It seems increasingly apparent that the Democrats and Joe Biden’s election strategy, besides trying to convince the public that Donald Trump is the spawn of Hitler and Satan, is to lie, deceive and gaslight voters into believing that down is up, bad is good, and that Biden has done a wonderful job even though by all visible markers his administration has been a disastrous failure.
In the latest example, the January jobs report was hailed by Joe and his minions as more proof that the economy was not just good, but spectacular. Naturally, the news media carried the message. “January Jobs Report Was a Blowout. Disregard the Seasonal Noise” proclaimed Barrons. NPR, our Democratic Party mouthpiece, crowed, “The U.S. created an extraordinary number of jobs in January. Here’s a deeper look.” “U.S. employment soars by 353,000, stunning Wall Street,” said an obviously stunned MarketWatch. “Another shockingly good jobs report shows America’s economy is booming” said CNN. The New York Times joined the parade, as expected: “Blockbuster Jobs Report Backs Up Fed’s Patience as It Waits to Cut Rates.” NBC News was positively giddy: “The great American jobs machine keeps revving in an election year.”
My son, an auto mechanic who is, as far as I can tell, completely apolitical, had just recently conveyed a completely different picture. He says that everyone he knows is struggling financially, and that he personally had a disastrous month because he is largely paid by the hour. Few Northern Virginians were bringing their cars in to be serviced. “Nobody has any money,” he told me. He worked the fewest hours last month than any time since the pandemic lockdown. Apparently he wasn’t the only one.
Economist and portfolio manager Robert Barone explained on the Forbes site (remember that Forbes is generally a pro-Democratic Party site now) that the workweek contracted in January to 34.1 hours, down from 34.3 in December and 34.4 in November. That is the lowest number since March 2020 when the Wuhan virus struck. The previous low before that was in November 2008, the Great Recession, when the wheels fell off the economy. Thus despite the alleged job gains, which are always estimates anyway, the total hours worked in January fell. The Household Survey reported a 63,000 job reduction in full-time jobs. The loss seems to have been masked by part-time jobs and second and third job growth.
Calling the January jobs report evidence of a “booming” economy without describing the factors noted by Barone is pure deceit, and deceit is a variety of lie, a particularly insidious one, since it uses the selective framing of facts to deceive. It is the job of journalists to expose official deceit. Instead, they often enable it, when the deception benefits a favored policy or politician.
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Pointer: Stephen Greene
Ethics Alarms 
They contracted the workweek so they could divide people’s pay by a smaller number and show an INCREASE in pay (per hour). Many people are paid salary and a few sites I looked at said that the wages (including salaried) were divided by the workweek number which gave an illusion of increasing wages.
It doesn’t matter. I means that the Department of Labor can’t be trusted and needs to go away.
Not to be predictable, but who CAN be trusted?
Jack,
I was hoping you would address this issue of misleading economic data. The jobs report is one that is always subject to deceit. Beyond the absolute numbers and hours worked we should mention that the growth sectors of jobs were health care, low wage hospitality and government. Many of these jobs are driven in large part by the massive numbers (about 7.5 million) of illegal “migrants” who have been given parole by the Biden administration and dispersed throughout the country.
When I taught first year Economics I would tell my students that numerical values do not tell the whole story and you must dig into the numbers to draw any real conclusions. For example, a higher investment value does not mean our capital stock is increasing which would lead to more output at lower costs. I see the Biden administration as the proverbial glazer who breaks windows to increase business. That activity will increase nominal GDP but we are wasting resources unnecessarily. Every choice has an opportunity cost.
Another stat that was touted recently was quarterly GDP growth was a robust 3.3 percent. How can that be if weekly take home pay growth was less than the hike in prices during the same time? It cannot. Therefore, we must look to other causal forces to increase consumption spending, The only reasonable conclusion is that the increase in consumption originates with the spending by the millions of “migrants” who are issued plastic spending cards by government and more people hired to deal with the “migrants”.
Chicago Spent $100 Million on “migrants”’ Since August –
In addition, the federal government spends billions of borrowed dollars at a cost of about 5.5% that it does not otherwise have and distributes it to NGO’s. The more “migrants” you have the more people you need to process them. If you look at fact checking pages about how much each family gets per month they will tell you that figures used by conservative groups is false because they fixate on resettlement costs of Afghans and not those illegally entering the U.S.. The fact-checkers also do not expose the value of the benefit subsidies received through third party NGO’s or local governments.
DHS Announces Distribution of More Than $77 Million in Congressional Funding for Communities Receiving “migrants” | Homeland Security
The fact of the matter is someone is paying for the hotel rooms and food costs of these parolees.
If we assume that each family receives an equivalent subsidy to that of 2040 hours of work at minimum wage that translates to $30,600 per family, or a total of 57.375 billion on an annualized basis. That is a conservative estimate because we know that “migrants” in Chicago are getting $9,000 cash assistance monthly.
Database shows where Chicago is spending on migrant crisis – Axios Chicago
Nowhere in any of the data provided is education costs discussed. One stat in one of the cited articles said that 30 percent of the “migrants” are school age children. That would mean that 2.25 million children have been added to our schools at an average cost of $17,000 each or 38.25 billion dollars annually.
The biggest challenge for people trying to evaluate the costs and benefits is that most of the media are part of the cabal that wants to mislead the public by simply parroting the statements of the NGO’s and government officials whose livelihoods are dependent on social problems.
What we have is a government intent on creating problems so that they can allocate billions of unfunded dollars to groups who will actively work to keep the misinformation campaign of politicians going so they don’t have to get a real job.
Why is your avatar the same as Jack’s? Another WordPress glitch?
No, Chris has been glitched to death, so I relayed this lengthy comment to save him frustration. Completely forgot about the avatar…
Chris, I’m going to have to read that a couple of times to absorb it, but it was brilliant. Thanks so much!!
I will say that since 2020, my adjusted-for-inflation salary has decreased.
Chris’s posts are always insightful.
jvb
Hopefully changing my email address will solve the issues.
I appreciate Joel’s and JB’s sentiments.
Everything boils down to the idea that Biden et al breaks things and then spends gobs of money claiming that he is responsible a increase in something good or blaming others when things are falling apart.
Claim 8 million new jobs since inaugurated. The fact is most of these jobs did not disappear they were simply on hold during the government mandated shutdown. New job creation stats come from ADP (a payroll service) which counts new positions added on existing accounts which is then extrapolated to create an idea of new hires nationally. The household survey also plays a role buy in neither case do hours worked play into the number of jobs created value. What is necessary is an unduplicated headcount and number of hours worked to get a realistic picture.
We have heard of the “gig economy”. What this means is that jobs are now counted in terms of projects. So if Tom works for 3 months doing editing for xyz corp and the 6 months as a web developer for abc corp but then spend 3 months in hiatus waiting for a new gig then 2 jobs according to the government were created yet only 9 months of employment occurred.
We keep hearing about consumption spending is still brisk which is why the Fed is loathe too lower rates. Well when you add millions of new buyers to the economy by opening up the borders then consumption expenditures will naturally increase. This opening of the border or should I say not enforcing existing law at the same time supply chains were strained due to government mandated closures then prices had no where to go but through the roof. Without the influx of illegal aliens upward price pressure would not have been so high. The current wave of lootings has also caused GDP to rise because lost inventories had to be replaced. Insurance covers some and some will come in the form of lost profits. Unfortunately, most of the money to replace goods goes to foreign suppliers so these negatively impact our net export values in GDP calculations. None of this adds value o the American consumer.
The immigration issue impacts American citizens in multiple ways. The most concerning is that the census counts all these parolees in determining Congressional representation. Even if they cannot vote these aliens effectively dilute the voices of the citizenry at the ballot box. Given that most of the new arrivals are considered minorities and that minorities are the primary target for progressive politicians who see them as a means to retaining power, and that by and large ethnic groups tend to migrate to like communities for support and cultural compatibility, adding 100,000 new persons to a district will likely cause that district to be split into two so it is likely that the new district will be inclined to vote in similar fashion as the original district. In the event that new migrants move into areas represented by progressive but with declining populations. the migrant population will protect the incumbent politician. In either case this effects the Electoral College and the apportionment of electoral votes.
All of these Biden policies are by design to “fundamentally transform” the United States into something other than a Constitutional Republican form of government. The notion that we are one nation comprised of many sovereign states is what the progressives wanted eliminate and one that many of our founders feared.
Welcome back…and the hits just keep coming!! I took an economics class in college, but as a computer-science guy, it largely went over my head. I think I would have fared much better had you been my instructor.
The gig economy is new to me, and your discussion of the impact of illegal immigration and its link to prices, congressional representation, and ultimately, the state of the Republic was really good.
You have tremendous insight and I appreciate you sharing it with me…and all of us.
Thank you Joel
That is really good information to know about the jobs reports.
One of the things I took away from your description is that the accuracy of the report depends on how accurate ADP is at estimating its share of the national payroll. If there were more employers who didn’t use ADP than they figured (or less) then ADP’s numbers would be distorted. I would imagine they could check their figures versus, say, Social Security’s annual records on how many W-2’s are issued, and IRS knows how many 1099-NEC form are issued for contractors, but those are annual figures after the fact.
In some sense, it sounds as though ADP is in the same situation as opinion pollsters — they have to estimate how best to weight the actual number they have as a proportion of the national economy. And….we have a decent grasp on how accurate opinion pollsters are.
But that brings to mind another question. From that description, and from my own anecdotal evidence, that would indicate that ADP has enough of the payroll market to effectively be a monopoly. Have you ever hear of the government looking to break up ADP as a monopoly? I sure haven’t. Hmmm.
Needless to say, Chris’s post is a Comment of the Day.
That is absolutely deserved, and I would argue his first comment in the discussion is worthy of runner-up status.
Congrats, Chris!