This has been ongoing for over a year now and I’m surprised I’ve never written about it.
So if you purely go by the top print of the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, more and more jobs are being added every month. In fact, it’s a laughable number.
As one site puts it:
After last month's record 4-sigma beat, today's print was "only" 3 sigma higher than estimates. Needless to say, two multiple sigma beats in a row used to only happen in the USSR... and now in the US, apparently.
The best part is that the BLS numbers have consistently beaten estimates for over a year now. And then in the following months, they are consistently revised downward…severely.
“[The BLS slashes] last month's ridiculous print by over a third, and revising what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K, a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!”
Of course, news agencies never report that last month’s numbers were off by 37%!! They just print the original number as great news for the economy. Even more than that, usually the revisions continue downward monthly until they are lower than the original estimates.
To put it bluntly, the BLS is spitting straight up lies and propaganda. One friend actually did the math and the chances of the last year’s events on job reports happening by chance (assuming a 50/50 chance of revising upward or downward) are 0.00042%. (The answer to everything is the BLS is lying)
It’s also very clear the BLS is lying since we get jobs from ADP, an actual payroll company, too and they’ve showed a significant downward trend in new job creation while the BLS has shown the opposite.
If I have to pick which one I’m believing, I’ll take the private company that could get sued for printing false information over government propaganda. That is to say, don’t believe another BLS report from this administration and don’t trust that the economy is doing well…because it isn’t.
Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that's great... until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later. And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).
Does that sound like a healthy economy to you?