The Employment Number Games Continue–(Biden Department of Labor lies)

 Biden Department of Labor has found that payrolls exceeded expectations! And, of course, beating expectations is important to the stock market and the Fed. To say that the Biden administration’s current “winning” streak is unprecedented is an understatement:

 I have posted repeatedly about the Biden administration’s constant issuance of false initial employment-related numbers, followed by extensive downward revisions in succeeding months.  But since only the initial reports get any attention from the media, all the public sees are the initial lies, not the later corrections.  So we got the April report today from the Bureau of Laborious Lies and miracle of miracles, once again the number of new jobs exceeded expectations by about 50,000; 235,000 versus 185,000 expected.  Hmmm, but then March’s initial numbers were revised down by 61,000 jobs and February’s by 78,000.  January had already been revised downward.  You see the pattern.   So the revisions were far more than the supposed over-expectation number for April, which will inevitably be revised down in future months.

Also of interest is the exceptionally large confidence intervals for the two surveys used for the labor force report.  The business establishment report has a confidence interval of 130,000 jobs at typical statistical significance confidence levels, which is mammoth.  So April could be 105,000 jobs or 365,000 jobs.  Yet somehow the

An Ominous Jobs Report

 

While the primary pieces of the report seem sound, a closer look at some of the underlying trends paints a far less rosy picture.

The real answer: unleash the American economy. Abandon the climate cult. Drill. Frack. Burn coal. Embrace nuclear. Put people to work instead of paying ‘em to stay home. Hire & reward the best people on merit instead of race. Fire federal regulators who cause more harm than good. https://t.co/oUUco0Qj4g

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) March 29, 2023

Just in case you were wondering about the economy

Data Show Poorest Americans Are Benefiting Most from Strong Economy

Once Again, Trump’s Economy Beats the ‘Experts’

It wasn’t long ago that economists were warning that President Trump’s government shutdown — which extended into late January — would wreak havoc on an already struggling economy, especially in the first quarter of the year....

And AP reported in the first week of January that: “Analysts had already expected the economy to slow this year as a boost from tax cuts and increased government spending last year begins to wane. But the longer the shutdown persists, the more it could erode consumer and business confidence, compounding troubles for an economy that was already slowing.”...

So what are these experts saying now that GDP growth accelerated to a startling 3.2% in the first three months of the year?

More poo pooing as the flying monkeys make their fearless forecasts.

Stupid Midwesterners Don’t Understand AOC’s Job-Killing Joy

Amazon was about to deliver thousands of new jobs to New Yorkers, and billions of dollars in tax revenue to the city’s coffers — but don’t you worry, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proudly helped put a stop to all that. In flyover country, we’re a bit confused about why someone might not actually want all those jobs and all those billions for their constituents …

Here’s the thing about the Postmodern Left: They don’t give a damn about jobs, wages, or really even any particular government program or Green New Deal or Five-Year Plan, or whatever it is they’re peddling this week. They’re just cynically cashing in on the system they pretend to disparage and despise. (Actually, the despisement is real.)

AOC is an excellent case in point. She enjoyed a privileged upbringing, was awarded a prestigious credential (I refuse to say she “earned a degree”) by a famous school, enjoyed her mid-20s living the bohemian life, saw her chance to become famous — and leapt at it at once.

Courtesy of the voters of her district, AOC has a good-paying job, one with fewer actual responsibilities than her prior bartending gig. Now that she’s on board the Fame Train, she might never have to provide an honest service or produce a useful product for the rest of her life.

…

Multiply this hundreds (at least) of times, with various “progressive” men and woman holding office around the country, and the result is the — dare I say it? — deplorable, irredeemable state of our local, state, and federal governments.

Sarah Hoyt: "The Left Believes in Trickle-Up Poverty"

How many decades now has the left been screaming about “trickle-down economics” and how the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, or that giving tax breaks allows people to invest and thereby creates more jobs. is just “wrong, wrong, wrong, miles and miles of wrongitude?”

Thirty or so?

In fact, their mad infatuation with "democratic socialism" is part of this shrieking and this mindset. (Hello Occasio-Cortex Occasional Cortex.) And it's mind-bogglingly stupid as well as evil.

I didn't realize how much of both it is until a recent Facebook discussion in which a leftist got... vocal and defended trickle-up poverty.

Okay, they’re – probably, though I wouldn’t bet on all of them – not aware that this is their preferred pathway and end result. But it is.

The discussion was about charter schools funded by government, i.e., tax money.

The argument against them was the same it’s always been: it privileges a few kids, while the rest remain mired in failing government schools. I’d heard it a million times. I’d just never actually stepped back and taken a look at how ridiculous that is.

Look, there is no comment about the charters costing more (they usually don’t) and no argument about the fact that government schools are failing.

There is just this outraged screeching that not every kid can get the same thing. Which is kind of amazing when you think about it. Presented with a dysfunctional school system that has resisted every attempt at reform and that turns out increasingly worse-educated children every year, the outrage is not that we aren’t coming up with enough ways for children to escape it, but that one of the pathways for escape should be blocked because not every child can leave.

The same arguments are adduced against homeschooling (when the advocates of government scholastic prisons aren’t shrieking that homeschooled children are maladjusted and ignorant) because – and this is almost a verbatim quote from that Facebook discussion – a divorced mother of two who is making minimum wage can’t give them an appropriate education at home.

Uh? What?

So, what you’re saying is that if you can’t rescue everyone from, say, a house fire or the path of a hurricane, you should shoot those trying to escape so that everyone can die?

Thinking about it, I realized this is exactly how the left thinks about everything, even – or perhaps particularly – economics. ...

Or to put it another way, the left would rather we all starve in the dark than that someone light a stove and make some food.

U.S. workers see fastest wage growth in a decade, outpacing inflation

Although it kills the Washington Post to say it:

"U.S. workers are seeing the largest nominal wage increase in a decade, the Labor Department reported Wednesday, as companies compete harder for employees than they did in recent years."

Poverty in the U.S. Was Plummeting—Until Lyndon Johnson Declared War On It

During the 20 years before the War on Poverty was funded, the portion of the nation living in poverty had dropped to 14.7% from 32.1%. Since 1966, the first year with a significant increase in antipoverty spending, the poverty rate reported by the Census Bureau has been virtually unchanged…

Simple math shows how poor people get trapped in poverty:

The potential sum of welfare benefits can reach $47,894 annually for single-parent households and $41,237 for two-parent households. Welfare benefits will be available to some households earning as much as $74,880 annually… A single mom has the most resources available to her family when she works full time at a wage of $8.25 to $12 an hour. Disturbingly, taking a pay increase to $18 an hour can leave her with about one-third fewer total resources (net income and government benefits). In order to make work “pay” again, she would need an hourly wage of $38 to mitigate the impact of lost benefits and higher taxes.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Thousands line up for zero-down-payment, subprime mortgages.

Over 100 companies giving 'Trump Bonuses' after tax victory, 'tsunami building'

And this is before the lower deductions on your pay kick in.  The Democrats are going to hate this.

It's the end of the tsunami election of 2018 they were counting on.

That, plus a reduced federal workforce.

DRUDGE economic round-up.

STOCKS SET NEW RECORDS...

Fed Govt Cut 16,000 Jobs in '17...

+196,000 in Manufacturing...

BLACK UNEMPLOYMENT RECORD LOW...

Six-figure construction jobs UNFILLED...

Food stamp recipients down 2 MILLION...

Philippe Reines Nervous Millenials Will Love Tax Cuts...

POLL: TRUMP HITS 6 MONTH HIGH...

Does it still surprise you that the press doesn't tell yoiu the good news comping out of the Trump Presidency?

When you're in the business of destroying Hitler, nothing gets in the way.

Glen Dale, W. Va. — Bad news travels fast. Good news, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to travel at all.

Last weekend in Beijing, as part of his 12-day trip to Asia, President Trump announced that the US and China had signed an $83.7 billion memorandum of understanding to create a number of petrochemical projects in West Virginia over the next 20 years.

If the agreement holds tight, it is an economic game changer for the state.

And yet, speaking to the locals here, you wouldn’t even know it had happened.

“I am surprised I heard nothing about it on the national news, nor in my local paper and newscasts,” said Jerald Stephens, 67, a West Virginia native and union rep, who has been a keen observer of local politics for as long as he can remember.

Weird, huh?

"... all of the jobs being created are very poor-quality and poor-paying."

Job growth was decent in July — the fourth straight month of just-OK results on that front, which probably led to high fives at the White House.

But there’s something unusual in the numbers.

And when I tell you what it is, you’ll understand that voter dislike of Hillary Clinton and the Russian interference in the election had little to do with why Donald Trump became president.

The election turned on the amount of money voters had in their pockets.

The latest revised figures from the Commerce Department showed that take-home pay and disposable income in the US haven’t nearly kept up with the job growth figures — and the trend began well before Trump took office.

...

In addition to poor increases in disposable income, savers also can’t count on income from bank deposits. So that, too, is slowing spending.

Washington originally said that disposable income grew at 1.1 percent annually in the first three months of Trump’s presidency. Now it says growth was only 0.20 percent on an annual basis.

And disposable income in the second quarter, which just ended, looks like it grew at just 0.51 percent annually.

The bottom line? Go ahead and cheer the July job numbers if you want, but in no way do they square with disposable income figures.

Either the job figures or the disposable income numbers are wrong. Or — and this is what many people believe — all of the jobs being created are very poor-quality and poor-paying.

All those "Help Wanted" signs in store windows are for entry-level, low wage jobs like restaurant workers or shop clerks. High paying manufacturing jobs are still in the future.

Our Miserable 21st Century

Ever wonder how the poor get all those drugs, legally, with which they are killing themselves?

But how did so many millions of un-working men, whose incomes are limited, manage en masse to afford a constant supply of pain medication? Oxycontin is not cheap. As Dreamland carefully explains, one main mechanism today has been the welfare state: more specifically, Medicaid, Uncle Sam’s means-tested health-benefits program. Here is how it works (we are with Quinones in Portsmouth, Ohio):

[The Medicaid card] pays for medicine—whatever pills a doctor deems that the insured patient needs. Among those who receive Medicaid cards are people on state welfare or on a federal disability program known as SSI. . . . If you could get a prescription from a willing doctor—and Portsmouth had plenty of them—Medicaid health-insurance cards paid for that prescription every month. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay, therefore, addicts got pills priced at thousands of dollars, with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars on the street.

In 21st-century America, “dependence on government” has thus come to take on an entirely new meaning.

Why Trump won

Thus the bittersweet reality of life for real Americans in the early 21st century: Even though the American economy still remains the world’s unrivaled engine of wealth generation, those outside the bubble may have less of a shot at the American Dream than has been the case for decades, maybe generations—possibly even since the Great Depression.

IV

The funny thing is, people inside the bubble are forever talking about “economic inequality,” that wonderful seminar construct, and forever virtue-signaling about how personally opposed they are to it. By contrast, “economic insecurity” is akin to a phrase from an unknown language. But if we were somehow to find a “Google Translate” function for communicating from real America into the bubble, an important message might be conveyed:

The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does. The Great American Escalator is broken—and it badly needs to be fixed.

With the election of 2016, Americans within the bubble finally learned that the 21st century has gotten off to a very bad start in America. Welcome to the reality. We have a lot of work to do together to turn this around.

Stock Market Gained $2T in Wealth Since Trump Elected

"This could be the start of a big bull market rally," Moore said on Risk & Reward, noting the market today crossed 20,000 point threshold.

Elizabeth MacDonald recounted how former President Barack Obama told a crowd in 2016 that Trump would need a "magic wand" to bring lost jobs and manufacturing back to America.

Teamsters' Hoffa: Trump Doing What We've Talked About for a Decade

Here's How Trump Could Make Mexico Pay for the Border Wall

Trump: Today, US Gets Back Control of Its Borders

Moore said that statement, compounded with Democrats' becoming "subservient" to billionaire Tom Steyer and his climate-change-advocate allies, have opened the door for union cooperation with the White House.

"We want jobs, not a radical climate change agenda," Moore said in characterizing union bosses' political mindset.

Theory and Practice

Megan says about rules based principles: “one that we classical liberal, market-loving folks are going to have to contend with in the years ahead.” Perhaps she’s younger than her picture because it sounds as if she was born last night.

We have not lived with neutral principles for well over a century and neutral rules have been nothing but an afterthought during the Obama administration. Being concerned about “the years ahead” makes it sound as if the Carrier deal is a sharp departure from government non-interference in the lives of people and companies. When the EPA controls what you can do with a puddle in your back year because they define it as a navigable waterway you are way beyond classical liberal market based principles.

A second point about principles: they should benefit people rather than the other way around. Once abstract theory causes enough harm to enough people it’s worth evaluating whether the theory is working for the people. If not, theory needs to be re-examined. 

An example is the theory of man-made global warming. It looks great on paper and in computer models but the Manhattan is not under water and snow is falling in Hawaii. Global warming alarmists have been predicting the end of the habitable world since the 1980s, with “the end” always being 10 years off. So far none of the cities that were supposed to be under water have drowned, the glaciers have not melted and the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps are intact. Yet we continue to be told that the end is nigh. With each passing decade Global Warmists have ratcheted up the decibel level and today if question their projections you are accused of crimes against humanity.

One principle that seems to be animating the classical liberal market-loving folks is that tariffs and trade wars are inextricably linked. Recall that tariffs funded the federal budget for most of American history until the 20th Century and the 16th Amendment was passed.

Would you be surprised to learn that China imposes a tariff of at least 25% on imported cars. Then there’s a 25% consumption tax on cars with bigger engines than 3 liters and a 9% vehicle purchase tax. But for some reason there has been no threat of American or European retaliation.

Finally, people who are the strongest advocates of the “invisible hand” being allowed to do its job are never the ones who suffer the consequences. They don’t work in factories that are being closed and their jobs are not being outsourced to India, Mexico or China. Perhaps the market-clearing wage for factory assembly jobs worldwide is $1 per hour and the free market may lead to that wage for unskilled labor in every country. But would people who write for a living hew as closely to their principles if we determine that the average free-market wage for writers, worldwide, is really $2 per hour. The American educational system is so far behind the rest of the world that India, China and Cambodia can certainly produce a glut of replacement writers who can use the internet at least as well as Americans, replacing the “principled free market” enthusiasts that currently pull down salaries that make foreign writers green with envy.

And the transportation costs of the written word are zero.

Death rates among white middle-aged Americans have soared 'due to the decline in factory jobs and laid off workers turning to drugs or alcohol or committing suicide'

Free trade is literally killing middle-age white men.

Increasing competition with China for trade has been blamed for soaring death rates among white, middle aged Americans.

A silent 'epidemic' of deaths from suicides, drug and alcohol poisoning within that faction was first highlighted last year.

But scientists were baffled as to why white, middle aged Americans were bucking the national trend of decreasing death rates. Now two economists believe they have found the answer.

Justin Pierce and Peter Schott believe they can trace back the uptick in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths to 2000, when President Bill Clinton decided to relax the rules on major imports....

American factories, which couldn't compete with China's cheap labor force, shut down in droves, while thousands upon thousands of middle-aged white Americans, without college degrees, were laid off.

Unable to cope, many turned to drugs, alcohol or even took their own lives, according to the research....

The surge in deaths amidst white, middle aged Americans was so significant that Dr Anne Case and Dr Angus Deaton, of Princeton University, compared the 'silent' epidemic to the Aids epidemic in the US.

Case and Deaton were the first to highlight the worrying increase in mortality rates last year in separate research.

Between 1978 and 1998, the study reveals the mortality rate for US whites aged 45 to 54 fell by an average of two per cent each year. This was reflected in other rich countries, including France, Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Sweden.

After 1998, these nations saw mortality rates for this group steadily continue to fall, by two per cent every year.

But, in the US, mortality rates rose by half a per cent a year.

The authors wrote: 'No other rich country saw a similar turnaround.'

They estimate that had the white mortality in the US rate held at its 1998 value, 96,000 lives would have been saved between 1998 and 2013.

And had it continued to fall as it had between 1978 and 1998, 488,500 deaths would have been avoided from 1999 to 2013.

This figure is comparable to the number of deaths caused by the Aids epidemic in the US.

While death rates related to drugs, alcohol and suicides have risen for middle-aged whites across the board, the largest surge are seen among those with the least education.

For those with a high school degree or less, deaths caused by drug and alcohol poisoning rose four fold, suicides increased by 81 per cent, and deaths caused by liver disease and cirrhosis jumped 50 per cent.

All-cause mortality rose by 22 per cent for this least-educated group.

Among those with some college education, researchers noted little change in overall death rates.

While among those people who achieved a bachelor's degree or higher, death rates fell.

A rise in suicide and drug overdoses in midlife, is a recognised trend across the world.

However, the authors note 'that these upward trends were persistent and large enough to drive up all-cause midlife mortality, has, to our knowledge been overlooked'.

In White, Working-Class Areas, Social Institutions Are Crumbling. That Decay Is Fueling Trump's Rise

READING, Pa.—This coal and steel region was thriving when Gary Martin started working construction sites in the mid-1970s. Ironworkers jammed the local union hall, the union sponsored a big picnic each spring, and business groups were flush with volunteers for charity drives.

Mr. Martin’s extended family attended church, as it had for generations, in an area called Irish Valley in neighboring Schuylkill County. Two-parent families were the norm, and fatal drug overdoses were so rare that some county coroners didn’t bother tallying them.

No longer. Working-class neighborhoods, in particular white ones hit hard by the decline of the U.S. industrial base, are crumbling under the weight of deepening social problems.

Mr. Martin, 63 years old, retired last year as head of Ironworkers Local 420 but financially supports three grandsons—22, 21 and 19—because his daughter became an addict. The oldest grandson turned to heroin, too, and Mr. Martin and his wife got divorced in another casualty of the stress, they say.

“Rather than spending my retirement half-time in Ireland as I planned, I moved back to the house with a dirt-floor basement where I grew up to try to help raise my grandchildren,” he says.

Read the whole thing. It's why Trump is winning.

Blue Collar Blues

The past nine recessions — spread between 1953 and 2008 — battered men, whose employment rates were notched down each time and never fully recovered, and sectors that employed the least-educated men were hit the hardest. Women, on the other hand, have fared better and remain on pace to recover the jobs lost during the most recent recession, the Stanford Report Card on Poverty and Inequality reports.

But the people who write articles about this issue are shut in a mental box. For example: After discussing the employees at a Volkswagon plant

Finding workers was and is surprisingly hard, said Bill Kilbride, president of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce. The chamber advertises and holds job fairs, but attendance is often sparse, he said.

Despite an impressive placement rate, Chattanooga State Community College’s technical training programs for the most in-demand fields, such as welding, aren’t full, said Jim Barrott, president of the College of Applied Technology.

Others believed that men just didn’t want to work and they had abandoned both work and family because they had lost their moral backbone.

But a study released in January indicates that what is more likely affecting those men is economic segregation in neighborhoods and schools, the rise of income inequality and the rising share of single-parent homes in communities.

Think about that last sentence and then tell me how it follows logically. What are the skills required to work on an assembly line? Economic segregation is a fancy way of saying that there are poor neighborhoods and rich ones. The way you move from one to the other is to earn more money. What does income inequality have to do with applying for a job in a factory? What does having one parent have to do with applying for a job in a factory? Studies like this are ways of applying statistics to pre-determined solutions.  The answer is never about welfare incentives.  It's never about the culture.  It's never about the individual.  It's always about "the system."