population Growth

Even this overstates job growth. Because the working-age population has grown by 8.6 millio since Febrary 2020 — when jobs peaked before COVID. No matter how you measure job growth since then, it hasn’t kept pace with that. In fact, the gap is widening under Biden, as the chart below shows.

But wait, you say, today’s unemployment rate is just 4%. How can that be if the job market is so bad?

Well, remember that the unemployment rate was 3.5% in February 2020.

What’s more, the 4% unemployment rate is also misleading. It’s derived by comparing the number of people with jobs to those actively looking for work. If you give up the job hunt entirely, you’re not counted as unemployed. Turns out there are 5 million more people who’ve dropped out of the labor force than there were in February 2020.

Had those 5 million kept looking for work, they would be counted as unemployed, driving up the official unemployment rate to 5.1%, instead of 4%.

We’re not even going to get into the fact that all the new jobs being created this past year have been part-time jobs — not full-time jobs. Or that most of the new jobs created under Biden have gone to immigrants, including illegal immigrants. Or the sharp growth in government jobs. Or the fact that real-wages are down. These inconvenient truths also help explain why Americans are so down on the economy.

Biden and Co. might think things are going great. But the more they celebrate these “wins,” the more out of touch they look to struggling Americans.