One of the Bidenary impacts to economic analysis and/or economic outcome review has been the inability of any government statistical data to make any sense. Quite frankly, almost every financial pundit in mainstream media pretends the data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) or the Dept of Commerce is accurate. It’s not, and we all know it.
Just like every other institution in Washington DC, the systems of economic tracking have lost all their credibility. That said, even with all the pretending intended to prop-up the Biden administration, eventually the results on Main Street are so obvious the data manipulators have to quietly attempt to smooth the disconnect. This story below is about one small part of that operation.
WASHINGTON DC – Job growth was overestimated by more than 770,000 last year. Put differently, about 1 in 4 jobs that were supposedly added last year never existed. That’s like eliminating all of the jobs gained in three whole months of 2023.
Overly optimistic employment estimates help explain why polling of people’s perceptions of the economy has been so terrible yet the official data from the Biden administration has looked so robust, at least in terms of the number of jobs. Much of the other data has been downright rotten.
With prices rising faster than earnings, the average worker’s weekly paycheck buys 4.4% less today than when President Biden took office. Homeownership affordability has plummeted because the monthly mortgage payment on a median-price home has more than doubled. Three-quarters of Americans now view fast food as a luxury they can’t afford. Gasoline prices are up 46%.
And now, even the job numbers have lost their luster, especially when you consider that millions of those added jobs are from double counting. Whenever someone who is already employed has to get a second — or even a third — job just to help make ends meet, that increases the number of payrolls, without increasing the number of people employed. (read more)
To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, here’s a reminder of SEC Chairman Gensler from last year. This is the Security and Exchange Commission Chairman.
Do you really think Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping don’t know exactly what this level of manipulative lying represents? When the institutions/systems of the United States government are maintained on a baseline of fraud, they become incapable of accurate influence. The collapse doesn’t come about because there’s a weak front door. The collapse happens because of cracks in the foundation.