“The great American comeback continues, but we still have to make more progress,” Biden said in a statement on Friday in response to the latest Labor Department employment report.
The Democratic Party stenographers at the New York Times celebrated the recent jobs report with this headline and subhead: Biden Has a Historically Strong Job Market. It May Not Be Enough. Job gains continue to surge, and the unemployment rate remains low, but as the president seeks re-election, voters say they care more about high prices.
The problem for Democrats is that the “historically strong jobs market” is a complete lie, but the high prices are definitely real.
As Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist, Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. explained in a post to X, May full-time employment fell by 625,000, the largest drop since last December; part-time employment rose by 286,000.
As economist Larry Kudlow explained in a Fox Business column, May “was a significant 272,000 [jobs] increase. Although nearly half of that was government and government-related jobs, that's what the nonfarm payrolls showed. However, when you lift up the hood, what you see is an incredible 408,000 job loss from the household survey.” (Emphasis by CHQ.)
Mr. Kudlow went on to explain, “…the household survey is more heavily weighted toward small businesses, and actually over the past year has produced only a tiny 31,000 increase in jobs. Now, additionally, under the hood, the civilian labor force shrunk by 250,000 and as a consequence, the unemployment rate notched up to 4%. And another key indicator of the labor force is the employment-to-population ratio, which fell slightly in May to 60.1%.” (Emphasis by CHQ.)
Bloomberg's chief economist Anna Wong: "May’s jobs report presented contradictory views of the labor market, as we expected. The establishment survey shows robust gains in nonfarm payrolls — yet the unemployment rate rose to 4.0%. We believe the latter currently offers a closer approximation of reality than payrolls, as BLS’ model for estimating business births and deaths – which added 231,000 jobs to the nonfarm-payrolls print in May – is lagging the reality of surging establishment closures and falling business formation. We think the underlying pace of current job gains is likely less than 100,000 per month.” (Emphasis by CHQ.)
While Biden was celebrating the “great American comeback” the unemployment rate rose to 4%, the first time it has breached that level since January 2022. Economists had been expecting the rate to stay unchanged at 3.9% from April.
The increase came even though the labor force participation rate decreased to 62.5%, down 0.2 percentage point.
What’s more, the hours worked held steady and remained only slightly above the 4-year low.
So, which is it? A “great American comeback” or an economic disaster for America’s working families?
With the survey of households used to compute the unemployment rate showing that the level of people who reported holding jobs fell by 408,000 analysts who aren’t in the tank for Democrats see it as a disaster, and here’s why, as our friends at Zero Hedge explained:
…not only has the US labor market been appallingly weak, with most of the jobs "gained" in 2023 and meant to signal how strong the Biden "recovery" has been, about to be revised away (as first the Philly Fed and now Bloomberg both admit), but more shockingly, all the job growth in the past few years has gone to illegal aliens.
Why have all new jobs been going to foreign-born workers (i.e. immigrants)? Because under Joe Biden you can be an illegal immigrant in deportation proceedings (not to mention anyone seeking asylum) and get authorization to work in the US for up to 5 years, no questions asked.
Bottom line:
1. Prices have never been higher and are starting to accelerate to the upside again
2. All the jobs created in the past year have been part time.
3. There has been zero job growth for native-born Americans since 2018; all jobs have gone to immigrants (mostly illegal aliens).
4. Real wages have not only been negative for most of the Biden presidency, and they just turned negative again.
That looks a lot more like a disaster than a “great American comeback” to us.
Inflation
Biden administration
unemployment rate
government jobs
government hiring
non-farm payrolls
Biden recovery
Illegal aliens employment
theft
Dollar tree stores
rising operation costs
commodity prices
stoke prices
monetary policy
M2 money supply
government spending