Job growth was far slower in the past year than the federal government originally announced. 

New government data revisions reveal that the jobs market is weaker than the administration has claimed, undercutting the notion that Bidenomics is a jobs engine.

What happened

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its annual review of employment data and found that there were fewer jobs in March of this year compared to the same time last year than was reported.

That averages out to 68,500 fewer jobs each month.

Here’s a look at industries suffering the biggest losses:

  • Professional and business services industry (-358,000)
  • Leisure and hospitality (-150,000) 
  • Manufacturing (-115,000)
  • Trade and transportation (-104,000)
  • Information industry (-68,000)

Apparently, the government has massively overstated the number of jobs it created each month. 

Not everyone is taking this news as a big deal. “This is really just a counting issue,” claimed Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, to CNN.

However, Peter Nayland Kust, one of my favorite data crunchers who in this All Facts Matter substack regularly points out the inaccuracy of BLS employment data each month, sounded an alarm:

If the average revision is ±0.1%, then this revision is five times the average! And the revision for total private employment is worse.

Kust then expounded on the disturbing implications of the government getting these numbers so wrong again:

The truly disturbing—actually terrifying—aspect of this is that we have yet more confirmation that the BLS does not know how to fix their broken reporting schemes. Every month they are presenting data that increasingly obviously flawed. They are presenting data which is simply wrong. Apparently they are aware of this, or at least are able to see it now and again during their benchmarking exercises.

…

Remember, this is the data the Fed uses to decide whether it wants to raise the federal funds rate or lower it. The BLS is telling us the Fed is using garbage data in their efforts to micromanage the economy.

That last point is important because the Federal Reserve Bank has used interest rate hikes to cool down the economy and fight inflation. Waiting too long to lower rates comes with its own peril, such as limiting economic growth.

The Fed has depended on various key data measures to decide how to respond to inflation, including unemployment data. If incorrect data paints a rosier picture of the labor market, the Fed could not act and jeopardize the economy.

Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration has claimed that the economy is rock solid, as evidenced by solid economic job growth. That is turning out to be false.

The BLS constantly revises employment data as it reconciles different sources of information. This time, the figures are so wildly different, which makes us question why and whether the data can be trusted in the future.

Bottom Line

Needless to say, Bidenomics has not been the jobs boom that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have claimed it is and these revised figures underscore that hard truth.