An economist skewered the leftist media for mindlessly propping up the Biden-Harris job market as the epitome of success now that it was revealed that the government overestimated job growth by nearly 1 million jobs.
The Biden-Harris administration’s overestimation was a whopping 818,000 jobs, equal to about 30 percent of the reported jobs growth in the 12-month period ending March 2024. The revision obliterates much of the optimism about how legendary the Biden-Harris job market supposedly was. The New York Times blathered in a June 2024 analysis piece about Biden having a “historically strong job market.” The Times economic columnist Paul Krugman even bleated an absurd 2023 notion that Biden was “creating the best job market in a generation.” Forbes also celebrated the supposed “Record-Breaking Accomplishments On Jobs” under Biden in a June 7, 2024 item.
In an exclusive interview The Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni rebuked how “[t]he talking heads who parroted the business headlines and never bothered to look under the hood of these jobs reports fundamentally failed in their role as journalists.”
As Antoni pointed out, many journalists just took the headline Biden numbers on jobs hook, line and sinker and fawned over them to the public without ever questioning their veracity.
“There was no skepticism, no scrutiny, and no verification of the facts. They simply and obediently repeated the administration’s talking points,” Antoni continued. For example, over at Politico in February 2024, the leftist outlet used the so-called “strong job market” to haphazardly celebrate “Biden’s ‘holy grail’ economy.” The outlet beamed how “[t]he blowout job growth in January adds fuel to President Joe Biden’s pitch to voters that the economy is solidly recovering under his watch.” But in fact, as Antoni pointed out, “The jobs market is, at best, anemic.”
There “are fewer native-born Americans working today than before the pandemic,” Antoni noted. Worse still is that the economy is “hemorrhaging full-time jobs and only adding part-time ones on net. More people are working multiple jobs to make ends meet. Earnings growth hasn’t kept up with inflation. Over 5 million Americans are still missing from the labor force compared to pre-pandemic,” Antoni stated. Antoni concluded by posing a blunt question to the talking heads in the media, “Where is the evidence of a robust labor market?”
Antoni also told MRC that there’s been consistent issues in the BLS’s data that has been evident at least since the year 2022 that have gone unaddressed:
[S]tatistical problems first became evident in the Spring of 2022 and the Labor Department has done nothing to address those issues. They owe Congress, and the American people, an explanation on what is wrong with their models and methodology, and why nothing has been done to fix it. If the problem was known within the Labor Department—and that’s likely given how many outside the department raised the issue—then it was effectively a sin of omission.
If there was a “sin of omission” on the Biden-Harris administration’s part regarding its methodology for tallying job growth, the media have done virtually nothing to investigate it.
On the question of whether a recession is on the horizon for the U.S. economy, Antoni stated that it is very likely that we have already entered one this month. “One difficulty in evaluating the onset of a downturn is the extent to which government debt is fueling GDP growth. You can put off a technical recession for a very long time if you’re willing to borrow enough money, but that doesn’t end well,” Antoni analyzed.
The future — in a nutshell — is grim, Antoni summarized. In fact, “2025 is shaping up to be a very rough year, even if many of the Biden-Harris era policies are reversed,” he continued.
Antoni pointed to a litany of government actions that have shackled the American economy into an even more precarious set of economic circumstances than what citizens have already endured for the past few years:
The Fed has blown asset bubbles across the economy, commercial real estate is imploding, inflation still isn’t dead, and the consumer is drowning in debt. So is the federal government for that matter. The next president—whoever he is—will have a heck of a fight on his hands trying to keep this economy afloat. We’re sitting on quite a few ticking time bombs.
Will the narcissistic media that have spent much of Biden and Harris’s term in office casting them as some sort of economic savants take their massive “L” on the job market and change course? Don’t bet on it.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News (818-460-7477), CBS News (212-975-3247) and NBC News (212- 664-6192) and demand they report honestly on the disastrous Biden economy.
