Biden Is Lying about the Jobs Data

The personal savings rate is near seventeen-year lows. Credit card debt is at record levels. Millions of prime-age workers have quit the job market, and full-time employment continues to wither. On the other hand, the Biden Administration wants you to think things have never been better. 

Last week, following the release of December’s jobs data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Biden crowed that “Real wages are up in recent months … and we are seeing welcome signs that inflation is coming down as well.” Biden concluded by saying “it’s a good time to be a worker in America.”

Unfortunately, things aren’t nearly as good as the White House and its accomplices in the corporate media would have us believe. 

It’s only a “good time” to be a worker in America if one equates falling real wages and falling full-time employment with “robust” employment conditions. 

Moreover, the numbers that the administration continued to cherry-pick to burnish its political image are themselves quite suspect. Response rates to employment surveys sent out by the BLS have gone into steep decline, and the Philadelphia Federal Reserve has recently accused the BLS of vastly overstating employment growth in 2022. 

A more sober look at broader economic trends continues to point toward economic pain in 2023, and there is less reason than ever to think that the Federal Reserve will engineer a fabled “soft landing” for the economy after years of record-breaking monetary inflation. 

Falling Real Wages, Falling Full-Time Employment 

In spite of what Biden may say, real wages in the United States fell, year-over-year from April 2021 to November 2022. That’s likely to also be the case for December once we get the inflation growth numbers for December. Put another way, wages are falling in real terms because the inflation rate has been outpacing wage growth during all that time. Nominal wage growth actually slowed in December according to the new BLS numbers, so unless the inflation rate suddenly collapsed to below 4.5 percent in December—which is unlikely—we will find that real wages fell in December for the twenty-first month in a row. 

Another factor pointing to weakness in job markets is the fact that the number of full-time workers fell in December. Nearly all of the gains in workers were part time.

Specifically, full-time employees dropped by 1,000 workers while part-time workers rose by 679,000 (month-over-month). The total gain in all workers for the period was 717,000. Moreover, the overall trend since 2021 is one in which growth in full-time work in general is falling—and turning negative in some months—while part-time employment represents most of the growth. 

What does this mean overall? David Rosenberg summed it up in a recent tweet, these are jobs “gains” characterized by part-timers, side giggers, and multiple job holders: 

An important aspect of the “household survey” Rosenberg mentions is that it considers part-time workers and barely-employed self-employed people as among the “employed” on a par with full-time workers. Yet, when we consider the reality of slowing wages combined with a lack of growth in full-time workers, one suspects that the employment situation isn’t exactly lucrative for a great many workers. There is also good reason to believe that many workers who are now taking on part-time work are doing so because the cost of living has increased substantially. For example, over the past year, the average hourly wage increased 4.6 percent while CPI prices rose 6.4 percent. Workers are falling behind, and it’s hard to square this with Biden’s claim that worke