In mid-January, the gigantic blowout spending bill going by the Orwellian name of Build Back Better died in the Senate. Over in the progressive precincts of government and the media, where everyone knows that all human wealth and well-being come entirely from government largesse, it was time to prepare for the bad economic news. Surely, with no massive new government blowout spending and with Omicron surging, the January jobs report would be dismal, likely even showing employment declines.
Therefore, in the run-up to Friday’s jobs report for January, the White House spin machine was in full tornado mode, blaming the impending news of a jobs decline on the virus rather than on the administration’s failed economic policies. From ABC News, February 4:
White House officials . . . offered prebuttals ahead of Friday's report, saying those who were out on unpaid sick leave the week data was gathered will count erroneously as unemployed. "We just wanted to kind of prepare, you know, people to understand how the data is taken, what they're looking at, and what it is an assessment of. And as a result, the month's jobs report may show job losses in large part because workers were out sick from Omicron at the point when it was peaking during the period when -- the week where the data was taken," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.
But the actual report showed a strong employment increase of 467,000 jobs during the month. From the New York Times, February 4:
Employers added 467,000 jobs in January, seasonally adjusted, the Labor Department said on Friday. The report smashed the projections of economists, who had been expecting the wave of coronavirus cases associated with the Omicron variant to lead to anemic gains, if not an outright decline in jobs. Instead, employers kept on hiring.
The Times is shocked to note that President Biden “struggles” to get the credit for good economic news such as this:
Mr. Biden has struggled to convince voters that his economic policies are working, in part because of lingering supply-chain bottlenecks, labor shortages and the highest inflation in decades.
Well, obviously the good employment news cannot be attributed to any economic policy of Biden, since his principal economic policy initiative has failed in the Congress. Meanwhile the inflation surge and energy price spikes stem directly from Biden’s intentional policies of overspending, rapid money creation, and war on the fossil fuel business. The good news, such as it is, is in spite of Biden’s policies, not because of them.
You would think that somewhere in the mainstream media someone would notice that employment increases cannot be tied to increased government spending, but I certainly can’t find that.
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