In the past year, discussions have revealed that U.S. labor market data may have been manipulated to look better than reality, with reports suggesting significant overstatements in job numbers. Despite official claims of strong job gains, a recent report from California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office revealed a starkly different truth: the state lost jobs in late 2023, contradicting earlier reports of growth. This revelation underscores ongoing concerns about the accuracy of job data, which is annually revised by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The discrepancy has raised doubts about the true state of the economy and the impact of policy decisions, hinting at larger implications for future economic policies.
We have discussed on several occasions over the past year how US labor market data has been manipulated to make it look better than it is. However, due to a peculiarity in BLS data revision reporting, we won’t have concrete evidence of how bad the actual job market has been in recent years until sometime in 2025, well into Trump’s second administration.
But even if the BLS can continue to trumpet “strong job gains” until early 2025, the grim reality has already surfaced in the biggest labor market in the United States.
Contrary to earlier reports of significantly increased employment in the deep blue state in 2023, the reality was far worse, according to the most recent report released by the nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), an agency of the California government under the direction of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee of the California State Legislature. The LAO also performs and publishes extensive analyses of the state’s budget and provides fiscal and policy advice to the California Legislature.
We discover precisely that in a paper titled “Newest Early Jobs Revision Shows No Net Job Growth During 2023”: the previously noted Early Revisions to state-level data indicate that California may have actually lost jobs in the fourth quarter of last year. As the research explains, “Payroll jobs fell by 32,000 between September 2023 and December 2023 based on the most recent release of the early benchmarks.” Conversely, at the time, the early monthly data demonstrated a strong rise in job growth (+117,000 jobs).
The National Audit Office (LAO) interprets this as meaning that “with the fourth quarter revision, calendar year 2023 saw essentially no net job growth (+9,000 jobs overall).”
Here is a brief overview provided by the LAO for anyone who is not aware of the order of changes made to the jobs data:
Monthly State Jobs Estimates Are Revised Annually. Each month our office publishes the most recent state employment figures from the the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey. State employment figures come from this monthly survey, which is based on a small sample of businesses in the state. As a result, once per year the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does a benchmark revision, updating the monthly CES estimates to match more reliable administrative data from states’ Unemployment Insurance programs.
Federal Researchers Now Publishing Quarterly Revisions. Although the BLS only revises the state-level CES once per year, the underlying data used to revise the CES survey is collected quarterly. Taking advantage of this asynchrony, in 2021, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia began publishing state-level “early revisions” based on the same underlying data but revised more frequently.
In any case, the gray highlight in the chart below illustrates the enormous difference between the real, post-revision numbers and the previously released, CES survey-based phony Q4 numbers.
Since there hasn’t been a bench on the data since January 2024, the growth rate of the statistic that incorporates the Early Benchmark Revision for these recent months is in line with the official CES projections. However, one thing is for sure: after the upcoming round of changes, California won’t have added any new jobs in reality for the second year running. Make that America as a whole.
Naturally, it won’t be revealed until much later in Trump’s second—technically third—term—that the shocking ‘ realization’ that inflation-sparking Bidenomics was a total disaster for the US labor market. By then, people will have moved on from Biden and his disastrous economic ideas.
Last year, GreatGameIndia reported that during the AI Safety Summit in the UK, Elon Musk warned UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that there would be no jobs in the future and AI would be capable of performing all tasks.
