The July jobs report was, yes, disappointing. Plenty on the left used it as a cudgel they could use to beat on the Trump administration, claiming that they were destroying the wondrous jobs record of "Autopen Joe" Biden's administration. The trouble is, as usual, the left believes a lot of things that just aren't so. This is one of those things.
An economy the size of the United States is like one of those super-massive tankers that carry oil from the Persian Gulf to other parts of the world: They are huge, but they are unwieldy. They can't turn on a dime. It takes months, sometimes years, for changes in major economic policies to be implemented and to have an effect. But what we do know already is that the jobs numbers touted by the Biden administration were, by and large, horse squeeze, and now we're learning just how overblown those claims were.
Here's part of the problem: The Biden administration touted too many experts who aren't. Now, I'll listen to authentic experts, but the left tends to tout "experts" (scare quotes intentional) who are not experts, but political hacks. Like Paul Krugman.
All last year, we were treated to a steady stream of stories about the “huge” and “baffling” gap between the public’s negative views about the economy and its “actual performance.”
Our favorite “economist” Paul Krugman was apoplectic. “Why are so many Americans still telling pollsters that the economy is in bad shape when “it’s hard to overstate just how good recent economic numbers have been.”
That's a typical Krugman statement, which can be translated as "You dumb rubes don't realize how good you have it." Yes, yes, I know, Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner in economics, to which I can reply, "So what?" The Nobel isn't all it used to be; the Peace Prize in particular stopped meaning anything when they gave one to Yasser Arafat, and they capped off their irrelevancy by giving a Peace Prize to Barack Obama for, apparently, existing.
Back to that July jobs report:
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after a string of glaring mistakes in its jobs report, announced the mother of all screw-ups.
In its preliminary “benchmark” revision, the BLS admitted that almost 1 million jobs that it claimed to have been created from April 2024 through March 2025 didn’t actually exist.
This, mind you, is on top of all those monthly revisions that cut back on the number of jobs created each month. And it comes one year after the BLS made a huge downward “benchmark” revision for the year prior.
The latest downgrade is so massive that even CNN was forced to admit that it amounts to “a stain on Joe Biden’s legacy.”
Add that to a long, long list of stains on what's left of "Autopen Joe" Biden's legacy; the only thing that makes any of this reflect less horribly on Joe himself is the certainty that he clearly had very little idea what was really going on during his presidency. And, as long as it didn't interfere with naptime, he probably didn't care all that much.
The fact is that the Biden administration was poison on economic issues, as with so many other issues. Now it's coming out just how bad things were. The American economy is massive, and takes a lot of wrecking, but boy, howdy, that didn't stop the autopen from trying it.
Read More: July Jobs Report Shows Weaker-Than-Expected Growth, Unemployment Rises
Scott Bessent on Meet the Press: 'We're Not Doing Economic Policy Off of One Number'
You can't keep these things quiet forever.
The revisions are essentially “rewriting history,” Deutsche Bank senior U.S. economist Brett Ryan told CNN.
Except, that’s not entirely true. The only history being rewritten is the one the mainstream media and corrupt “economists” like Krugman were peddling.
All last year, for example, we were pointing out that the BLS was continually exaggerating job gains.
This revision also demolishes claims that Trump was handed a booming economy that he is now wrecking.
Booming economy, my left eye. The Biden administration was a mess. It's still, to this day, not clear who was actually in charge, although we know it wasn't "Scranton Joe."
Experts are great when they are actually experts. But true expertise in economics is hard to come by (although Dr. Thomas Sowell is probably the best) because a national economy is a lot like the global climate: Huge, chaotic, unpredictable, with billions of inputs and outputs.
But everyday folks know what's affecting them. In the Biden years, we all saw gas prices go up. We all saw home heating oil and natural gas prices go up. We saw inflation making every trip to the grocery store painful. We saw home prices shoot up, in part due to excessive regulations, in part due to a lack of supply. We saw millions of people flooding into the company illegally, placing a horrible pressure on our economy, while Washington didn't even bother to pretend to enforce our immigration laws. We saw all of that - and Paul Krugman thinks we were imagining it.
That, as much as any other reason, is why Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office today.
So, when it comes to economics and how well the nation is doing, put not thy faith in princes - or self-proclaimed experts. Look at your bank account. Look at your 401 (k). Look at the interest rates on home mortgages. Look at gasoline prices. That's where the real story is told.
