The Biden administration is claiming success for the newest June jobs report despite the nation’s high unemployment, slow economic recovery, and rising inflation.
According to the numbers from the Department of Labor, the United States added 850,000 jobs in June and average hourly earnings grew by 0.33 percent.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki took to Twitter to brag “jobs are up, wages are up, economic growth is up, consumer confidence is up.” Her characterization of these slow gains as the “Biden Boom” failed to acknowledge the actual American economic situation, and showed just how out of touch the Biden team is with the average hardworking American.
In the last week: Jobs are up, wages are up, economic growth is up, consumer confidence is up.
This is the Biden Boom. https://t.co/5Wgpq64LVU
— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) July 2, 2021
Psaki’s claim that “wages are up” ignores the fact that the federal government proudly sent oodles of cash to Americans over the last year, which forced employers to raise wages to compete with stimulus checks. Having to compete with government handouts (funded by their own tax dimes) is taking a tremendous toll on small businesses. At least 25 Republican governors have chosen to opt-out of Biden’s inflated federal unemployment benefits program early, but that makes a small dent in the nation’s road to recovery.
Psaki’s celebratory tweet also conveniently overlooks the fact that real inflation-adjusted wage numbers for June have yet to be released. In May, inflation-adjusted hourly wages dipped 0.2 percent from April. Real average weekly earnings also decreased 0.1 percent over the month, due to the change in real average hourly earnings combined with no change in the average workweek. The plunge for real average hourly earnings grew even steeper, decreasing by 2.8 percent, when seasonally adjusted from May 2020 to May 2021.
Contrary to White House spin, this is not a “boom.” As a matter of fact, it’s a less-than-normal recovery that is still struggling to reconcile an unemployment rate that actually rose to 5.9 percent in June. Despite the Biden administration’s promise to boost certain minority groups in the workplace, women, black Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and workers who don’t have a high school or college degree all saw increasing unemployment rates last month. Now, more than 9.5 million people are unemployed in an economy where the labor force participation rate did not rise.
If we were to continue at the pace of the last 3 months, we would return to Feb 2020's level in June 2022 and to the pre-pandemic trend in Sept 2023. pic.twitter.com/4opGboffV4
— Aaron Sojourner (@aaronsojourner) July 2, 2021
The Biden administration’s gaslighting proclamation of economic success also comes on the verge of what could be the worst inflation of this century. According to the May 2021 Consumer Price Index data, consumer prices were climbing at their fastest annual rate since 2008 as inflation skyrocketed to the highest it’s been in over a decade.
While the index numbers for food and energy have steadily climbed over the last year, the index for other goods and services such as “food, clothing, shelter, fuels, transportation, doctors’ and dentists’ services, drugs” and other day-to-day living items also “rose 3.8 percent over the last 12-months, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending June 1992.”
