Full-time fumble: ‘Bidenomics’ masks the true employment picture

Joe Biden at his State of the Union address in March boasted his administration has created 15 million new jobs since January 2021. Not exactly. When you delve into the math, not only is the number highly misleading, but it turns out that new jobs consist largely of part-time employment, nebulous self-employment, and government workers. And among native-born citizens, the job market is in a recession.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes two jobs reports: the “Establishment Survey” and the “Household Survey.” The Establishment Survey samples actual employers and shows the growth in non-farm payroll jobs (as well as a breakdown by specific industry), while the Household Survey samples individual households and measures broad census data, such as total number of employment-age population, size of the labor force, the U3 unemployment rate, and total number of employed and unemployed.

Biden’s talking point about job creation is the ultimate self-indictment.

Getting a precise picture of U.S. employment requires conflating data from both surveys. Typically, the data complement each other. But in recent years the numbers have diverged. For example, the Establishment Survey shows about 3 million additional people employed since January 2021. This may be due in part because the employer-based survey picks up more illegal aliens than the survey of households.

The White House obviously prefers to tout the Establishment Survey’s figure. In any event, the reality is Biden has a much worse record of job creation than Donald Trump. And that’s before we delve into the nature of these new jobs.

Not even close to 15 million

When COVID-19 shut down the world in March 2020, employment cratered. It took well over a year to come back from the lockdowns and merely get back to par with the pre-COVID baseline in February 2020. As such, the only fair comparison for Biden to make is to measure the number of employed individuals today compared to February 2020.

Viewed that way, we don’t have 15 million new jobs — we have just 5.5 million jobs created between January 2021 and February of this year, according to the Establishment Survey, and just 2.3 million according to the Household Survey.

Let’s go with the more impressive 5.5 million figure, even though the Philadelphia Federal Reserve believes it’s overstated.

Although 5.5 million still sounds meaningful, remember the country is constantly growing. Since February 2020, the civilian non-institutional population of working-age residents grew by 8.1 million. So job growth has not kept pace with population growth, especially judging from the Household Survey. This is why the civilian labor force participation rate is down from 63.3% ahead of the lockdowns to 62.5% today. When factoring in population growth, in fact, we find an additional 729,000 unemployed individuals today.

Put another way, 611 of every 1,000 Americans of employment age were working before COVID compared to 601 today. Also, an additional 5 million people are no longer in the labor force but of working age, which means that for whatever reason they gave up on the job market. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell explains these missing workers are the result of “excess retirements.”

In short, we have a much larger population without jobs than before COVID.

Part-time and multiple jobs

Compared to the same period under Trump, the current labor market today is terrible. After 37 months into Trump’s tenure, the Establishment Survey shows 6.7 million jobs created.

But here’s the kicker: The population only grew by 5.6 million, which means job growth under Trump outpaced population growth by 20%. Under Biden, population growth has outpaced job growth by 47% — or 252%, going by the Household Survey. Hence, by virtue of population growth alone, we have gone backward in the job market since COVID.

It gets worse. As I’ve noted before, we have been losing full-time jobs. All the net job growth has come from part-time employment. In total, 3.4 million part-time jobs have been added since January 2021, with 1.7 million just over the past nine months.

This isn’t a story of a growing economy of go-getters seeking upward mobility. These are people taking second and third jobs just to afford a basic standard of living. In fact, the number of those holding multiple jobs has surged by 1.6 million since Biden took office. That’s why the Establishment Survey shows greater job creation: It is double-counting the increasing number of employed people with more than one job.

Also, many of the new jobs are classified as self-employed. Thanks to tax law changes, that now includes a number of Uber or Lyft drivers. Are record numbers of people starting their own businesses? Not really. These are unemployed and underemployed people taking nebulous jobs or struggling workers forced to take a second gig to tread water.

Meanwhile, thanks to the endless “revisions” of the employment data, full-time jobs are now down 1.8 million since June of last year.

In short, the top-line job-growth numbers are akin to an increase in a white blood cell count of a sick patient — an ominous sign, not a sign of good health.

Inflation-driven ‘growth’

A large share of the remaining (lethargic) full-time job creation has been fueled by government itself. Over the past year, government employment has doubled the growth rate of private sector work. Government jobs have comprosed between 21% and 58% of all job creation in the past six employment surveys.

It takes no skill or ingenuity to print trillions of dollars and create phantom jobs, while saddling consumers with the consequences.

This is perhaps one reason why all the job creation has been concentrated in just 15% of U.S. counties:

Americans need not apply?

Perhaps the most shocking data point that nukes the Biden administration’s entire job growth narrative is the drop in Since October 2019, native-born U.S. workers have actually lost 1.4 million jobs. So where is the job growth? Over the same period, foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs.

In fact, there has not been a month of net job creation for native-born workers since July 2018.

This could very well be why there are a few million jobs detected by the Establishment Survey but not the Household Survey. It would also not be surprising if many of these jobs were temporary or part-time.

Biden’s talking point about job creation is the ultimate self-indictment. Even during an official period of low unemployment, we have a permanently weak economy where no real full-time jobs are being created to keep up with the population growth. If this is what a job boom looks like, just wait until the official recession hits.