For the past almost three years President Biden has been more vocal about employment than any other subject. This is a two-part essay. First, is he telling us the truth about job numbers and secondly some thoughts on why employment participation is what it is.
JOBS, FACTS
During January and February of 2020, the Trump economy continued to grow and 604,000 jobs were created (operative word). After reaching a peak in February 2020, employment fell by a combined 22.4 million in March and April, a Covid-related decline of 15 %. For example, there are more than one million restaurants in the U.S. and most of them closed temporarily. A month later jobs recovery began but it was a slow process and there was still a huge hole to fill when Biden took office 10 months later. That’s when Biden began his almost monthly public statements on jobs creation.”
The president’s boasting about jobs created began in the Spring of 2021, ‘We’ve created more than 1.5 million jobs, the most in the first 100 days of any president on record.”
This went on through 2021 and 2022, “We created more new jobs in two years than any president did in their entire term.”
He persisted into 2023, “As we head into Labor Day, we ought to take a step back and take note of the fact that America is now in one of the strongest job-creating periods in our history; in the history of our country.”
“And it wasn’t that long ago that America was losing jobs. In fact, my predecessor was the one of only two presidents in history who entered his presidency and left with fewer jobs than when he entered.” Not a lie but very misleading in that he just failed to mention that in February and March of 2020 the pandemic took away 22 million jobs from President Trump.
It’s more than disappointing to think our president can get behind his teleprompter every month and assume we are all too stupid to know he is lying to us. And then finish off by crediting all of this economic success to Bidenomics, as he leans down close to the microphone and whispers, “Bidenomics, it’s working” as if he was telling a secret to a bunch on second graders.
But Biden can’t help but double down on what he is selling as Bidenomics. He continued later on in September saying, “Look, look at where we are now. Just this morning, we learned that the economy created 190,000 jobs last month. All told, we’ve added 13.5 million jobs since I took office, around 800,000 of them manufacturing jobs. We created more jobs in two years than any president ever created in a single four-year term. We did it in two years.”
Perhaps we better fact check that assertion that he has created more jobs than any other president. Sure, in terms of raw numbers, he did add more jobs because the population in 1970 was about 203 million compared to 331 million in 2020. By doing the comparative math correctly measured by percentage increase from the start of their terms, Biden ranks in the middle of the pack. His growth numbers were in fact exceeded by Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Clinton. Another lie. It gets to the point that we have to ask ourselves; can we believe anything he is reading to us from the teleprompter?
BOTTOM LINE ON THE “CREATED” ISSUE: Nearly 72% of all the job gains since 2021 were simply jobs that were being recovered from the 22 million pandemic layoffs. In fact, when looking at today’s economy compared to pre-pandemic levels, employment is up only by 3.7 million. On the other hand, prior to the pandemic, actual job creation under President Trump was 6.7 million jobs. Bidenomics has never yet reached the trend line established from 2017 through January 2021.
And all the while he is bragging about his economy, he is under water on every poll that deals with the economy.
LABOR PARTICIPATION RATE, the second part of this essay; what is it and how did we get to where we are today?
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labor force participation rate is an estimate of an economy’s active workforce. The formula is the number of people ages 16 and older who are employed or actively seeking employment, divided by the total civilian working-age population.
In the 12 months ending Aug. 2023, the U.S. labor force participation rate ranged between a low of 62.2% and a high of 62.8%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes the figures monthly. As of Aug. 2023, it was 62.8%.
Background; when Obama/Biden took over in January 2009 the labor participation rate was 65.7%. That was the beginning of an 8-year steady decline until they departed the White House January 2017 with a participation rate of 62.8%’ about a 3% decline. Is 3% a big deal? Yes, it’s significant because in 2017 there were 165.2 million workers involved. Each percentage point represents 1,652,000 workers time 3 equals an Obam/Biden loss of about 5 million workers. That was an element of Obama’s declared formula to “fundamentally transform America.”
We need some more background information to clarify and understand the Obama/Biden 8-year labor participation rate disaster.
In 1996 President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The legislation substantially reconstructed the nation’s welfare system by giving state governments more autonomy over welfare services while also reducing the federal government’s role.
The Welfare-to-Work Act, as it became known, provided for the following:
- The act ended welfare as an entitlement program.
- Required recipients to begin working after two years of receiving benefits.
- Placed a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid by federal funds.
- Sought to encourage two-parent families and to discourage out-of-wedlock births.
- Enhanced enforcement of child support.
- And required state professional and occupational licenses to be withheld from undocumented immigrants.
This Act, with these requirements, ended six decades of federal government control of the programs. In the process of dismantling the old model, President Clinton created something, different and critical to success; the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF, which changed the financing and benefit structure of cash assistance. Instead of welfare being funded in a more open-ended manner, now welfare was funded by federal block grants to states, along with a requirement that states had to match some of the federal dollars.
This Act created a foundational principle of “personal responsibility”; it changed the culture of U.S. welfare.
TANF:
- Added work requirements for aid, shrinking the number of adults who could qualify for benefits.
- It created caps for how long and how much aid a person could receive.
- It instituted harsher punishments for recipients who did not comply with the requirements.
Following on, President Bush called on the Senate to take action to continue the historic progress of welfare reform and ensure that more Americans are able to achieve independence through work.
Did TANF work? In its annual report to Congress on the level of welfare dependency in the country, HHS found that 4.7 million fewer Americans were dependent on welfare three years after welfare reform was first passed in 1996. The percentage of the population dependent on welfare fell from 5.2% to 3.3% during that time.
As the rate of welfare dependency declined, the overall poverty rate in America fell. In the four years following enactment of welfare reform, 5.4 million fewer Americans were in poverty. Within these four years, the poverty rate for all individuals fell from 13.7% to 11.3%, the lowest rate since 1979.
2009: Enter Obama/Biden with their American transformation scheme.
“WITHOUT AUTHORITY, OBAMA MOVES WORKERS BACK TO WELFARE” were the headlines.
In a classic case of Executive Branch abuse of regularity power, Obama/Biden cut the legs off from the TANF program by informing the states that they could apply to the Secretary of HHS for a waiver of the work requirements contained in the law. That Obama/Biden move could have and should have been challenged by Congress and/or the Supreme Court because the work requirement was an essential element of the law and one that the stature specifically said cannot be waived. But it was not challenged.
The Obama/Biden initiative killed a 13-year-old successful program with the following negative ramifications:
- The U.S. labor force participation rate went down about 3% which meant that about 5 million able-bodied welfare recipients did not transition from welfare to work.
- The federal government essentially regained control of the welfare program and reverted back to the bad old days.
- Obama/Biden significantly added to the size of the identity group voting block that is government-dependent and for the most part votes for the democrats.
- The Congressional Research Service reported that the number of able-bodied adults on food stamps doubled after Obama suspended work requirements.
- By 2016, a record 47 million Americans receive food stamps, about 13 million more than when they took office.
- Increased welfare does not solve the poverty issue. The Census Bureau put the number of Americans in poverty at 45.3 million as of 2013. That’s not quite 5.5 million more people in poverty than there were in 2008, just before Obama took office.
- When the labor force participation falls, tax revenue falls and government revenue is reduced as welfare costs go up.
- Government spending on welfare increased 32% during the Obama/Biden first term.
WHAT DID BIDEN LEARN DURING HIS 8-YEAR TUTELAGE UNDER OBAMA?
Biden’s first budget submission in 2021 expanded welfare without work incentives setting the stage to trap a new generation of Americans in poverty and dependence. In fiscal year 2022, the federal government spen$1.19 trillion on more than 80 different welfare programs. That represents almost 20% of total federal spending and a quarter of tax revenues in 2022 or $9,000 spent per American household, all adding to the already unsustainable debt trajectory. The Congressional Budget Office has projected $12.7 trillion in spending on these programs over the FY 2024-2033 budget window.
What did Biden learn from Obama? He learned how to advance the movement towards a welfare state.
What are Obama’s building blocks to “systematically transform America? They came from Saul Alinsky, 1909-1972, a Chicago-based organizer, community activist and political theorist. Considered the father of community organizers, he became Hilary Clinton’s hero and Obama’s philosophical mentor (Obama quotes him often in his book and Hillary did her senior year thesis on Alinsky).
It is enlightening to align Alinsky’s eight steps from democracy to a socialist society with what is happening in America today with Democrat leadership.
1. Healthcare: “Control Healthcare and you control the People.” Democrats campaigned in 2020 for “Medicare for all.”
2. Poverty: “Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, Poor People are easier to control and will not fight back if the government is providing everything for them to live.”
Here are some 2022 quick facts about poverty provided by Poverty USA. The poverty threshold for an individual is a household income of approximately $13,000 per year, and it’s roughly $26000 per year for a family of four. 37 million Americans are living in poverty, which makes the poverty rate 11.4%. There are over 11 million children in poverty.
3. Debt: “Increase the National Debt to an unsustainable level.” Obama/Biden created more debt in 8 years than all previous administrations combined.
4. Gun Control: “Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a Police State with total local control.” Gun control is habitual Democrat priority campaign subject.
5. Welfare: “Take control of every aspect of their lives, food, livestock, housing, and income.” Government spending on welfare increased 32% during the Obama/Biden first term.
6. Education: “Take control of what People read & listen to; take control of what Children learn in School.” That is well underway across the nation in grades K-12 and in colleges and universities.
7. Religion: “Remove faith in God from the government and schools.” Almost there.
8. Class Warfare: “Divide the people into the wealthy against the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with full support of
the voting poor.” This is Biden’s “Tax the rich” on-going plan.
If you believe the Alinsky eight steps to socialism has some validity, and if you also believe the lid is already on the coffin, all that remains is to nail it down. Is that where we are with the Obama/Biden transformation of America?
CONCLUSIONS:
Americans are the most benevolent people on earth. We will always take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. But 80 government welfare programs run by an enormous out of control burearcracy can actually cause more harm than good.
The problem is with the work ethic of the millions who can, but choose not to, care for themselves because they have a choice and choose welfare over work.
BOTTOM LINE:
CBS reporting: “Today, 7.2 million men between 25 and 54 years old are not working or even looking for work and have essentially dropped out of the workforce resulting in a major hole in the American economy.
How are they spending their time? On average, nearly seven hours each weekday is dedicated to leisure time; relaxing, playing games and watching TV, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
Meanwhile, more than 770,000 manufacturing jobs are open according to the latest federal count, from November 2023, even though manufacturing workers are, on average, earning more than $30 an hour.
Plan to go vote before the coffin gets nailed shut, forever.
Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of two books, Vision to Execution and Fix the Systems, Transform America as well as the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com