Staff Reports
A gaggle of Senate Republicans just dropped the hammer on acting Labor Secretary Julie Su, and it’s about time someone held these clueless bureaucrats accountable. After the Labor Department reported a jaw-dropping revision to job numbers that wiped nearly 1 million supposedly created jobs off the map, those GOP senators are demanding explanation instead of a shrug and a “whoopsie!”
The Labor Department’s recent revelation is as notorious as a Hollywood plot twist. It stunned America by announcing that from early 2023 to early 2024, the U.S. economy only added 818,000 fewer jobs than initially touted. For anyone keeping score, that’s the largest downward revision since the calamity of the 2009 financial crisis. Yep, that’s right. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the job count has been about as reliable as a weather forecast that insists on sunny skies before a monsoon.
📍Big Rapids, MI@JDVance takes the stage, immediately hits @KamalaHarris on the economy, points to the @BLS_gov revision report that suggests there were 818k fewer jobs added last year than initially reported.
“They are cooking the books to hide how bad the economy really is” pic.twitter.com/cdbdeLqf8a
— Taurean Small (@taureansmall) August 27, 2024
Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, joined by four of his fellow Republicans, penned a strong letter to Ms. Su, questioning just how many coffee breaks she and her team took while fumbling with job data. Their message is crystal clear: what kind of malfunctions plague the Labor Department’s reporting that allows nearly a million jobs to vanish like socks in a dryer? As they edge closer to the presidential election, the state of the economy is top of mind for Americans. The last thing they need is misleading job reports that lead to more confusion than a cat chasing its own tail.
Senators Marshall and his crew pointed out that consistently releasing overly optimistic job estimates is not just goofy; it’s downright dishonest. This isn’t just idle chatter; this kind of deception contributes to the fact that a mere quarter of Americans actually trust their government to do what’s right. Talk about a trust deficit! With illusions of prosperity being pushed by this administration and parroted by the media, one can’t help but wonder if they’re all in on the act together.
Freezing in the spotlight, the Labor Department’s revision comes as key election dates loom, prompting fear among Republicans that the inflated numbers served as a convenient facade to hide the true state of the economy. Former President Donald Trump, always quick to pounce on government missteps, labeled the revision a “massive scandal.” Can any sensible constitutional patriot blame him? It’s a wild ride when the Biden administration keeps conjuring economic numbers that would make even a magician bow in disbelief.
Beyond the surface drama, the senators’ letter raised serious concerns about the validity of the Bureau’s accuracy, warning that if media outlets received these revised job figures first, the public perception of the job market could have shifted significantly. They also expressed fears about how the drastic changes in job data could affect the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, which is supposedly driven by “data dependency.” If Jerome H. Powell isn’t careful, he might find himself juggling economic expectations that are as unpredictable as trying to catch a pig in a mud pit. So as the clock ticks down towards November, Americans wait with bated breath to see how far the government will go to maintain the illusion of a thriving economy.
