Remember how President Joe Biden — just last week, mind you — touted the U.S. gaining 517,000 new jobs for the month of January? Who wouldn’t promote that kind of number? There’s only one problem.
That number didn’t include the number of seasonal jobs lost following New Year’s.
While career politicians have no idea what it’s like to take whatever job you can get in a weak market, seasonal jobs — created by the quadfecta of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s — provide at least a temporary income for millions of Americans.
The Cato Institute reported recently that if the Biden regime had included the number of seasonal jobs lost at the beginning of January, the jobs number would be quite different.
As Alan Reynolds noted for the Cato Institute:
With a State of the Union address coming up, nobody could blame President Joe Biden if he mentions January’s supposedly huge 517,000 gain in seasonally adjusted payrolls rather than the actual unadjusted 2,505,000 loss.[…]
Everyone knows that holiday workers are always laid‐ off in January, sometimes less than usual. A milder winter can also make January job losses look milder. In such cases (including January last year) seasonal adjustment makes huge jobs losses look like large gains on paper.
But seasonal adjustment is no paycheck.
That’s right. If the Biden regime had bothered to include the jobs number without the “seasonal adjustment,” our economy actually lost over 2.5 million jobs in January.
Related: What's Joe Accomplished In Two Years? Americans Say, Not Much
Economic Advisor Rich Dvorak posted a screenshot of the seasonal job loss on a graph from Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), which is run by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
The Not Seasonally Adjusted print for monthly change in Nonfarm Payrolls was -2.5 million jobs. That means the headline +517K employment gain reported in January was driven entirely by a +3 million seasonal adjustment. pic.twitter.com/4yEdctxpAO
— Rich Dvorak (@RichDvorakFX) February 3, 2023
That’s a far cry from the number foisted upon the American people to give them some false sense of security, which most probably don’t believe considering all they have to do to know how things are going economically is to shop…well, anywhere.
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Joe Biden once again repeated the false claim that the national deficit has gone down under his watch.
— MRCTV (@mrctv) February 8, 2023
That's a lie. See the facts here: https://t.co/2LxmGq2YB5 pic.twitter.com/qtWAVYg6O4