BLS Admits 2024 Job Numbers Were Fake
Once Again, Lou Costello Labor Math Is Confirmed
There are lies, damned lies, statistics, and then there are the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment statistics.
As was noted on Townhall the other day, we are reminded of this by none other than the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Biden administration claimed to have added almost 400,000 jobs from July through September of last year, but new data released this week suggest none of those jobs ever existed. Despite constantly gaslighting by the mainstream media, Americans knew the economy was in poor shape and these latest numbers prove it.
What occasioned Townhall’s opprobrium was the quarterly release by the BLS of its Business Employment Dynamics (BED) report, which summarizes job gains and losses for the quarter.
Are you shocked to learn that the quarterly job numbers do not reconcile to the monthly job numbers?
In the third quarter of 2024—the latest BED reporting period—the BLS is now reporting what amounts to a net loss of jobs (although it buries the lede with its usual bureaucratspeak).
From June 2024 to September 2024, gross job losses from closing and contracting private-sector establishments were 7.6 million, a decrease of 131,000 jobs from the previous quarter, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over this period, gross job gains from opening and expanding private-sector establishments were 7.6 million, an increase of 31,000 jobs from the previous quarter. (See tables A and 1.)
Even at just the broad numbers specified in the opening paragraph, the BED report is effectively reporting no job growth in the third quarter of 2024. 7.6 million job losses and 7.6 million job gains means zero job growth.
Actually, the BLS is reporting net job losses in the third quarter of about 1,000.
What job growth did the Employment Situation Summary Reports for July, August, and September of 2024 report? 477,000 jobs.
Note that 477,000 is the revised total, after the BLS had already walked back some 33,000 jobs in its regular post-reporting revisions.
The BED report proves what I said repeatedly at the time: the numbers do not add up.
Nor was it simply me saying that. Even the BLS has managed to undercut its own jobs reporting, as it did when it made 818,000 jobs disappear last year.
Even the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, conducting its own independent review of BLS quarterly jobs data, concluded that the BLS jobs reports for the summer of 2023 were bogus, and there was virtually no job growth during that time.
Indeed, as I pointed out when analyzing the most recent Employment Situation Summary, the BLS Current Population Survey indicates there was almost no job growth in all of 2023 and 2024.
The Establishment Survey and the ADP National Employment Report missed signals picked up by the Household Survey showing an extended pause in job growth. In the summer of 2022 and throughout 2023 and 2024, the Household Survey quite literally charted zero job growth.
Which is why I am a little less surprised than Townhall at the reality of the BED numbers. Yes, the monthly job numbers in 2024 were largely trash. Yes, the BLS was engaging in Lou Costello Labor Math on a regular basis. No, the jobs numbers did not add up, nor did they add up at the time.
Will the 2025 numbers be any better? Possibly—but we should not be surprised if they also turn out to be crap.
This is criminal fraud. Peter, who in the Trump administration has the authority to legally go after this? They should hold accountable, fire accordingly, and prosecute!
There’s likely some fudging going on in the “seasonal adjustments” also.