The Patriot Post® · The Real Story of the Jobs Report Revision
“Since Vice President Harris and I took office, our economy has created nearly 16 million jobs,” tweeted someone using the @POTUS handle on X. That was Tuesday, August 20. One day later, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) issued a massive correction, revising downward a year’s worth of “jobs created” numbers by a whopping 818,000. It was the largest revision in 15 years, and it marked one heck of an “oops!”
Maybe it’s just the Labor Department taking up Kamala Harris’s mantra: “What can be, unburdened by what has been.”
Kidding aside, the problem is simple but profound, as we noted yesterday in reporting that revision: As is the case with all such corrections, for every 10 people who’ve heard about the millions of jobs created under Joe Biden’s swell economy, only a small fraction of them will hear about this, er, correction.
Case in point is Biden’s own commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, just last night. Asked by ABC News correspondent Kayna Whitworth to comment on Donald Trump’s remarks about the revision, Raimondo initially deflected, saying, “When I hear that, first of all, I don’t believe it because I’ve never heard Donald Trump say anything truthful.”
Surprisingly, Whitworth didn’t let her get away with it, immediately asserting, “It is from the Bureau of Labor.”
A clearly flustered Raimondo then stuttered, “I’m not familiar with that.”
She might have been familiar with it if she had watched ABC News, which was the only network to report on the number — albeit for all of 19 seconds. Again, that proves the point that relatively few people hear about corrections.
Interpreting Raimondo as simply being ignorant also assumes that she’s telling the truth. However, it’s highly likely that, as a top economic official in the Biden administration, she did know about the report and hoped a Leftmedia hack would help her get away with deflecting to Trump.
Others find something even more sinister at play — a government effort to falsely inflate Biden/Harris success in order to help win the election. “It really isn’t a revision — it is a total lie,” Trump argued. “They wanted it to come out after the election, but somehow it got leaked. The Harris/Biden administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating jobs statutes to hide the true extent of the economic ruin that they have inflicted on America.”
The Leftmedia (and some in conservative media) will be all too happy to “fact-check” Trump’s claim, as if that’s the point instead of the fraudulent Biden/Harris economic record. No, it wasn’t a “leak,” and BLS didn’t get “caught.” BLS revisions are routine. Just don’t lose the forest for the trees: This was a major revision on a key plank of the Biden/Harris (and now Lyin’ Tim Walz) campaign.
We may never know if there was a cabal of left-wing deep-staters plotting to deceive America about jobs reports to help Democrats in power. But if you’ve been alive for the last eight years, that doesn’t sound so crazy, does it?
We do know that the revision will put pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates before the election, which would also help Harris.
Biden has been trumpeting the “millions of jobs created” line for years already, and the Leftmedia has gladly parroted him. He said it in his late-night convention rerun Monday, except, as USA Today’s transcript records, he misspoke and touted a “record 60 million new jobs.”
Joe Biden’s record is Kamala Harris’s record, and both of them are gaslighting about their economic “achievements,” which brings me to another key point.
We’ve noted many times that a large portion of the jobs created under the Biden/Harris administration, especially early on, were simply people going back to work after the pandemic lockdowns. Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs in 2020, though the V-shaped recovery had already begun that same year under Trump.
Biden loves to share a particular graph showing how impressive “his” jobs numbers are, but the pandemic makes for a significant asterisk. Even the Newsweek fact-checkers are on it. “At the start of his presidency, about 143 million Americans were in non-farm employment. As of July 2024, there are now 159 million employees. However, pre-pandemic employment was around 152 million.”
Ultimately, though, we can set aside arguments over what Mark Twain called “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The economy has less to do with what the stats show than how people feel. That’s why there have been so many media stories in recent years telling us that everything is awesome.
Both campaigns are hoping to paint a picture for voters. Trump says his record as president was one of historic economic prosperity, and he’ll bring that back if reelected. Harris promises to fix inflation (with Soviet price controls) and restore the middle class (with job-killing corporate tax hikes), implicitly denying that she’s been vice president for the last three and a half years.
According to a new survey, more people than ever are afraid of becoming unemployed in the next four months. Pair that with the massive revision in jobs numbers and ask yourself: Does it feel like the Biden/Harris economic plan is working? Or would more Americans prefer the prosperity of 2017-2019?