‘Terrible news’: Biden pummeled as he blames Delta for abysmal jobs report, black employment among hardest hit

President Biden touted his economic plan’s alleged success despite the fact that the U.S. economy only added a minuscule 235,000 jobs in August to the floundering economy, massively missing the prediction of 740,000 jobs that had been expected.

The unemployment rate dropped to 5.2 percent as expected according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The August numbers missed the mark by roughly two-thirds the Wall Street Journal reported. It’s the worst monthly increase in added job numbers since January with black employment being among the hardest hit.

 

(Video Credit: CNBC Television)

It was widely believed by economists that the Delta variant would have an impact on economic recovery and it is being blamed by President Biden for the terrible job numbers. But there is more to the story here. Many businesses simply cannot find enough employees due to it being more lucrative to still sit at home and collect an unemployment check. The Delta variant is not the only variable that caused the massively lower job numbers.

This is also reflected in the private sector that was expected to add 600,000 new jobs and instead only added an abysmal 374,000 jobs in August according to the ADP National Employment Report that came out on Wednesday. Medium-sized businesses won the contest by adding 149,000 jobs for the month. Small businesses only added 86,000 workers.

Friday’s report was released just two days before the $300 per week in supplemental unemployment benefits is set to expire.

The numbers are in stark contrast to the ones in July which saw 943,000 jobs added to the economy according to The New York Times. That was 845,000 more than predicted.

The economy is still reportedly 5.5 million jobs lower than the pre-pandemic level, according to the Department of Labor.

“Workers are still not coming back to work in the numbers that our main street businesses need to survive and to grow from there,” Brady said.

Analysts on CNBC’s Squawk Box said the low number of jobs added was “terrible news” for the economy.

(Video Credit: CNBC Television)

“The market not selling off a ton of this, but this is terrible news for what it means for the real economy,” host Becky Quick remarked.

“You can drive a truck of about half a million workers through that gap,” Steve Liesman said. He alluded to the fact that education had represented a “big miss” for forecasters who had anticipated a “huge influx of workers.”

Private education gained 40,000 jobs in August, but state and local education lost 27,000 jobs. Retail got hit even worse and lost another 29,000. Transportation and warehousing tacked on 53,000 jobs, while manufacturing added just 37,000. Labor force participation stood at 61.7 percent, almost two points lower than in February 2020, which was pre-pandemic.

Leisure and hospitality, the sectors that recently had been leading in job gains, saw the biggest slowdown in hiring and remained unchanged in August.

The report indicates that unemployment is persisting despite the rise in wages, which ticked up to 4.3 percent year-over-year, and 0.6 percent for the month.

“There is some expectation that we will be hiring,” Liesman commented. “It doesn’t appear to have been caught up, or maybe it was papered over by the seasonal adjustments. So I don’t think it’s wrong to think that the miss is not as bad as it seems from the headline, but it’s still a miss. It still suggests we had, clearly a Delta variant effect in this number here.”

Reaction to the job numbers was intense:

Fox Business host Charles Payne correctly pointed out that it would be front-page news if black unemployment had surged like this under Trump.

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