US Employment Reports Greatly Exaggerated, Over 400,000 Jobs Mistakenly Added to Total
Editor’s Note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re reposting it here in case you missed it.
Just because there is a number in a jobs report from the Biden administration’s Bureau of Labor Statistics does not mean it is necessarily so.
That’s the bottom line of a Jan. 6 Fox Business report that said in the first 11 months of 2023, jobs reports overestimated the number of jobs created by 439,000 positions.
At a time when “Bidenomics” has become President Joe Biden’s shorthand for the economic growth he says he has achieved, Fox Business said the numbers indicate “the job market is not as healthy as the government suggests.”
Fox News noted the jobs report drives a number of economic decisions, from the stock markets to the Federal Reserve’s interest rates.
David Rosenberg, founder of Rosenberg Research Associates, offered different numbers but the same conclusion.
“Time to stop trading off the payroll data. The downward revisions in 2023 totalled an epic 443k. More than 40% of payroll growth in 2023 didn’t even come from the survey but from the fairy-tale ‘Birth-Death’ model,” he posted on X.
Time to stop trading off the payroll data. The downward revisions in 2023 totalled an epic 443k. More than 40% of payroll growth in 2023 didn’t even come from the survey but from the fairy-tale ‘Birth-Death’ model.
— David Rosenberg (@EconguyRosie) January 5, 2024
The problem of overstated job numbers is not a new one.
Bureau of Labor Statistics figures have been wrong before.
In August, the agency admitted that from March 2022 to March 2023, it overstated job growth by 306,000 jobs, according to Fox Business.
In December 2022, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank estimated that the official federal data overstated growth by 1.1 million jobs in the second quarter of 2022, Fox Business reported.
#Bidenomics – two new jobs created per person and you’re working both of them.#DementiaJoe https://t.co/HinLnPPNRE
— Thomas J. Quinlan (@thomas_quinlan) January 4, 2024
The totals are only part of what Fox Business noted in the job numbers.
One area of job growth in the past three months has been the government sector. Taxpayer-funded government jobs increased at a rate of about 50,000 a month, according to Fox.
December’s jobs report showed 683,000 people stopped looking for work.
Fox Business said a record 8.69 million workers now hold multiple jobs, noting that since June, the economy has shed 1.5 million full-time workers and added 796,000 part-time workers.
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