In an announcement Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics presented “revised” payroll numbers that acknowledge job growth has been much weaker than previously reported through much of 2024.
How much weaker? The federal agency subtracted 818,000 jobs from the number of new jobs that were supposedly created through the first quarter of the year. Those figures average out to 68,000 fewer jobs per month than previously claimed by the federal government, according to a related Fox Business story.
The revised job growth figures come just weeks after a July jobs report said national unemployment had jumped to 4.3%.
EJ Antoni, a financial policy expert at The Heritage Foundation, tells AFN he was not surprised at the revised numbers because he has been writing about the federal government's questionable statistics for much of the year.
An article published July 19, for example, questioned promising job numbers because one-third of them are federal government jobs. The article also says “revised” figures from April and May dropped the figure of new jobs by almost 100,000.
A more recent Antoni article, published August 8, seemed to predict the current job revision. He describes how Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers from late 2023, once revised, cut the number of new jobs in 2023 in half.
Even though much of the public doesn’t follow job statistics closely, Antoni says people are figuring out why the numbers look much rosier than real life.
“I think it helps really solve the mystery behind why so many people have been so down on this economy despite all these great jobs headlines that you see in the business news,” he tells AFN. “It's because the headlines were wrong."
Biden bragged Monday about 'record' jobs
The newest job numbers revision also comes right in the middle of the Democratic National Convention, where the “economy” was mentioned six times Tuesday night by the main DNC speakers. Inflation was mentioned only once but Donald Trump was mentioned 24 times, according to Fox News.
In his late-night speech Monday night, President Biden angrily bragged about a “record 16 million jobs” and “record small business growth” during his 3 ½ years in the White House.
Alfredo Ortiz, CEO of small business advocate Job Creators Network, tells AFN the “downward revision” of job creation mirrors what his organization has heard from business owners.
“The labor market is far weaker than topline numbers suggest and has been dominated by government and quasi-government jobs," he says.
The reality in the labor market, he adds, is that businesses “can't withstand another four years of bad Biden-Harris policies.”
