Congressman David Schweikert revealed the truth about job numbers after an update was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics which claimed the economy under outgoing President Joe Biden added 256,000 jobs in the month of December.
“As we transition to a new administration, the December jobs report provides an essential opportunity to assess the economic policies of the Biden administration and the challenges facing hardworking Americans,” stated Schweikert, Vice Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee.
“While the December data demonstrates strong employment growth, having increased 2.2 million in 2024, the report underscores persistent issues that demand immediate attention,” added Schweikert.
“Under the Biden administration, American families have faced unprecedented economic headwinds, including inflation rates that outpaced wage growth for much of the last four years. Policies prioritizing excessive spending and burdensome regulations have strained small businesses, stifled innovation, and eroded purchasing power. While there have been temporary gains in certain heavily subsidized sectors, the broader economic foundation remains unstable,” concluded an exasperated Schweikert.
In a post to X, the Joint Economic Committee Republicans summarized, “In December, employment rose by 256K, averaging a monthly gain of 186K in 2024. While these gains are notable, challenges remain: an unemployment rate above 4% for the past 8 months and a historically low labor force participation rate.”
In December, employment rose by 256K, averaging a monthly gain of 186K in 2024.
While these gains are notable, challenges remain: an unemployment rate above 4% for the past 8 months and a historically low labor force participation rate.
— Joint Economic Committee Republicans (@JECRepublicans) January 10, 2025
In his remarks Friday, Schweikert added, “It’s imperative that we prioritize policies which foster economic growth, encourage innovation, empower domestic businesses, and restore confidence in our markets.”
He added, “Reducing government overreach, prioritizing fiscal responsibility, and enacting tax reform that incentivize investment while rewarding hard work are the most crucial facets of restoring American prosperity.”
“I am committed to working with my colleagues to enact solutions that address these economic challenges and create a thriving future for all Americans. Together, we can ensure that 2025 is the beginning of a stronger, more resilient future for all Americans.”
Payroll employment rose by 2.2 million in 2024 (an average monthly gain of 186,000), with some industries growing more than others. pic.twitter.com/dzesehbhMG
— Joint Economic Committee Republicans (@JECRepublicans) January 10, 2025
The update from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is infamously subject to revision as well. This proved to be a factor that badly hurt the Biden administration and the Kamala Harris campaign in August 2024 when the BLS estimate of new jobs created between March of 2023 and March of 2024 was revised down by almost 818,000 or about 30%. The release was allegedly intended after November 5th but was leaked according to President-elect Donald Trump.
Rep. Jodey Arrington, Chairman of the House Budget Committee, observed at the time, “Based on more comprehensive data released from state unemployment tax records, the Biden Bureau of Labor Statistics acknowledges they were way off on the number of new jobs created between March of 2023 and March of 2024 by almost one million or 30%, which is five times their average margin of error. The economy is the top issue in this presidential race and the recent downwardly revised job numbers taken together with persistently high prices and interest rates bellies a much weaker Biden-Harris economy than we were led to believe.”
Accusations that the Biden White House deliberately inflated the jobs numbers abounded with President-elect Donald Trump addressing the revision directly calling it a “total lie,” and “a scandal.”
President Trump addresses report that Biden-Harris Labor Department inflated jobs numbers by 818,000 during speech in Asheboro, NC pic.twitter.com/mNyq6JJ3XL
Trump told supporters in Asheboro, NC, at the time, “The Harris-Biden Administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics to hid the true extent of the economic ruin that they’ve inflicted on America.”
Schweikert’s office provided a few highlights of the BLS report, noting that the outgoing legacy of the Biden administration will be marked by:
“Real wages failing to keep pace with inflation, leaving many families burdened with record-high levels of credit card debt and preventing the ability to grow savings.
A labor force participation rate that has struggled to recover to pre-pandemic levels, leaving millions of Americans sidelined from economic opportunities.
The failure to address workforce development, with an uneven rate of job openings compared to worker skills, leaving both manufacturing and construction industries with critical labor shortages.”
This analysis looks at President Trump’s first three years in office—2017, 2018 and 2019, the pre-COVID era—to get a more unbiased view of the policy impact of his approach.
In Trump’s first three years:
Trump extended economic growth to achieve the longest economic expansion in the history of the U.S.: 10.5 years.
To do this, Trump created 7.1 million full-time jobs in his first 3 years as president, the jobs that count: full-time jobs, in the pre-COVID era. This is more than an amazing feat because Trump only created 6.7 million total jobs. How did Trump increase full-time jobs by more than his total job increase? By making every job he created a full-time job, and, most importantly, converting 400,000 of Obama’s part-time jobs into full-time.
By comparison, Harris/Biden only created 1.0 million full-time jobs in the last two years, September 2022 to September 2024, the post-COVID era. Most of their job creation has been part-time jobs.
Trump created so many jobs that job openings exceeded the number of unemployed for the first time in history, not only exceeded but went on to double the number of unemployed.
The open job force was so strong under Trump’s first three years that he was stripping 160,000 people per month out of welfare for a total reduction of welfare recipients of 8.5 million, 19% of the total recipients.
The open job force was so strong that, for the first time ever, a million people left Social Security Disability and went from consuming Social Security tax dollars to paying into the system.
Trump pushed the bankruptcy date for the Social Security system back by years through welfare enrollment reduction and increased employment and wages.
Trump’s lowest unemployment rate of 3.5% was the lowest level since Eisenhower, just 0.1%, a tenth of a percent from its lowest level ever.
Trump set 12 all-time records for Black employment, pushing Black unemployment to its lowest level in recorded history, 5.3%, far below Obama’s lowest rate of 8.0%.
Trump reduced the personal income taxes for all families of four or more making $53,000 or less to zero. In the other 150+ countries of the world, such families are considered rich and pay tens of thousands in taxes. Economists have not begun to understand the full ramifications of this feat. In chess, it’s called checkmate. No other country can get the upper hand.
As a result, the wealth of the bottom 50% of the U.S. increased by $1.4 trillion under Trump. Under Obama’s last four years? 0.8 trillion
In a sane, rational world, Trump would have earned three economics Nobel prizes, setting records for trade, unemployment reduction, economic growth, and achieving economic equality. (That’s equality, not equity).
Trump’s strategy for his second term: the roaring 20s, where growth was 40% as compared to Obama’s 11%. The 1922 Fordney-McCumber tariffs of 40% were combined with a reduction of the personal income tax rate from 76% to 25% under Calvin Coolidge.
I am confident that Trump is eyeing a massive trade deal with China, just like Trump’s USMCA, which has shifted the trade balance of the world.
If Trump is successful at combining a modest and carefully designed broad tariff of 20% or less with equal or greater business tax rate reduction, we are likely to have the roaring 20s all over again. Hard to believe that the U.S. economy of $28 trillion could grow another 40% in the next four years but hold on to your hats.
John Huppenthal was the Arizona Superinterndent of Public Instruction from 2011-2015. Prior to this role, John served as a member of the Arizona State Senate and the Arizona House of Representatives. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Americans consistently voice their disapproval on the state of the economy in recent polls, largely because of the stratosphericcost of living. But apologists for the Biden administration point to the low unemployment rate of 3.9% in April as proof of the economy’s strength.
Yet this is a hollow talking point since the real unemployment rate is likely between 6.5 and 7.7%.
The unemployment rate is the percentage of people in the labor force who don’t have a job. That means the unemployment rate can change if either the number of people unemployed or the total size of the labor force changes.
The shocking reality is that somewhere between 4.7 million and 7 million people who aren’t working today are not included when calculating the unemployment rate. That artificially reduces the figure.
The reason these millions of Americans are uncounted began with the events of 2020.
When the government instituted draconian lockdowns across most of the economy in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, over 17 million people became unemployed, and another 8 million people immediately left the labor force.
As the economy slowly reopened across the country, millions of people began returning to work. That, of course, drove down the unemployment rate by reducing the number of unemployed people. Some of those who left the labor force also returned and eventually found jobs, further reducing the unemployment rate.
But there were also millions who left the labor market entirely and never returned. As such, they were no longer counted among the unemployed nor in the labor force. This pushed the unemployment rate down even more.
If those millions of people were to suddenly look for work again, it would greatly increase the labor force, but it would also increase the unemployment rate, at least until those job-seekers found work.
Official government data point to just how many workers are missing from the labor market today. Several metrics show a large gap between their current reading and their pre-pandemic trends. These include the employment level, the number of non-farm payrolls, the employment-to-population ratio and those not in the labor force.
The gap is between 4.7 million and 7 million people, all of whom are not working but are excluded from the unemployment rolls. If they were still counted as jobless members of the labor force, the unemployment rate would jump to between 6.5% and 7.7%.
The latter figure is almost twice the official unemployment rate. Even 6.5% would represent a significant spike.
Looking only at the unemployment rate can give a distorted view of the labor market. If unemployed people are looking for work and then get jobs, that causes the unemployment rate to fall. But, if those same people give up looking for work and leave the labor force, it has precisely the same effect on this metric.
Using additional data provides a better gauge of the labor market’s health and workers’ jobs satisfaction. Real, or inflation-adjusted, earnings are a good example—and they have plummeted.
While the average American worker’s weekly paycheck has increased $147 from January 2021 through April 2024, those earnings buy $47 less because prices have risen so much faster than incomes.
This has caused many Americans to work extra hours or pick up a second job. Among renters, more than one-fifth of them have taken on another job in order to pay their rent on time in the last few months.
That’s noteworthy because whenever someone is hired, whether it’s that person’s first or fourth job, it’s still counted as an additional payroll in the government’s monthly job statistics. With millions of Americans picking up additional work to try and make ends meet for their families, the number of jobs has risen much faster than the number of people employed.
Simply touting a low unemployment rate provides a view of the labor market that is at best incomplete and at worst deceptive. A comprehensive view of economic conditions for the working class shows why they are so unhappy: inflation has made it impossible for them to get ahead, no matter how many jobs they work.
E.J. Antoni is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation, public finance economist and the Richard F. Aster Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and a senior fellow at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
Friday’s jobs report is not the home run that Democrats and the mainstream media claim. In their rush to champion topline job creation, they overlook how the jobs report is actually made up of two surveys. And the other doesn’t look so good, though it’s far more reflective of the economic reality facing ordinary Americans and small businesses.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys business establishments and households each month to generate its report on labor market conditions. The establishment survey of payrolls produces the monthly job creation number the media is quick to champion. Yet even the BLS admits the household survey is “more expansive” because it also measures self-employed workers and those employed privately in households. This survey produces the unemployment rate.
For years, these surveys have tracked each other in terms of employment growth, as you’d expect. However, beginning in mid-2022, they began to diverge, with the payroll survey showing far more job creation than the household survey. Over the last year, the payroll survey finds 2.9 million jobs have been created, while the household survey reveals only 1.1 million new jobs.
In stark contrast to the 353,000 jobs created in the payroll survey, the household survey shows employment actually declined by 31,000 last month. Full-time jobs declined by 63,000. That’s a far cry from today’s headlines about a booming economy.
These household survey numbers are in line with other anecdotal and empirical data. On Thursday, the job placement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas reported a historic 82,300 layoffs in January. This week, UPS announced 12,000 layoffs. Major companies such as Zerox, Spotify, and Hasbro have recently laid off at least 15% of their workforce. There’s also a jobs bloodbath currently occurring in the media sector.
On Wednesday, ADP reported that only 107,000 private-sector jobs were created in January.
There are other technical problems with the jobs report. Seasonal adjustments and annual revisions to population estimates have made January jobs reports notoriously untrustworthy. I can’t understand why we need opaque “seasonal adjustments” to the job numbers at all. Americans are smart enough to understand that job creation will be higher in some months and lower in others for seasonal reasons. We don’t need green eyeshades smoothing them for us.
Bipartisan tax cut legislation passed this week in the House of Representatives can turbocharge job creation in both surveys in the months ahead. The legislation, brokered by House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO), extends key tax cuts passed as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, making it easier for small businesses to invest, expand, and hire.
This legislation is overwhelmingly supported by Main Street, with small businesses calling the immediate expensing provision “a game-changer.” The Senate should quickly pass this legislation and send it to President Biden’s desk to be signed into law.
In the meantime, let’s see if the payroll and household surveys continue to diverge in the jobs reports ahead. If they do, it will be more confirmation that the economy is not out of the woods yet.
Alfredo Ortiz is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, president and CEO of Job Creators Network, author of “The Real Race Revolutionaries,” and co-host of the Main Street Matters podcast.
Suddenly America is facing a severe structural labor shortage. We all feel it, whether we’re trying for reservations at a restaurant that has reduced hours, seeking handyman help, or just trying to get somebody to answer the dang phone.
Nurses and teachers are in short supply. Employers report at least two job openings for each job seeker. Beyond personal inconvenience, when workers produce fewer services and goods for dollars to chase, prices go up and inflation results.
You can partly blame it on COVID. Politicians shut down much of the economy, then shoved trillions of dollars in “COVID relief funds” to those forced not to work.
Unfortunately, the spigot was never fully closed, and many Americans found that sleeping in agreed with them. Europe, Canada, and Japan all rebounded while the U.S. was left with about one million fewer workers.
Adding to the problem, the youth anti-work movement continues to grow. Work is for suckers and victims. Social media outlets praise workers for quitting their jobs. Others are lionized for being “quiet quitters,” idlers who do the least work possible while still collecting a paycheck.
The inspiration for the anti-work cult traces back to the Marxist anti-capitalist movement, a long-time foe of the American work tradition. Their thesis is that capitalist employment is exploitive and therefore, not working is virtuous.
It coincidentally turns out that, for many Americans, government policy has significantly disincentivized work. And for these people, working harder is no longer the way to get ahead.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Phil Gramm and John Early explain how this effect is commonly underestimated because of the way income is reported by the federal government. The Census Bureau, inexplicably, does not treat most transfer payments as income.
That’s important because government transfer payments to the bottom 20% of households, income-wise, ballooned by 269% between 1967 and 2017 while the middle 20% realized only a 154% increase in their after tax income.
The results were staggering. In 2017, the bottom 20% of households had $6,941 in “income” and only 36% of working age people actually worked. However, after the transfer payments and taxes are included, as they should be, their total income was $48,806.
The second to the bottom quintile had 85% employment and an average total income of $50,492, actually less than a $2,000 difference from the lowest group. The middle quintile was 92% employed and earned $66,453, but after taxes and transfers that shrank to $61,350, merely 26% more than the bottom quintile.
But wait, there’s more. Family units are smaller in the lowest quintile than the others. Per capita, the adjusted net income was actually $33,653 in the lowest quintile, $29,497 in the next lowest, and $32,754 in the middle.
Sorry for all the numbers, but they tell an important story. For 60% of Americans, working much harder and even earning more money produced a negligible net benefit. Means-tested government programs were just as lucrative. It’s not hard to understand why the percentage of working age people in the lowest quintile who were employed fell from 68% in 1967 to 36% in 2017.
Policymakers seem to believe that incentives don’t matter, but they do. People who choose not to work and live off the labor of others earn some understandable resentment, but they’re not acting irrationally under the circumstance. The heart of the problem is their enablers in Big Government who, for their own political purposes, created this perverse system.
It’s often forgotten that in the 1990s, governments established work requirements for many means-tested benefits. “Workfare” was a generational policy success. In spite of hysterical warnings that “children would starve in the streets,” poverty rates dropped as employment increased.
Unfortunately, the advocates for workfare declared victory and moved on. But welfare bureaucrats stayed put, patiently reestablishing their vision of welfare without requirements. So now poverty is supported rather than reduced. And Arizona was among the states that quietly removed the work requirements for Medicaid and other welfare programs.
But government handouts that replace labor don’t work. They erode self-reliance, worker pride, and self-sufficiency. They threaten our shared prosperity. And most of all, they undermine American values.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
