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.
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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.
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Oh, and here’s the updated query:
That’s the Obama two step: Announce a good result, celebrate success … and then quietly revise the numbers downward a few weeks later.
Then use the new downward revised number as the baseline to calculate NEXT quarter’s gain! Wash, rinse, repeat.
You can go back even further and see that when an R is potus, the estimates are lower, making things look worse than they are and when a D is potus they do it the opposite way, which this article showed. I have tracked it back to Reagan before I stopped checking.
Pointing out the split in the way the numbers were handled – R vs. D – was an effective red pill when I pointed it out to my (then liberal) son. He started tracking the manipulation and has been on a journey of discovery ever since.
They did this for 8 years under Obama and wonder why Trump was elected.
Yikes! I’ll have nightmares now!
In debate, Trump needs to stomp on Biden’s claim that Biden created 7.2 million jobs.
Those were jobs folks were returning to after the COVID lockdown.
I hear even so-called conservatives arguing that Obama “deported” more illegal aliens than Trump.
Obama moved illegal aliens from point A to point B and counted this as deportations. They did not leave America.
Where is the common sense?
Obama’s “Deporter In Chief” was a publicity stunt. He changed the definition of “deport” to include turn backs (i.e. Border Patrol prevents illegal aliens from entering the US, making them return the way they came). These had never been counted as “deportations” before.
The intention was to make Obama appear to be a staunch defender of our borders and an immigration hawk in preparation for his pivot to amnesty.
Only Nixon can go to China; only the “Deporter In Chief” can grant mass amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.
It was all bulls**t. A variation of the technique where DOJ simply changes the way it reports crime so most go unrecorded, then declares a drop in crime.
Even worse, the technical term for “turn backs” is voluntary return (VR), which does not exist in immigration law (at the agent level). VR is an internally created administrative function designed to mitigate volume and reduce immigration court case load. An immigration judge can grant a voluntary departure (VD) in a deportation hearing. No hearing, means no VD can be granted.
The secondary benefit is to the alien. A re-entry after a formal deportation is a straight felony. You cannot charge the felony after a VR. This also reduces criminal case load on the federal criminal court.
The entire system is designed to fail any enforcement effort, for at least the last 60 years.
No surprise here. Downward adjustments are required to give the Fed reason to make interest rate cuts in Sep and Nov.
Yes, our government well and truly sucks. Shot-through with corruption perpetrated by Swamp zombies and bureaucratic mushrooms, it has become a threat to us all.
We are governed by ‘experts’ in idiocy. Communist commissars. All of them. It’s like it is 1916 again with Louis Brandeis and Wilson.
The Biden adminstration did one good thing for the American Public: it amplified how the LEFT LIES…. just outright untruths…After years of their blatent lies about Trump, Hunter’s Laptop, and Joe being cognitively fit to serve as President- despite what we’ve learned and seen with our own eyes, should wake some Dems up to what their party ACTUALLY is about….keeping their fat cats in power and their control over you.