Just as the media's “errors” are always in favor of the Biden administration and at the expense of the Republicans, government statisticians are also “mysteriously” erring in the administration's favor.
Fox Business' Elizabeth MacDonald ran the numbers and found that in 2023, initial government reports overstated employment by 439,000.
Because the government cut 439,000 jobs after the fact, the total percentage of jobs created by the government last year is even higher. Increased government hiring has increased the number of jobs.
“Time to stop trading payroll data,” tweeted David Rosenberg, founder of Rosenberg Research Associates. According to his calculations, he says downward revisions came to “about 443,000 epics,” adding that “more than 40% of payroll growth in 2023” comes from the “fairytale 'Birth-Death' model” which the BLS uses to “estimate” its employment reports.
And there are many reasons to believe that it is by design, the strongest of which is the unlikely that almost all revisions are to the downside. With the exception of December (because the data has just been reported), July 2023 is the only month last year where the revised numbers estimated more jobs were created than were initially reported. But even that didn't happen until a second review: The initial review estimated 30,000 fewer jobs were created than initially reported.
In the year 2022, the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia estimated that the BLS overstated job creation by more than 1 million between March and June of that year.
In 2021, the two months with the most revisions (June and July) were those in which the number of jobs created was revised down by 405,000 and 402,000 jobs, respectively. Although to be fair, there were plenty of revisions in the other direction that year.
It is not the first time that the administration has tried to rewrite the economic reality before our eyes.
In 2022, ahead of the second quarter GDP numbers that everyone knew would mark a second quarter of negative economic growth, thereby meeting the widely used definition of a recession, the White House literally launched a campaign to redefine what the word “recession”.
Before the publication of data, the The Biden administration published an article on the White House blog claiming to answer the question “What is a recession?” where they deviate from the traditional definition, writing; “While some argue that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists assess the state of the business cycle.” The “some” people who maintain the definition the White House argues against include the UK's central bank, France's national statistics office, Germany's central bank, Canada's federal Balanced Budget Act and the parliament of Australia.
The White House got a handful of fact-checkers to write articles consistent with this new definition, and ironically, many of these same fact-checkers had adhered to the “two-quarters” definition in earlier writings..
Reality is really optional for them, as reflected in the fact that they'll make up the numbers and then hope you don't notice when you check them later.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking by Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry i The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside George Soros' Secret Network
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