The Jobs Numbers: Now They Tell Us

Now they tell us. The news that the Biden payroll growth numbers were off by some 818,000 jobs certainly rains on the Democrats’ parade. Just the other night President Biden was touting his record on job creation as a reason to back his anointed successor, Vice President Harris, in November. Even before the downward revision, though, Mr. Biden had been padding the job numbers, which started from an artificial low during the Covid pandemic.That doesn’t make this morning’s announcement by Mr. Biden’s Bureau of Labor Statistics any less eye-popping. It turns out that the bureau was putting forward statistics — hailed by the president as evidence of his administration’s “record” level of employment growth — that were off by some 30 percent. Instead of the 2.9 million jobs purportedly added between April 2023 and March, the number was closer to 2.1 million. So when Mr. Biden was crowing about the March jobs numbers and “15 million more people who have the dignity and respect that comes with a paycheck,” he was off by nearly a million. Plus, too, Mr. Biden was measuring job growth against the 142 million Yanks employed when he took office. That was about 10 million shy of the number employed in February 2020 of the Trump era, before the pandemic led to a temporary job market crash.It was nigh inevitable that the job market would snap back to its pre-pandemic level, as it did by the summer of 2022. So it’s dubious for Mr. Biden to take credit merely for the economic ship of state righting itself after a storm. Even the left-leaning guardians of accuracy in the press at factcheck.org couldn’t swallow Mr. Biden’s gloating. His claim of record-shattering job growth is “missing some glaringly obvious context,” say the flabbergasted fact checkers.“Biden’s Job Growth Chart Ignores Impact of Pandemic,” is how factcheck.org put it in a headline. They took exception to Mr. Biden’s sneer that President Trump “had the worst jobs record since the Great Depression,” noting that jobs growth under the 45th president had, pre-pandemic, chugged along at 180,000 per month. The revised numbers under Mr. Biden show jobs grew by about 174,000 a month between April 2023 and March 2024, per CNN.Those are hardly record-shattering numbers, even could Mr. Biden take credit for the economy expanding on his watch. Growth would, though, have been higher if Mr. Trump’s economic policies continued past 2020. Also, too, it’s not hard to imagine even higher levels of job creation since then were it not for Mr. Biden’s high-spending, high-regulation, high-inflation policies, enacted with the help of Ms. Harris’s tie-breaking votes in the Senate.At a time when the non-policy momentum appears, at least for the moment, to be with the Democrats — aided by the enthusiastically uncritical coverage of the liberal press and Ms. Harris shrinking from taking any policy positions — the job numbers offer an opportunity for President Trump to reorient the campaign back toward his long suit — pro-growth economic policies. He’s already decrying the erroneous numbers as “fraudulent.”It’s “a terrible insult to our economy,” the 45th president declared, “because we were seeing numbers that were OK, but not great, now we’re seeing numbers that — when they’re adjusted — are a disaster.” Yet Trump faces an uphill climb in convincing voters that he would make a better steward of the economy than Ms. Harris. Polls generally find that voters trust Trump over Mr. Biden on the economy, but one poll found Ms. Harris in the van on that head.While that was just one survey, and it showed Ms. Harris with but a one-point lead over Trump, it underscores the challenge he faces in running against a candidate who is not as widely blamed for Mr. Biden’s economic misrule. It will require all of Trump’s discipline to make his economic case to voters. The stakes are high for America — and the candidates. It will, after all, decide which of them will accede, in January, to the nation’s most coveted job.

The Jobs Numbers: Now They Tell Us

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