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The Phony Job Numbers Begin to Reverse

By April 5, 2023Commentary

I have mentioned in a series of posts that the Biden administration has issued a series of misleading labor market reports painting a rosier picture of employment than actually exists.  The underlying ability to do this is created by using survey data which currently has a response rate of 30%, allowing for lots of room to just make up whatever estimate you want to fill in the blanks.  So sure enough yesterday the latest “jobs, openings and labor turnover” results were released, with a massive downward adjustment of over a million supposed job openings.  The notion that employers have multiple jobs available for every person looking for work is just false.  Now we do have a problem with many people not even trying to look for work and being happy to scrounge off of taxpayers, but the truth about the labor market appears to be that companies are cutting back and/or not actually trying to fill supposedly open positions.  At some point Congress needs to investigate the process by which the Bureau of Labor Statistics is generating these reports and figure out how to prevent political manipulation, which clearly has been occurring.  (ZH Post)

Join the discussion 4 Comments

  • Nathan says:

    Indeed the job posting company is set to layoff 2200 employees. I am guessing they have been feeling the fake job posting numbers for awhile.

  • Dallas - CPA name withheld for confidentiality says:

    30% rate is partly due to the inclusion business entities that typically dont have payroll . I have 3 clients, that are non-operating businesses, thus no employees that are included in the quarterly census data

    • Kevin Roche says:

      in this case, they separate out the detailed findings by business size, and you have to have some employees, but the issue is the trend in response rate, which has declined by a phenonmenal amount in the last decade. Without ascertaining potential differences in which firms stopped responding, you have all kinds of confounding and bias possibilities. And the notion that you are estimating or making up most of the responses is just not good. Thinks like unemployment comp tax filings are more accurate indicators of some employment trends, but it is tricky to get right

  • Don says:

    I can’t believe Congress will investigate anything. This is so terrible. I truly feel abandoned by this administration

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