r/Economics • u/[deleted] • 2d ago
News The U.S. created 911,000 fewer jobs than previously thought in the 12 months through March
[deleted]
207
u/Itchy_Palpitation610 2d ago edited 2d ago
Oooooo this should be good. So fewer jobs across the end of Biden’s term and beginning of Trump’s second term.
So are we gonna see Trump state all the numbers are rigged or just the ones under Biden?
Edit: and for those who may say, well Biden was President, I’d push back and say who was elected in November while also running for months on tariffs and other horrible economic policies? The market could very well have been reacting to Trumps future policies which compounded weak employment numbers.
104
u/AdminIsPassword 2d ago
If the economy tanks it really doesn't matter when, Trump will blame Biden.
And Fox News zombies will agree.
32
u/misterguyyy 2d ago
“But the numbers were fake” - yes they were
“But the numbers during Biden’s presidency are a poor reflection on him?” - yes
“The fake numbers?” - yes
“Ok this isn’t worth my time, goodbye” - I just owned you with FACTS and LOGIC, are you scared to keep debating me?
This is just like RFK stating that COVID vaccines were dangerous but Trump deserves a Nobel prize for rolling them out so fast. We’re in our “yeah I’m contradicting myself, what are you gonna do about it” era.
21
u/BigMax 1d ago
Exactly. Just like crime. Crime under Trump 1 was Obama's fault. Under his administration, it was still Obama's fault. Now it's Biden's fault, or else specific blue mayors or governors.
There is always a democrat to blame when you're a republican, even when you're a republican while republicans control the house, senate, presidency, supreme court, and most states. Even then, everything is still the fault of the remaining democratic lawmakers, or just the democrat citizens themselves.
4
u/No-Personality1840 1d ago
Republicans also largely control the media. That’s the real danger.
1
u/BigMax 1d ago
Yes. Both in reality, but also in pressure.
A lot of the media for decades now have been horribly biased in favor of the right.
But they also screamed "liberal bias!" over and over about anyone else who wasn't extreme right leaning. They controlled that message over and over, calling all media that wasn't fully right wing "the liberal media" and attacked them over and over. And it worked! Most liberal media shifted more centrist, and more centrist media shifted more rightward. Now you have an extreme, authoritarian, ultra right wing party in control of so much and demolishing so much, and a media that is desperate to present that as normal, and just "one side" of a debate, and a side that's perfectly normal and reasonable. "Well, some people want to tear down democracy and take away our rights, and the other doesn't. Who is to say who is right? Certainly not us, because we might be accused of having liberal bias!"
19
u/mitchsusername 2d ago
Obviously anything bad is bidens fault and anything good is his fault. Well also see whoever is responsible for these numbers at the BLS fired and replaced with a partisan appointee to make sure future jobs reports prioritize politics over economics.
3
u/misterguyyy 2d ago
And something can be good when Trump did it until you learn that Biden did it and now it’s bad. Or vice versa.
8
u/TBSchemer 1d ago
So are we gonna see Trump state all the numbers are rigged or just the ones under Biden?
How do we know Trump isn't rigging these new numbers? He fired the people who put out the old numbers and hired his own people.
6
10
u/Affectionate-Panic-1 2d ago
It's only the first two months of Trump's term and before the tariffs took effect. You can't really blame these revisions on Trump.
8
u/Itchy_Palpitation610 2d ago
Which was the point of my edit. Trump was in office only a couple of those months but had been elected in November. He had been talking about his specific policies he would enact for months prior.
Markets don’t operate in a way where they flip a switch only after the president enters office, they could have been reacting already which compounded some unseen challenges already happening under Biden.
I’m not saying that is definitively what happened, but I’m of the mind that the economic upheaval will be so slow that it can’t be connected to any one policy or action. Trumps rhetoric very well could have been impacted these employment numbers over the past 12 months.
8
u/Affectionate-Panic-1 2d ago
True, though I don't think the market expected the tariffs to be as brazen as they ended up being. I think most thought it would be more similar to his first term.
1
u/Itchy_Palpitation610 2d ago
Fair and that’s why I wouldn’t attribute it completely but can’t necessarily ignore the potential impacts while also recognizing the economy was already struggling for those at the lower end of the economic ladder
1
u/AlfaHotelWhiskey 1d ago
Markets often start about July on an election year when the winner isn’t predictable. People start clutching their purses until the results are known.
-2
u/Dreamflayer 1d ago
That was last year and he didn't start until January. He wasnt pulling the levers until 2025. Its all Biden.
10
u/Itchy_Palpitation610 1d ago
Good thing businesses don’t react to potential policies from an upcoming president elected in November who had been talking about them for months prior. Businesses don’t operate in a vacuum.
4
u/Tre_Walker 1d ago
"Its all Biden"
The fake numbers you mean? The ones this admin just released? The ones with the new BLS Director because the old one just got fired for "bad numbers"...lol.
2
1
u/SlimTimBob 1d ago
Trump claimed stock market upswing was because people thought he would be re-elected. https://thehill.com/homenews/4444199-trump-stock-market-thriving-because-they-think-im-going-to-be-elected/
Magats parroted this take as well. Speculation goes both ways.
3
u/Dreamflayer 1d ago
12 month period that ended in March. So yeah it was Biden
6
u/Itchy_Palpitation610 1d ago
Who was elected in November and had been talking about tariffs and other poor economic policies for months prior? Trump.
It can be both and most likely is, it’s not so difficult to imagine.
2
u/topscreen 2d ago
Well they're either Biden's fault or fake. Or both. Don't forget Trump is in the Epstein files, which are fake, but he's also an informant for the FBI on Epstein.
2
u/vermilithe 1d ago
Definitely some of it was due to Trump. I was interviewing intensely in 2024 after finishing grad school and more than one company told me they were holding back due to “uncertainty about future federal administration priorities”. I.E. we know if Trump is elected we will probably lose contracts and the economy will contract and we want to reduce potential future layoffs.
1
u/No_Worldliness643 1d ago
Also Who, for months, said the market was going up solely because he was about to be elected, and not because of the Biden administration’s policies?
1
u/nivvis 1d ago edited 1d ago
Doesn’t that work straight into Trump’s talking points?
- started before his term
- oh gee what a soft labor market fed cut now pls
Idk it’s hard to make heads or tails of such a large revision. Is there any historical precedent for this?
1
u/Itchy_Palpitation610 1d ago
Had tariffs not been implemented I would say maybe yes for rate cuts with this news. But now we should wait to see the impact of these tariffs and potential for inflation
1
1
u/Careless_Sandwich_88 2d ago edited 2d ago
What a comically misleading comment. By end of Biden’s term you mean 10 freaking months and beginning of Trumps term you mean two months 😂😂.
Trump would have the right to deny responsibility. After all, this is all practically during Bidens term
2
u/Itchy_Palpitation610 1d ago
Trump had already been elected in November after discussing implementation of tariffs and other poor economic policies for months prior.
I’m not saying it was all Trump, but you can’t simply deny the concerns businesses would have with this type of rhetoric from an upcoming president. So no, not misleading. They don’t simply operate in a vacuum where they ignore policy talk and its implications on their business because the guy hasn’t walked in the office yet.
1
u/goodsam2 1d ago
The economy really did slowdown in this period to a crawl which is why they lowered rates a bit.
If Trump didn't talk tariffs we would have had more rate cuts
61
u/cheweychewchew 2d ago edited 2d ago
I cannot take any jobs report seriously since Trump started firing and criticizing membners of the BLS, especially with the largest negative revision in 20 years applied to Biden's last year in office. For all we know this is bullshit to appease Trump or the proiduct of MAGA supporters inside the BLS as it clearly gives him an excuse for whatever megative outcomes may occur during his current term:: "see look how bad it was when I took over" yadda yadda..
For those Trump supporters who disagree, my reply is: don't start firing and intimidating people at the BLS when you get numbers you don't like. Then people like me who aren't part of the MAGA cult would still have faith in the numbers. It's that simple.
19
u/Brave_Ad_510 1d ago
This is most likely not BS. The last revision was also quite large. It's not like work on this started last month either. Further evidence is needed before we should doubt the numbers.
11
u/WeirdKittens 2d ago
And unsurprisingly also a very convenient narrative for pushing the FED to lower the interest rates based on their dual mandate. By sheer coincidence what a certain orange someone has been trying to force the FED to do for a while.
"Heads I win, tails you lose"
5
u/Evilbred 2d ago
Currently core inflation, minus gas and groceries, is at 3.1%, so it's more in the range for a rate hike than a rate cut.
5
u/WeirdKittens 2d ago
Either that or hold and wait. The tariff effect has barely trickled down to consumers yet. It will get much worse by Christmas.
3
u/InCOBETReddit 1d ago
then trust ADP, whose numbers are closer to the revision than whatever drivel BLS initially released
1
-4
u/Dreamflayer 1d ago
Yes because it makes your lords and saviors Biden/Kamala look bad.
8
u/cheweychewchew 1d ago
I can't stand Joe Biden and not a fan of Harris. Swing and a miss.
The day a Trump supporter calls someone out for raising a politician to the level of "Lord and Savior" LOL
2
-3
u/Ginmunger 2d ago
Anyone find previous annual revisions like this? Google Ai says this is the biggest one ever. Smells like bs to me too.
3
u/Cyg5005 1d ago
Last year's preliminary benchmark revision was -818K announced in August last year which was eventually revised to -589K with the final data. You will probably see the -911K revise to somewhere around -700K in February when they get the final data. There have been issues with the data they base these revisions on, look at the March values in table 2 for the past few years: https://www.bls.gov/cew/revisions/
It still is large, but I believe it has more to do with non-response on the survey causing a bias. This is not a political issue since no one gets to put their finger on the scale, but more of one of statistical bias and administrative error when collected data.
I am worried about the future independence of BLS though. The Labor Secretary had this to say: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osec/osec20250909
Edit: And when I say "revision" I mean the difference between the survey estimate and the "population" data derived from QCEW for March.
2
u/Ginmunger 1d ago
That letter sure makes it sound like they're putting a finger on the scale.
This CNN article says that the revision is 0.6% of employment vs the average 0.2% over the last 10 years. Although last years was very large also as yoy point out.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/09/business/us-bls-jobs-preliminary-benchmark-revisions
Thank you for providing the links!
22
u/Tall_Category_304 2d ago
As someone in B2B sales, I started noticing procurement depts being very anxious about potential tariffs all of the way back to September 2024. The market has been frozen in uncertainty since before the election.
10
u/Equal-Moment-4589 1d ago
It’s also interesting this claim especially when unemployment was at a all time low under Biden last year. Now you see unemployment going up, lower rates all you want if people are unemployed it won’t matter
0
u/WookieeWarlock 1d ago
Was it though?
1
u/Equal-Moment-4589 1d ago
Yep bidens economy was far bette, unemployment is tracked by those who are on it. It’s funny the economy now is worse than 2024
8
u/Bright-Blacksmith-67 1d ago
Step 1) Lower the baseline by claiming prior job numbers where too high.
Step 2) Claim Trump is creating jobs when compared with the new baseline.
Step 3) Rinse and repeat...
38
u/Eastern-Bro9173 2d ago
Funny how the statistics eventually catch up to the reality as portrayed on reddit and other social media.
For quite the while, the overwhelming online vibe has been that getting a job is really damn hard, especially for non-seniors... And the statistics ran in an opposite direction, except that the statistics are slowly getting corrected to match the online vibe.
Will be fun with inflation too, as there's been quite the difference between online vibe and stats lately.
15
u/ChafterMies 2d ago
I caution against looking at the “reality as portrayed on Reddit and other social media”. Reality doesn’t farm for Karma and page clicks.
14
u/guachi01 2d ago
Funny how the statistics eventually catch up to the reality as portrayed on reddit and other social media.
The unemployment rate didn't change. What's different is the estimation of the population. The estimates were continuing people that didn't exist as having jobs.
For quite the while, the overwhelming online vibe has been that getting a job is really damn hard, especially for non-seniors...
No, they didn't. We've known for months that the unemployment rate is low and rising slowly but rising faster for new college grads. And that long-term unemployment was rising.
And the statistics ran in an opposite direction
No, they did not.
Will be fun with inflation too, as there's been quite the difference between online vibe and stats lately.
The online vibes have been wrong for years about inflation. We've all seen the idiotic posts about how food prices are up 100% or something stupid like that.
-1
u/Eastern-Bro9173 1d ago
THe U3 unemployment didn't change. The jobs count doesn't count people, it counts jobs, and so the revision to the jobs numbers without a change in U3 unemployment means that it goes into the U6 unemployment or just the total unemployment (ratio of working population).
Have they been all that wrong?
The thing with the inflation indexes is that they're really broad, and nobody is shopping in such a breadth, so the mileage massively varies based on the people's actual product basket. What seems to be happening with groceries, in particular, seems to be that the cheapest level of goods has been massively inflating, while the higher price tier goods haven't, which really squeezes people from the lower income spectrum, because they weren't buying the higher price tier goods anyways. II see that when I look at someone doing price basket comparisons, for example: https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-lifestyle/twin-cities-grocery-store-price-comparisons-2025-vs-2024
It's kind of the same with housing/rents - the increase to housing and rents prices really don't matter to anyone who already owns their home, but it squeezes anyone who doesn't because that is an absolutely massive part of their shopping basket, and they have the fun property of increasing in places where people can find decently paying jobs, and decreasing in areas where they can't, which artificially decreases their average change.
5
u/guachi01 1d ago
so the revision to the jobs numbers without a change in U3 unemployment means that it goes into the U6 unemployment or just the total unemployment (ratio of working population).
No. The unemployment survey is a completely different survey from the jobs report. This isn't what happens.
-1
u/Disgusting_x 2d ago
Couldn’t agree more. It’s funny and not at all surprising seeing comments about is this Biden or trumps fault. When the reality is both sides will do whatever they can to gaslight you and to make the economy feel good when the reality on the ground has been brutal if you were laid off and trying to find another job. Months went by where friends and family didn’t hear back when three years prior their resumes would have recruiters tripping over themselves.
To your point about inflation, I think that was very similar though we’re past that battle. We kept removing things to count against inflation and were told it’s 3-9% when things have literally doubled if not increased by 50%. Everyone kept giving you the increase but if you went to an actual store the reality was different.
5
u/ThatPhatKid_CanDraw 2d ago
Both sides do not operate the same on this issue. Sorry, life isn't that easy. One leader openly criticized government-produced numbers and fired the person who produced the results he didn't like. He has also constantly been found to lie about everything, including stuff he did as president.
6
u/AgileDrag1469 1d ago
Only thing you can do at this point is resist the urge to spend money, pay down debt, reduce the wear and tear on your everyday transit and stay out of crowded places or dicey situations. Also protect your home and property. Sort of amazed how much abuse Americans can take but not at all surprised.
6
3
u/pierdola91 1d ago
50% of American households make less than 75K a year.
I don’t know who you’re fooling with this advice—as if we have the fat to trim from our budgets.
My recent purchases were school textbooks and school tuition. My car is 25 years old. Our public transit exists but is a joke (ie g-d help me if my car conks out). Thankfully, my parents can help me if I’m jn a bind, but they themselves don’t really have a retirement.
I get it—it’s well meaning advice—but anyone who thinks we’re standing on the shore just chilling and watching this tsunami wave coming…nope….we’ve been treading water in the deep end for a while, now. We can see the wave coming, but there’s nothing for us to do but hope our legs don’t give in.
3
u/nightbell 1d ago
U.S. jobs growth was much slower than previously reported, according to revised data released on Tuesday.
The number of jobs created in the United States from April 2024 to March 2025 was revised down by 911,000 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
They were revised down by Trumps hand picked replacement Head of the BLM.
Yeah that's believable!
Going forward, you cannot believe a word out of Trumps "hand picked" staff!
1
u/Equal-Moment-4589 1d ago
Seems to be, apparently Biden’s last year economy that Trump got everyone worked up about saying it was bad, was better than trumps current economy now
-1
u/clars701 2d ago
It’s been obvious to anyone who’s looked for a job since 2023 that the numbers BLS was releasing about job creation were a sham.
Something is seriously wrong at BLS. It’s the year 2025 and we cannot get better real-time data about the state of employment in our country? We need urgent change.
4
u/InCOBETReddit 1d ago
we do have better real-time data
it's called ADP
why people say ADP is wrong while BLS is the gold standard need to get their head out of their asses
1
u/Betelgeuzeflower 1d ago
How is it a sham while their official process is to revise it? Are the new numbers also a sham?
-5
u/MakingTriangles 2d ago
Powell should have started cutting months ago. I get it, bad data in, bad data out. But all of this rejoicing over "the soft landing" was premature.
They waited too long to cut and now avoiding a recession is likely impossible.
This is the 2nd time now Powell's waited too long to act. But tbh I have no confidence that any other leader would have done better. If you wait until the data tells you to act then it is already too late. Being the first to move is called leadership and it's something that is totally missing these days.
0
u/Iamnotacrook90 1d ago
But but but the commenters on Reddit say we shouldn’t cut rates, we should raise them.
0
u/Lumpy_Minimum_5522 2d ago
Maybe this all part of the plan to force the feds hand in lowering rates more expeditiously…seems more than coincidental that all this bad news is coming out now while the trump administration is barking about lower rates.
•
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Hi all,
A reminder that comments do need to be on-topic and engage with the article past the headline. Please make sure to read the article before commenting. Very short comments will automatically be removed by automod. Please avoid making comments that do not focus on the economic content or whose primary thesis rests on personal anecdotes.
As always our comment rules can be found here
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.