Much like how the media’s “errors” are always in favor of the Biden administration and at the expense of Republicans, the government statisticians are now“mysteriously” erring in the administration’s favor too.
Fox Business’ Elizabeth MacDonald ran the numbers, and found that in 2023, initial government reports overstated employment by 439,000.Since the government wiped out 439,000 jobs after the fact, the total percentage of jobs created by the government last year is even higher. Increased government hiring has been driving the jobs numbers higher.
"Time to stop trading off the payroll data," tweeted David Rosenberg, founder of Rosenberg Research Associates. By his calculations, he says the downward revisions came to "an epic 443,000," adding, "more than 40% of payroll growth in 2023" came from "the fairy tale ‘Birth-Death’ model" the BLS uses to "guesstimate" its jobs reports.
And there’s plenty of reasons to believe it's by design, the strongest of which is the implausibility of nearly all revisions being downward. With the exception of December (because the data was just reported), July 2023 is the only month last year where the revised numbers estimated more jobs created than initially reported. But even that didn’t happen until a second revision - the initial revision estimated 30,000 fewer jobs created than initially reported.
Back in 2022, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve estimated that the BLS overstated job creation by over 1 million between March and June of that year.
In 2021, the two months with the biggest revisions (June and July) were ones where the number of jobs created was revised down by 405,000 and 402,000 jobs, respectively. Though to be fair, there were plenty of revisions in the other direction that year.
This is hardly the first time the administration has tried to rewrite economic reality before our eyes.
Back in 2022, ahead of Q2 GDP numbers that everyone knew would log a second quarter of negative economic growth, thus meeting the widely-used definition of a recession, the White House literally launched a campaign to redefine what the word “recession” means.
Ahead of the data release, the Biden Administration posted an article to the White House blog claiming to answer the question "What is a recession?" where they veer from the traditional definition, writing; “While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.” The “some” people maintaining the definition the White House is arguing against includes the U.K.’s central bank, France’s national statistics bureau, Germany’s central bank, Canada’s Federal Balanced Budget Act, and Australia’s parliament.
The White House managed to get a handful of fact-checkers to write articles agreeing with this new definition - and ironically many of those very same fact-checkers had adhered to the “two-quarters” definition themselves in past writings.
Reality truly is optional for them - as now reflected in the fact that they’ll make up the numbers and then hope you don’t notice when they’re revised later.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
