How bad will the January 2022 jobs report be next week when it’s released on Friday? We may have some indication of that based on how the White House is already previewing its talking points for the press.
During her daily press briefing, Jen Psaki, fresh off mocking those who have concerns about rising crime, felt the need to give an unprompted mention of the unreleased numbers. In it, she oddly cited the number of people who called out sick during January due to COVID-19 as a preemptive excuse for what is to come.
The fact that the Biden administration, for the first time since taking office, is trying to get out in front of the next batch of employment numbers pretty well signals things are going to be apocalyptic.
I’m open to being presented with more information, but I’m not sure how people calling out sick plays into the unemployment numbers. That seems like a rather ridiculous bit of spin on the part of the White House, given people who take sick days are not counted in job loss figures. Yet, Psaki is asserting that will be the reason that the report looks dire. How does that add up?
Even if the assertion here is that there were fewer people available to take the actual survey because so many people were indisposed with Omicron (her assertion that 9 million people called out sick appears unsupported, or at best, generalized), that doesn’t make much sense either.
Normally, about 60,000 households are polled a month to fill out the employment survey. A smaller sample would still be representative and they never receive every survey back. Further, if someone didn’t fill out the survey because they were sick at home, they would not be counted as a job loss even if they did, in fact, lose their job. Wouldn’t that actually make the jobs report look better than it is?
Again, maybe I’m missing something, but Psaki’s explanation makes no sense whatsoever.
The level of gaslighting that is coming from this administration is just breathtaking at times. We are so far past the “how refreshing” proclamations from the press insisting that Psaki would be transparent. For my money, this is the most dishonest White House in modern history, and modern history includes the Clinton administration.
So what’s this all portend? I think it’s pretty clear that Psaki knows the coming jobs report is going to be in negative territory. That will follow on the heels of a flatlining December report in which the numbers missed by over 50% in a month where seasonal hires should have caused a sharp uptick in employment.
The economy continues to stumble when it should be booming, and the White House continues to have no answers for what to do about it. Or better yet, they don’t like any of the answers out there because they are so dedicated to keeping the COVID-19 “crisis” going for political gain. Although, it looks as if they severely miscalculated on that front.