BLS Admits Annual Jobs Overstated, Gives Phony Boost to Bidenomics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics delivered an unpleasant Labor Day surprise earlier this year when it confirmed that it overstated the jobs created total from March 2023 to March 2024 by at least 818,000. The gross miscalculation, the largest in 15 years, makes President Joe Biden look foolish. Biden frequently but falsely proclaims that the U.S. has the world’s strongest economy, that he has created 15 million jobs---800,000 of those in manufacturing---which, he insists, proves that Bidenomics is a rip-roaring success. The adjustment lowers the total employment growth for the 12-month period, not including farm jobs, from 2.9 million to about 2.1 million, knocking down average monthly growth during that time from about 242,000 to about 174,000. To determine the new estimates, the government relied on the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which tracks employment and wages that employers report and covers more than 95% of all U.S. jobs.

BLS and its dozens of economists inflating the aggregate jobs total by 818,000 is an error akin to a field goal specialist lining up for a five-yard boot but kicking the football fifty yards to the right of the goal post. Economists that work on the monthly reports have one main task---to accurately count and report the number of jobs created. But if the numbers crunchers’ assignment was to purposefully put the most positive spin on the data to deceive Americans, specifically likely voters, and to give the Biden administration cooked reports to boast about, then everything becomes clear. BLS’ reports are a valuable information source that voters and analysts use to gauge the economy’s health. If they are patently dishonest, then Americans are right to question what other official documents are also purposely fabricated. Even Fed Chairman Jay Powell is suspicious. In June, when the government reported May’s unlikely job creation total of 272,000, Powell said, “they may be a bit overstated.”

Skeptics but realists at Zero Hedge noted that during the summer of 2022, BLS, in its determination to show job growth regardless of the quality of those jobs, started to tinker with the labor market’s make up. ZH found that month-to-month gains were going to low-paid, part-time workers while the number of full-time workers declined or remained flat. Detailed data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services suggested that non-farm payroll growth to date for FY24---which started 1 October 2023---comes from illegal aliens who have received Employment Authorization Documents, EADs, granted via parole.

The usual pro-growth suspects shrugged off this year’s downward adjustment. Yardeni Research founder and Yale University Ph.D. Ed Yardeni wrote that, “We're not sweating this report.” Yardeni called the revision “old news” because it tracked employment data from months ago. Goldman Sachs economist Ronnie Walker labeled the revision “erroneous” and “misleading” because it excludes many of the jobs that illegal immigrants hold, a group that, he noted, contributes significantly to job growth. Walker understated illegal immigrants’ labor market participation. Since about 2019, native-born Americans have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained three million jobs. That is more than a significant contribution, the words Walker used. Instead, it’s a complete displacement of American workers.

Goldman Sachs advocates for more immigration and more non-immigrant visas like the H-1B, even if higher immigration levels deny U.S. workers an opportunity to get jobs in a tight economy. A Partnership for Public Service poll sampling of U.S. adults this spring found that just 23% trust the government, compared to 35% in 2022. The results show more Americans consider the federal government to be incompetent, and just 15% believe it to be transparent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is both incompetent and non-transparent.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org