Someone not named Joe Biden will now appear atop the Democrat ticket this November following the president’s announcement Sunday that he will no longer seek re-election to a second term. Right now, the favorite appears to be Vice President Kamala Harris, whose campaign will likely follow the same playbook as the Biden campaign – including dubious claims that the country has seen a great jobs renaissance under the Biden-Harris administration.
While there have not been many positive economic metrics throughout the Biden administration, the jobs reports issued by the Biden Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) have been one supposed bright spot for Democrats. But new data has undermined that narrative and raised serious questions about a potential effort by the administration to deceive the American people.
According to The Kobeissi Letter, a leading market research firm, “Jobs report numbers have been revised DOWN in 4 out of 5 months of 2024” – a striking pattern that suggests the administration may be willfully misleading the public about the actual state of the economy with a pivotal election just four months away.
In total, from January to May, the initial jobs numbers have been off by nearly 250,000. After originally reporting 353,000 new jobs in January, that number was revised downward by 97,000 to 256,000. February saw a 39,000 downward adjustment, while April and May were revised down by 67,000 and 54,000, respectively.
Of course, only the higher initial reports made headlines, with media outlets claiming they indicated a strong job market. When BLS quietly released the “revised” figures weeks later, there was little coverage of the fact that the numbers were significantly worse than initially claimed.
So far this year, the only month where the jobs numbers actually increased from the original to the final report was March, and that was a comparatively small revision of less than 20,000 jobs.
Moreover, many of these supposed “gains” aren’t more Americans entering the labor force, but rather people with full-time jobs taking second and third part-time jobs to make ends meet amid dramatic increases in cost of living. As Kobeissi also noted, “Over the last 2 months, part time employment is up by +336,000 workers. But, full-time employment is down by a MASSIVE -653,000 workers over the same amount of time.” In total, more than 8.6 million people now hold multiple jobs, a new record.
This glaring discrepancy between the Biden-Harris administration’s narrative and the actual reality Americans are experiencing in the jobs numbers has not been limited to 2024. Overall in 2023, initial employment reports were revised down by a cumulative total of 439,000 jobs.
Moreover, a significant portion of the job growth that has actually taken place has been in the federal bureaucracy. During the final three months of 2023, the federal government added an average of 50,000 new employees – all of whom will have their salaries paid by the American taxpayer. For the 12-month period from March 2022 to March 2023, while private sector job creation also was adjusted lower by 358,000, government payrolls were revised 52,000 higher.
Even worse for Democrats, many of the 14 million jobs the Biden-Harris administration claims to have created are actually people returning to work following the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, even if the administration’s dubious jobs numbers are taken at face value and the impact of second and third jobs is ignored, the administration has only “created” about five million new jobs – a relatively modest number compared to past administrations. (The Trump administration, for reference, created about seven million new jobs in three years before the pandemic.)
The apparent deception from Biden’s BLS is particularly concerning given the amount of public trust placed in the agency to provide accurate facts on the economy and the labor market. Given that these figures are often used by institutional investors to make decisions that affect entire industries, even the appearance of biased data could have a destabilizing effect.
Democrats’ eagerness to use the jobs numbers as a key pillar of their 2024 campaign creates even more reason for skepticism. With stubbornly high inflation still eating into Americans’ paychecks, the jobs report and strong stock market returns (which are also largely due to inflation) have been the only economic arguments Democrats can rely on. It is difficult to imagine a more powerful incentive to fudge the numbers.
Unfortunately, however, as much as the Biden – and now Harris – hope to create an alternate reality using statistics and math, it has become increasingly difficult to sell that reality to the public. For the millions of Americans forced to take a second job to put food on the table or facing a skyrocketing cost of living, Biden and Harris patting themselves on the back for fake jobs numbers will only drive them toward candidates who acknowledge the real struggles everyday people are going through.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
