Wednesday Morning Rant

Last week's jobs report was underwhelming to say the least. In the wake of the headline "not as much as growth as expected" conclusion, the junta unsurprisingly trotted out the same old tired lines as always. Bidenomics is great. America is back. Don't let the wreckers gaslight you into thinking things are bad. Etc. You can set your watch by it, just like Obama's "green shoots" and "jobs created or saved."

One of the downsides to press coverage on the employment reports is that it ignores - probably because the "expert" journalists don't even know about it - everything outside the executive summary. The internals of BLS reporting are often interesting and if you want any context outside the headline number and the biggest movers by economic sector, you have to dig in and learn what to look for. Journalists can't usually be bothered, if they are even capable.

One of the more interesting data tables recently has been A-7: Employment status of the civilian population by nativity and sex, not seasonally adjusted. This table is a straight year-over-year comparison. In the most recent report, it was April of 2023 vs April of 2024. These are still BLS numbers and they are decreasingly reliable, but the methodology used to derive those numbers is consistent and so internal comparisons are both possible and useful. What does this table tell us?

There are several data points in the table, but some stand out.
Domestic vs Foreign Labor Participation Rate

• April, 2023: 66.7% (foreign-born); 61.5% (native-born)
• April, 2024: 66.0% (foreign-born); 61.7% (native-born)

• April, 2023: 3.1% (foreign-born); 3.1% (native-born)
• April, 2024: 3.9% (foreign-born); 3.4% (native-born)

Domestic men have lost the least in terms of unemployment. Domestic women are still in the best shape in absolute terms but their relative move (+15% unemployment) is second-best, ahead of foreign men with foreign women rounding out the pack. Domestic women are the only group that saw an increase in the labor participation rate, with all other groups seeing lower participation than in April of last year.

(As an aside, there is one group that is very clearly advancing, even if not economically: foreign population as a whole. The domestic civilian non-institutional working-age population went from 220.115 million in April of last year to 219.976 million this year. The foreign number went from 46.328 million last year to 48.089 million this year - a staggering 3.8% increase in a single year. Want to know why the border is open? This is one of the reasons.)

But economically, who is winning in Brandon's economy? Nobody, actually. Unemployment is up across the board and participation is down in most areas. Nobody wins under Bidenomics, at least not enough to push the averages. Those in the best shape are just those who are losing the least for now.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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