Once upon a time, one had to watch “The Wonderful World of Disney,” or, more recently, “Game of Thrones” to gaze at fantasy, but viewers of the Jan 6 edition of Fox News’ “The Story, with Martha MacCallum” were treated to the pixel-pixie dust of Ms. MacCallum trying to have a sensible conversation with a man who clearly is disconnected from economic reality.
His name is Jared Bernstein, and no surprise, he is on President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors. And, also no surprise, he used to work for the leftist policy-pushing Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Because, of course, your priorities are unimportant; they must be sifted through and subsumed beneath the priorities of politicians, who cheer the idea of taking your money and pushing it where you’d rather it didn’t go, and who call that “America, caring.”
And just like Mr. Bernstein seems oblivious to the fact that he and his political allies employ the euphemism “policy” in place of the real word, “force”, he also seems completely blind to the stark economic realities all around him.
Responding to MacCallum playing a video of JP Morgan Chief Economist Michael Feroli saying that, “We are expecting the economy to slip into recession by the end of the year” due to the “lag effect of the (Fed) tightening and financial conditions that the Fed has engineered here, as well as the additional rate hikes that they’re, uh, signaling,” Bernstein, who appeared to be speaking from the White House driveway, might as well have been on Pluto.
MacCallum asked him, given what Feroli (and Alan Greenspan) said about a looming recession, if he has changed his mind to now agree with that assessment. He responded:
“No. I like where I am on that over-under better than where they are. Uh, we’re talking today of an unemployment rate of three-and-a-half percent; that’s close to a fifty-year low.”
At which point anyone with a brain and some self-respect might have yearned to appear on camera and call out Bernstein for him either being completely ignorant, or for him being intentionally deceptive.
What Biden’s advisor magically neglected to mention is that the “unemployment rate” he cites includes some rather tricky government sleight-of-hand. It leaves out the massive crash in workforce participation that’s occurred in the U.S. since early 2020.
Many Americans have been aware of this. They’ve seen or experienced it firsthand, since shortly into the rights-attacking, Constitution-breaching, jobs-and-supply-chain-destroying lockdowns that governors and city politicians imposed on millions of Americans under the unconstitutional label of “Emergency” that Donald Trump recklessly “declared” March 13, 2020.
Almost a year ago, Fortune writer Tami Forman wrote about the crash in female workforce participation, noting:
“(T)he January jobs report found that 275,000 women left the workforce last month, leaving the women’s workplace participation rate at 57%—a rate that pre-pandemic had not been seen since 1988. An entire generation of progress has been erased in two years.”
As of December, 2022, total U.S. workforce participation stood at just 62.3 percent, still an entire percentage point lower than the February, 2020 rate, prior to the U.S. becoming a medical-police state. Even the tax-subsidized (and, thus, never as concerned about job cuts as we are) National Public Radio (NPR) admitted the truth in November.
Related: 'The Great Resignation': Record 4.5 Million People Quit Their Jobs in November...Alone! | MRCTV
And the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) mentions a few things that Mr. Bernstein conveniently overlooks. For example, as one might expect, even as Bernstein next tells MacCallum about an economy that saw “4.5 million new jobs” last year, he neglects to mention that many of them were part-time. Many people took on second, part-time, jobs and the part-time worker numbers were static in December:
“The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons, at 3.9 million, changed little in December. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs.”
And the BLS also tells us something else that Mr. Bernstein conveniently neglects to mention:
“Among those not in the labor force who wanted a job, the number of persons marginally attached to the labor force declined by 231,000 to 1.3 million in December. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, numbered 410,000 in December, essentially unchanged from the previous month.”
That means that this glorious “unemployment” rate Mr. Bernstein heralds is as fake as the oaths most politicians take to protect and defend the US Constitution. It’s as fake as the Bidenista and pop media fearmongering over Climate, as utterly unfounded as the inflated mortality rates the politicians and “DR. SCIENCE” Tony Fauci threw at us regarding COWABUNGA19, and as unsound as the mythically “effective” jabs they took our tax cash to create.
Of course, like a purser on the deck of the Titanic, Bernstein continues to cheer for his sinking employer. Pridefully, he spouts marginally cheery economic news without offering the real, full story, and he deflects from two core facts.
First, a recession is not measured by employment numbers. It’s measured by gross domestic product, by productivity – which is being smothered by the inflated money supply and profligate federal spending pumped out by the Federal Reserve for decades, and by the politicians of both major parties in DC. They show utter contempt for real savings and real investment, and, instead, boost Keynesian, central-bank-funded, tax-injected federal spending that wipes out the buying power of our earnings even as it removes our ability to spend and invest in what WE think are good ventures and products.
Second, the U.S. government isn’t even Constitutionally sanctioned to measure employment, unemployment, demographics, or GDP.
Mr. Bernstein’s position is constitutionally unwarranted. And Mr. Bernstein’s arrogance is matched only by his cupidity and displayed economic ignorance.
Of course, it might not be ignorance. He and the authoritarians in DC might know full well that they are not dealing honestly either with us, or with their oaths to abide by the US Constitution.
Related: Biden's 'Transitory' Inflation Doesn't Seem So 'Transitory' | MRCTV