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August 10, 2022 - The latest employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics looks absolutely great, right up until the start to go through it. According to the BLS data, the nation added roughly 525,000 new jobs. But a closer look tells a much different story. It's a story about people struggling to keep up financially. And it's a story about people having to take on second jobs just to make ends meet.
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If you saw any of the government announcements about the report, then you would have thought that everything going on in the economy was hunky dory. The White House touted the report as if the economy was on steroids... and why wouldn't they. After all, the economic news for this administration has run the gamut from bad to abysmal. They are looking for any shred of light at the end of the economic tunnel the country is in, and they want to hang on to that. Unfortunately, they picked the wrong report. ZeroHedge had a great, but very technical, analysis of this issue. So we'll break it down here.
Their analysis compared the BLS report to other BLS data known as the Household Survey. That survey takes into account layoffs. Their conclusion was that there were actually only 179,000 new jobs added. The expectation had been 250,000 new jobs, and they were well short of that.
As bad as that sounds, it gets worse. Comparing the standard BLS payroll data to the Household Survey going back to march, ZeroHedge concluded that the economy has actually shed close to 250,000 full and part time jobs.
Looking at June data alone, they concluded that the economy shed 71,000 full time jobs that month, but replaced them with 348,000 part time jobs that paid considerably less. In other words, average Americans at losing their full-time jobs and being forced to take multiple hourly jobs just to keep their heads above water.
If all of that isn't enough to make you doubt the government's spin on the economy, then consider this. Credit card debt jumped by $46 Billion in the second quarter of this year. That's the largest jump in 20 years and it indicates that consumers are turning to credit because they can't afford to pay for the goods and services they need with their job earnings.
Any way you slice it, the economy is now a stinking pile of feces. And there is no amount of lipstick that the White House, the FED or the Treasury Department can put on it to make it anything other than it is. For the government to continue to scream that the economy is doing great is really nothing more than wishful thinking. It's a display of just exactly how incompetent the people supposedly running the economy are.
by Jim Malmberg
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