The economy surprises the “experts” – again
It happens nearly every time, almost like Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football. Why are they called “experts”? Well, they’re expert at predicting what the left wishes will happen, and then they’re expert at being perpetually astonished at what actually does happen:
The April jobs report showed the U.S. added only 266,000 jobs during the month and the unemployment ticked up to 6.1%.
Economists are usually off the mark, but holy cow. They predicted 978,000 job growth and unemployment of 5.8%. I have never seen such a huge difference between prediction and numbers.
Miserable considering the U.S. started to see some growth at the end of former President Donald Trump’s term.
And the NY Times, for example, headlines an article about the report this way: “The Jobs Report: The Boom That Wasn’t/April’s anemic job creation was so out of line with what other indicators have suggested that it will take some time to unravel the mystery.”
Such a mystery! Such a puzzlement! Not only are people demoralized and worn out, not only are many people in blue cities frightened that the police won’t be allowed to protect them against, rioters and looters, but many people are still being paid to not work.
Facts may be stubborn things, but they can still be denied if the will to do so is strong:
Biden says the April jobs numbers “show we’re on the right track”
In April:
?Unemployment INCREASED
?18,000 manufacturing jobs were lost
?Economy added only 266,000 jobs, far below expectationsBiden is squandering the recovery he inherited. pic.twitter.com/l1HbEvdP9k
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 7, 2021
How many people are paying attention? That’s a question I find myself asking a lot these days.
Well this is Obama’s third term so it was to be expected. Reality is a bitch. It is true that the stay at home money is artificially lowering employment. But think about it. What a stealth way to get a $15 minimum wage.
But there is a problem. People forget how to work after prolonged unemployment. Punctuality, grooming and effort to do a good job deteriorates. Shades of Hillbilly Elegy redux. It takes a lot of effort to get people used to the concept of working. You heard of the slacker generation. Prepare for the stoned generation.
Press is blaming “child care.” Women having to stay home and not work to care for children.
Solution … of course is universal child care!
Also BTW … Almost every where no matter what the business (restaurant, hardware store, tire store, grocery store … everything) I have gone for the past month or so has a sign up … HIRING!
They had a job fair with 1800 jobs available … 20 people showed up.
The economy, the numbers, they’re inconceivable.
Looting the treasury (that is, your grandchildren) to pay off layabouts in hopes of their future votes. What could go wrong?
Whatever happened to ‘he who does not work, neither shall he eat’?
@Insufficiently Sensitive:
“he who does not work, neither shall he eat”
I don’t think that this boorishly over-simplistic and unencumbered with shelf-miles of learned commentaries morsel of New Testament Drek featured prominently in the intellectual and moral foundations of Chairxirsons of the Federal Reserve between 1987 and 2018, Old Chap.
But the Gods of the Copybook headings are stronger than all of us. Paul will have his day.
I’ve seen some speculation elsewhere that the Biden administration may have tweaked the number upward to encourage the push for additional stimulus. Cynical of me to share, I know.
If it is not clearly, factually reported by the MSM, it ain’t news.
Rising unemployment is clearly related to the couch-inclined getting helicopter money from DC.
A 75% shortfall in the month’s employment rate is huge.
Yes, you can lay economists end-to-end and not reach a conclusion, but missing the employment estimate by such a large # means something is afoot, and it is in the Executive Branch, with squinty-eyed Joe leading our country downhill.
Ol’ Joe intends to nominate a bunch of minorities to Dept. of Energy, with qualifications such as LBGTQ, many with probable foreign allegiances or blackness by their names: Tarak Shah (LBFTQ) and POC as Chief of Staff, Shalanda H. Baker (POC) as Deputy Director for Energy Justice [sic], Shara Mohtadi (POC), Chief of Staff, Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, Ali Nouri, a molecular biologist (!) as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs; and the list goes on.
We’re long past the point where any official statistics can be trusted. Going to have to be those good old Lying Eyes instead. Keep an eye on supermarket prices, local soup kitchens, etc. We’re looking for the Truth here, so take off the colour-blind glasses when driving past food banks and develop a feel for whether there are fewer or more Whites patronising them. That’s a better measure of the ‘Economy’ (or what’s left of it) than what comes out of Babylon on the Potomac.
Possibly County and Town level data can be trusted more… it depends. At least at these lower levels you have some chance of knowing just how rubbery the figures are and what the local grifts and distortions are.
For the rest, stick to crude and unsophisticated metrics. A good deal of West’s current malaise is the rise of a credentialed over-class of symbol-manipulators who have never done yard work or changed their own oil. Many of these Cloud People simply cannot grasp that there is no-longer much of a connect between the symbols they manipulate and the peons and solid matter down on the dirty brown Earth.
The idiot is paying people not to work, so no wonder the jobs aren’t being filled.
In 2008 the stimulus was supposed to make unemployment go down. It went up and the experts were baffled.
Why did God create economists ? To make astrology respectible.
@Paul In Boston:
There’s many a step twixt the Discount Window and Joe Sixpack Deplorable in Shitsville, KY (he’s going to be needing the KY).
I frequent a music venue/restaurant/bar in Venice, Nebraska. The owner just posted on FB how much his food prices have gone up. Really shocking.
Biden is a total failure.
“Facts may be stubborn things, but they can still be denied if the will to do so is strong:” neo
Denial has an expiration date.
“Biden says the April jobs numbers “show we’re on the right track” RNC Research
A revealing fraudian slip. Nationalizing the US economy first requires a public so desperate that nationalization is seen as a… life preserver.
“Whatever happened to ‘he who does not work, neither shall he eat’?” Insufficiently Sensitive
That metric is on sabbatical. But never fear, it will return, as reality can only be denied for so long.
PS; love your handle
@Cornhead:
Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man has been saying the same thing recently from his Texas lair.
Can’t say I’ve noticed much change in HKD which is USD currency pegged, but insane property rents drive and dominate everything here and these have dropped due to Covid keeping Mainland Chinese out, likely masking increases in food wholesale prices.
In Indonesia, all it takes is a spike in the price of cooking oil to start anti-Chinese pogroms. India nearly went collectively bonkers a few years back when the price of those nasty little purple onions which you sweat out at 3am went up too much. So food prices can get ‘interesting’.
Cornhead,
“Biden is a total failure.”
That would be true if Xiden’s puppet masters wanted the economy to do well. They don’t.
In fact, they want it to crater. Badly. Catastrophically. The public has to be prepared for nationalizing of the economy.
Nor do they fear being voted out of office, since they control how the votes are counted and in the blue states and major cities… who counts the votes.
Cornhead,
Speaking of food prices and your namesake commodity.
Here is the commodity price of corn over a few months.
https://www.ifcmarkets.com/en/market-data/commodities-prices/corn
Yikes!
@TommyJay:
There’s no corn involved in the production of Fernet-Branca, so the Hipsters will be OK.
I seem to remember that every jobs report during the beginning of the Trump administration was also similarly skewed.
Always predicting much higher unemployment and then being stunned that the jobs report was better than they expected.
At this point all you need to do is look at the D or R after the presidents name. To figure out which way they will try to game the numbers.
Every institution has been infected with this rot. And not a single elected official seems to give a fig about it
No wonder they hated Trump so much. He was the only one who ever rubbed their nose in it.
Geoffrey Britain (10:20 pm) alludes to a “fraudian slip.”
Was that, itself, a Freudian slip??
I’m voting for Freudian Slap.
This is what I call “moving in the right direction” – one time when the cliche actually gets it right.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/05/another-sensible-decision-from-ron-desantis.php
Posted without comment.
https://babylonbee.com/news/cnn-praises-joe-biden-for-efficiently-liberating-thousands-from-wage-slavery-in-first-100-days-in-office
https://babylonbee.com/news/shocking-study-finds-paying-people-not-to-work-makes-people-not-want-to-work
“Paul in Boston”s comment on May 7 at 9:33 pm about economists and astrology is the funniest thing I have read in a very long time.
If you give it away for free you will never ever be able to satisfy the demand.
I recall that when the original COVID relief package was being rammed through, some Evil Republicans including the ever- mysterious Lindsey Graham objected to the provision of unemployment benefits which exceeded actual wages, for this very reason. They were of course roundly denounced as mean persons, the squishes caved, and several trillion dollars later here we are.
Why this would be puzzling to anyone who claims to be an economist is puzzling to me.
BTW, the caving of the squishes was not IMO because they feared being portrayed as Evil Republicans, but because they feared that their huge chunks of Sweet Graft might get cut out. Although they do fear the Evil Republican label.
M J R,
Xiden thought he was lying but in actuality he revealed their agenda. They’re happy with the jobs report, it’s tracking exactly how they actually want the economy to go… so a verbal fraudian prat fall.
Paying attention is one thing. Taking seriously has two components, 180 degrees opposed.
Unfortunately, too many of our countrymen are not only NOT ‘paying attention’, they seem to be happily marching in lockstep down ‘The Road to Serfdom’.
Press is blaming “child care.” Women having to stay home and not work to care for children.
Solution … of course is universal child care!
So, women, other than mothers, will stay home to care for [unPlanned] children.
Whatever happened to the em-pathetic effort to socially justify Planned Parent/hood (i.e. elective abortion) by normalizing so-called “rape… rape-rape culture” by way of social liberalism and warlock trials?
Keep women appointed, available, and taxable.
A Deplorable Take from the trenches:
https://bigcountryexpatoriginal.blogspot.com/2021/05/home-prices-and-wow.html
California, of course, has had a scandal (One you never heard of) with unemployment benefit fraud.
California paid out $11 billion in bogus jobless claims in 2020, and investigators are looking into possible fraud involving $20 billion more, authorities said Monday, according to CBS Los Angeles.
Between March 2020 and January 16, 2021, the California Employment Development Department processed 19.5 million claims and paid out $114 billion in unemployment benefits — roughly 9.7% of which were paid out to fraudulent claims, the agency said.
The employment department also identified that up to an additional 17% of payments made during this time have been made to potentially fraudulent claims, which are currently being investigated, officials said.
Pretty soon, we’ll be talking about real money. Much of that was paid to prisoners. The state plans to solve that problem by releasing 76,000 of them. Is California smart or what ?
@Mike K: As long as California keeps their criminals-at-large, let them deal with it.
I’m not going there any time soon.
Unfortunately, we can’t seal the borders between states.
They’ll start paying attention when grocery store prices start creeping up this summer … everybody notices when the grocery store tab grows, despite the idiotic yammering of Janet Yellen.
Mike K,
The state of WA had the same problem with UE benefits fraud and of course the woman in charge got a new job in the Biden administration.
Griffin:
It is a feature not a bug?
John Fisher,
Considering that we haven’t measured inflation or GDP according to more traditional, realistic metrics for years (since the Obama admin for GDP, and decades for inflation), I’d say you’re not being cynical, but rational.
Although I’m sure that the Getting Paid Not To Work factor is strong in the equation, I’m not discounting the perfectly rational choice of many of those folks not wanting to bother applying for jobs in the industries that have been hardest hit by the caprices of their state and local governments. Why bother when the next lockdown is just going to put you out of work again?
I’d like to see a state by state breakdown, to compare those that didn’t lockdown or came out of lockdown early against those with more draconian or arbitrary lockdown standards.
America is back!!!
… as it was under Obama when each employment report was released with great fanfare and success but later must be revised downward when no one is looking.
Under President Trump, nearly every employment report had to be revised upward as the markets exceeded expectations.
Indigo+Red,
Yes, the old formula – inverted during the Trump years – is back: All negative economic news is “Unexpected”.
I swear that those corresponding keys on the keyboards of Bloomberg writers had to have required monthly replacement during Obama’s reign. Likewise during Trump’s short tenure.
Meme floating around: