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.
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