The latest jobs report came out on Friday, and Joe Biden wants you to believe that it was fabulous news.
"This morning’s report confirms that 2023 was a great year for American workers,” he boasted in a statement. And the compliant liberal media certainly took the cue. Total nonfarm payroll employment went up by 216,000 in December, which was higher than expected, and that’s what much of the headlines about the jobs report are focusing on.
But a deep dive into the report gives us a much better picture of what’s happening, and things aren't as great as Biden and his minions want us to believe. In fact, the data may actually be catastrophically bad.
Let's dive in, shall we?
For starters, despite the better-than-expected increase in employment, the unemployment rate did not go down; it remained the same at 3.7%. While that is a decent number, unemployment in January 2023 was 3.4%, and December’s unemployment rate is also higher than the pre-pandemic unemployment rate of 3.5%.
There was also a 0.3 percentage point decline in both the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, now standing at 62.5% and 60.1%, respectively, which means that the percentage of the nation’s working-age population actually decreased in December — a month normally buoyed by temporary holiday season employment.
As for the hiring that took place, it was mostly concentrated in a few select sectors: government, health care, social assistance, and construction. In fact, government hiring accounted for 24% of nonfarm payroll employment gains in December, while healthcare made up 18%, and social services constituted 10%.
The job market in professional and business services showed minimal change in December, with an increase of only 13,000 positions. Employment in professional, scientific, and technical services continued its upward trajectory, adding 25,000 jobs and averaging 22,000 new jobs per month in 2023, which is significantly lower than the 2022 monthly average gain of 41,000. Employment in temporary help services declined in December, shedding 33,000 jobs, and has lost 346,000 jobs since March of 2022.
Biden has consistently tried to take credit for creating the jobs that came back from the pandemic shutdowns, and by that standard, job growth has actually slowed. Roughly 4.8 million jobs came back in 2022, compared to the 2.7 million calculated for 2023. So by that standard, hiring has slowed significantly. Nonfarm payroll employment is only up 4.9 million over pre-pandemic levels and is still behind where we were trending before the pandemic hit.
Guess what? We still haven’t recovered from the pandemic. pic.twitter.com/2toErJmbQn
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) January 5, 2024
"Overall, employment in professional and business services changed little in 2023,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Employment showed little change over the month in other major industries, including mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction; manufacturing; wholesale trade; information; financial activities; and other services."
And then there’s the fact that the employment gains for October and November were both revised downward in the latest report. "The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for October was revised down by 45,000, from +150,000 to +105,000, and the change for November was revised down by 26,000, from +199,000 to +173,000. With these revisions, employment in October and November combined is 71,000 lower than previously reported."
Zero Hedge points out that this trend is deeply concerning because the job gains for 10 of the last 11 months of 2023 have all been revised downward. “Why? So that the White House can take credit for a strong number (one which also sparks algorithmic buying in the market) only to quietly revise it lower one and two months later when nobody is looking."
But here’s where things look really bad. According to the BLS, the number of full-time workers went from 134,727,000 in November to 133,196,000 in December. That’s a whopping 1.531 million decline.
There’s another dirty secret lingering in the data.
Next we turn to the numbers behind the headline job prints which were rather terrible: the monthly nonfarm payrolls (from the Establishment Survey) may have been weak at 216K but the far more accurate Household Survey showed that the number of Employed workers actually collapsed by an unprecedented 683K, the biggest drop since the US economy was shutdown by covid!
"In short: December was a catastrophic month for the jobs market, which is why we expect the usual theater: non-stop spin and lies from the Biden admin, and not a single relevant question from the liberal media whose job is not to educate or inform, but to carry water, spread lies and enable propaganda,” observes Zero Hedge.
This was not a good report, no matter what the White House and the media tell you.
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