President Joe Biden has achieved significant job growth figures throughout his term in office, especially with the upcoming election looming. However, a concern arises as the Bureau of Labor Statistics has had to repeatedly revise the numbers due to overinflation, as highlighted by Issues And Insights.
“Last month, for example, BLS said that the economy created 272,000 jobs, which the media branded as ‘whopping,’ ‘robust,’ ‘vigorous,’ and a ‘blowout.’ Economists had expected 190,000 new jobs in May,” the report said.
“But on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics admitted that it had overestimated job gains in May by 20%, with the new figure just barely above economists’ expectations. The change barely got a mention in the press,” it said.
The bureau initially projected job growth to be 175,000 in April, but later revised it down by almost 38 percent to 108,000. Similarly, in January, the agency announced the creation of 353,000 new jobs, only to reduce that number by nearly 100,000 later on. Furthermore, February’s job numbers were slashed by almost 40,000. This year, almost a quarter of a million “new jobs” have disappeared, highlighting a recurring trend during Biden’s presidency.
“Why? One big reason is the statistical models the BLS uses to fill in gaps in its survey of businesses have been misfiring. Here’s how Bloomberg explains it,” Issues And Insights said in its report:
“A chunk of the potential overestimation of payrolls stems from adjustments the agency makes to the monthly employment report to account for the net amount of businesses opening and going under, Wong and Knapp say. Because the BLS only surveys existing establishments, it uses a so-called birth-death model to estimate those flows.”
‘The labor market saw a turning point sometime in the second half of 2023,’ Wong said. ‘Business closures surged, while new business formations slowed sharply.’
“As a result, the BLS overestimated job growth by about 60,000 each month last year,” the report said.
The “jobs created” data, however, does not warrant as much jubilation as the White House would like you to think. A significant portion of these new positions are either part-time or secondary and tertiary jobs individuals have resorted to in order to cope with the effects of “Bidenomics.”
“BLS data show that there are 319,000 more adults working multiple jobs today than there were a year ago. Multiple job-holders now account for 5.2% of those employed, up from 4.4% when Biden took office,” the report said.
“All of which helps to explain why, when 1.3 million jobs were supposedly created this year, the number of unemployed climbed by almost 700,000 and the unemployment rate went from 3.7% to 4.1%,” it said.
“And this is to say nothing of the fact that most of the jobs created went to foreign-born, not native Americans, and real wages are lower today than they were when Biden took office,” it said.
