The stock market was boosted today by a “blockbuster” jobs report. “The economy” added 254,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.1% This was good news for the Kamala Harris campaign, which probably was the intended effect.
Anyone who has followed the shenanigans at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in recent years will greet these numbers with skepticism. There have been two obvious trends: First, new jobs have overwhelmingly been part-time. So lots of new jobs are a sign, not of a strong economy, but of hard times that are forcing people to take on additional work. This chart shows that, over the last year and a half, full-time jobs have consistently declined, while part-time work has grown:
Second, initially rosy job counts have consistently been revised downward in subsequent tabulations. Thus, the Biden/Harris administration gets a good headline, while few notice that a month or two later, many of the purported new jobs evaporate.
But something else is going on here, too. Zerohedge points out that this month’s supposedly positive numbers are driven by an explosion in government workers:
The answer, ironically, was in the number of government workers, which exploded higher, and were not only instrumental in pushing the Household Survey print much higher, but meant the difference between a 4.1% and 4.5% unemployment rate.
Here is what happened.
In September, the number of government workers as tracked by the Household Survey soared by 785K, from 21.421 million to 22.216 million, both seasonally adjusted (source: Table A8 from the jobs report). This was the biggest monthly surge in government workers on record (excluding the outlier print in June 2020 which was a reversal of the record plunge from the Covid collapse months before).
While government workers soared by the most on record, private workers rose by just 133K, a far more believable number, and one which however would indicate that the recent labor market malaise continues.
This simple chart shows how the currently-reported unemployment rate would be different if we took out the new taxpayer-funded jobs:
Zerohedge notes that there is something funny going on with the seasonal adjustment of government employment, which always surges in September as schools get back in session. But the basic point is more fundamental. Statistical manipulation aside–and it seems clear that the government has been manipulating government numbers to try to help the party of government–an increase in public sector workers has nothing to do with a strong economy, and is nothing to celebrate. On the contrary.
Will the Biden/Harris administration’s statistical manipulations help to drag the bedraggled Kamala Harris and Tim Walz across the finish line? I doubt it. This is just more gaslighting: don’t believe your lying eyes, believe what the Party tells you! That may work with a depressing number of suburban wine moms, but they can’t sell it to the millions who can’t afford groceries and gasoline.
Governments are the greediest institutions in our society. The fact that greedy governments are sucking up ever more resources, and hiring ever more like-minded employees, is nothing for the rest of us to celebrate.
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