As I have said before, the Coronavirus pandemic has made job forecasts difficult, and unreliable. Yet the corporate media continues to report these forecasts as if they are credible and reliable. For example:
CNBC: January jobs report could show omicron caused first steep decline in payrolls in more than a year.
NY Times: January Jobs Report May Disappoint. It Is Sure to Perplex.
What a difference a day makes. The Washington Post reports that U.S. added 467,000 jobs in January despite omicron variant surge:
The U.S. economy added 467,000 jobs in January even as the omicron variant spiked to record heights, with the labor market performing better than many expected because of the virus’s spread.
The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 4 percent, from 3.9 percent the month before. [Because more people are searching for work in January.]
The monthly report, released by the Department of Labor, stems from a survey taken in mid-January, around the time the omicron variant was beginning to peak with close to 1 million new confirmed cases each day. The rapid spread during that period upended many parts of the economy, closing schools, day cares, and a number of businesses, forcing parents to scramble.
The data in the new report is believed to be heavily affected by distortions from the virus, and there are signs the labor market has improved markedly since mid-January.
Nearly nine million workers were out sick around the time the survey was taken, and some of them could have been counted as unemployed based on the way the survey is conducted. With such high levels of infection in many parts of the country, it is likely that many businesses also paused hiring.
January is traditionally a weak month for employment when retail and other industries shed jobs after the holiday season. Economists say that seasonal adjustments made to the survey’s data to account for this have the potential to distort the survey in the other direction, given that the holiday shopping boom appeared to take place earlier this year than typical.
As such, predictions for job growth for the month had been all over the map. Analysts surveyed by Dow Jones predicted an average of about 150,000 jobs added for the month, in what would be the lowest amount added in a year. Some economists predicted job losses, of up to 400,000.
They should be embarrassed by today’s jobs report demostrating that they don’t know what the hell they are forecasting. They are no longer credible or reliable. Please stop treating them as if they are.
Last year was a strong year for growth in the labor market, with the country adding an average of more than 500,000 jobs a month — regaining some 6.4 million jobs lost in the pandemic’s earlier days. The country still has more than 3 million fewer jobs than it had before the pandemic. [At the current pace of job growth, the U.S, will recover these 3 million jobs this year.]
“Omicron is going to make it look like things dropped off a cliff in January, but overall they did not,” said Drew Matus, chief market strategist for MetLife Investment Management.
Some economists like Matus say that the prospects for such rapid regrowth are more complicated this year, with the fiscal measures that boosted the economy during the pandemic’s first two years, like generous government aid, and record low interest rates from federal bankers, having largely expired, and the country’s confidence in a virus-free future dented after the winter wave.
Since the rollout of vaccines last year, there have been hopes that a return to a more typical rhythm of life could encourage some of the roughly two million people who have left the labor force during the pandemic to seek work anew, but thus far, continued threats from variants — and uncertainty after more closures of schools, daycares, and office — have prevented this from materializing in a substantial way.
There are signs that the omicron exacted a toll on the economy during its peak [in January].
Weekly unemployment claims swelled mid-month to its highest level since October, though the numbers have come down in the two weeks since. Other statistical markers like passenger traffic at airports, hotel revenues, and dining reservations also took a hit during the month.
Recent months continue to be marked by incredible churn in the labor market, as record numbers of workers are switching jobs. In December, some 4.3 million people quit or changed jobs — a number which was down from an all-time high in November but still at elevated. Employers continue to report near record numbers of job openings: the Bureau of Labor Statistics said they reported some 10.9 million openings last month.
So the Biden Boom is continuing. Paul Krugman has More Thoughts on America’s Feel-Bad Boom:
By the numbers, 2021 was a boom year for the U.S. economy. Back in 2020 many forecasters expected a sluggish recovery, with unemployment staying high for years. Instead, unemployment has already come down almost to prepandemic levels, and a record percentage of Americans say that this is a good time to find a quality job.
It’s true that inflation has eroded the purchasing power of wages, but new estimates indicate that despite this, real income has gone up for most adults.
Oh, and while the spread of Omicron may cause a bad month or two for jobs, rapidly falling cases in New York and elsewhere suggest that the good economic news will resume soon.
Yet consumer sentiment has plunged: Americans’ assessments of the economy are worse now, on average, than they were in the early months of the pandemic recession. Why?
Regular readers know that I’ve been speculating about this issue for some time, wondering in particular why people say that the economy is bad even when they’re fairly upbeat about their personal finances. At this point, however, I think I’m closing in on an answer.
Poor assessments of the economy, I’d now argue, mainly reflect two things. First is a longstanding issue: People react more negatively to inflation than textbook economics would have predicted. Second is extreme partisanship, fed by right-wing media.
About inflation: Consider two imaginary economies. In one, the typical family’s income rises 2 percent a year, but consumer prices are rising at the same rate. In the other, inflation is running at 6 percent, but family incomes are rising 7 percent a year. Which economy is better?
Economists would, I’m pretty sure, overwhelmingly vote for Economy No. 2, in which real incomes are going up. But the public might disagree: People are bothered by inflation, even when their own incomes are more than keeping up. Maybe that’s because inflation conveys a sense that things are out of control. [This is known as infaltion psychology.]
Whatever the psychology involved, inflation aversion is simply a fact of life. It was a Democratic economist, Arthur Okun, who first suggested evaluating the economic situation using the “misery index,” the sum of unemployment and inflation. As an economic concept, this index doesn’t make much sense: The costs of unemployment are huge and real, while the costs of inflation are subtle and surprisingly elusive. But the misery index works pretty well as a predictor of economic sentiment.
And since U.S. inflation has risen a lot over the past year, it’s not surprising that economic sentiment has declined despite falling unemployment.
But my analysis of the data says that economic sentiment is considerably worse than you’d expect even given inflation; The Times’s Nate Cohn, using a more elaborate model, finds the same thing. What’s that about?
The dispiriting persistence of Covid is one possible answer. But let’s not ignore the elephant — and I do mean elephant — in the room: extreme right-wing partisanship.
These days partisanship shapes almost everything in America. For example, you can’t talk sensibly about lagging rates of Covid vaccination without acknowledging that Republicans are four times as likely as Democrats to be unvaccinated. And the partisan gap in perceptions of the economy has exploded in recent years.
Let’s not bothsides this. Yes, Democrats may have been reluctant to acknowledge good economic news under Donald Trump. But right-wing negativity right now is absurd, with Republicans assessing the current economy as worse than the economy in June 1980, when unemployment was almost twice as high and the inflation rate was 14 percent. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this craziness might explain a large part of the shortfall in consumer sentiment.
But where’s the craziness coming from? Even mainstream media have accentuated the negative; one liberal think tank analysis found that CNN and MSNBC devoted 50 percent more screen time in November to inflation than to all other economic developments combined.
But Fox News has devoted almost three times as much screen time to inflation as CNN over the last two years, while among other things illustrating its reports with photos of empty shelves taken in other countries and other years. No wonder the G.O.P. base says that the economy is in terrible shape.
What does this say about the future, in particular the political future? If and when inflation comes down, as forecasters, the bond market and even consumers expect it to do eventually, overall consumer sentiment should start to reflect the economy’s real strength. But as we’ve seen, a substantial part of the electorate has economic perceptions quite far from reality; even if things improve, they probably won’t hear about the good news or will be regaled with other negative stories.
So Democrats will need more than an improving economy to survive the midterms. They’ll need to get receptive voters to perceive that improvement, and then get enough of those voters to the polls to match the sizable minority determined to believe that Joe Biden’s America is a Mad Max-type wasteland.
Republicans and their conservative media propaganda machine have been sabotaging the Coronavirus recovery with their anti-science, anti-vaxxer hysteria, and thus sabotaging a faster economic recovery and a return to normal, and sabotaging the Biden agenda out of pure partisanship. They are at war with America.
npolling reflects that far too many Americans are willing to reward these malevolent boteurs who only a year ago violently tried to overthrow American democracy and install their “Dear Leader” as America’s first autocratic dictator. There is a collective insanity going on that borders on Stockholm Syndrome: a psychological response wherein a captive begins to identify closely with his or her captors, as well as with their agenda and demands.
This is how democracies die and fall under the darkness of fas
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A.B. Soddard writes, “COVID Derangement Is Working Out Just Fine for the GOP”, https://www.thebulwark.com/covid-derangement-is-working-out-just-fine-for-the-gop/
The Republican treatment for coronavirus is quite simple. You mix doubt with denial, look past the lost lives and then wait. When the infection spreads, the virus replicates and mutates, and new variants jolt the economy, you then blame President Joe Biden.
For nearly two years we have witnessed an entire cohort of Americans reject the social compact and discard the welfare of others, including their own loved ones. In the name of liberty they have proudly protected the rights of Americans to reject vaccines, refuse masks, spread the virus, demand expensive therapeutics, claim ICU beds, clog up hospitals, and gum up the economy.
The virus champions in the GOP know that their unvaccinated supporters are 17 times more likely to be hospitalized and 20 times more likely to die from COVID. You will not hear them lament that more than 10,000 mostly unvaccinated Americans are dying each week as we approach the loss of 900,000 American lives. On this they are largely silent. Mass death is another casualty of the long culture war; the cost of doing business in today’s Republican party.
This attitude is, itself, a sickness. Michael Gerson calls it “GOP political necromania,” and describes it as “an effort by populists to prove that their MAGA commitments outweigh all common sense, public responsibility and basic humanity.”
When Gerson puts it like that, it sure sounds bad. Except that the truth is that this strategy is working quite well. Except for their dead voters, friends, and family members—as a purely political matter—this whole COVID radicalism thing is going great for Republicans.
[R]epublicans have paid no price for any of this. They come up with one nutty rant after another. They fundraise off of them. And they ignore their dead pawns[.]
And somehow it’s Joe Biden who has seen his approval rating tank while Republicans are poised to take both the House and the Senate.
In the face of this madness Biden and the Democrats have been utterly befuddled. Voters are holding them responsible for controlling the virus, but are allowing Republicans to set the terms of the culture war that has allowed the virus to persist.
Biden has also largely pulled his punches. Facing coordinated, sustained opposition to mitigation tools and strategies, Biden had two choices:
Go to battle against COVID radicalism and be criticized for being partisan.
Dodge the culture war, try to unite the country, and hope for the best.
He chose initially chose Door #2 and only recently found himself backed into trying Door #1. Yet it’s been too little, too late. By the time Biden expressed frustration at the unvaccinated and Republican leaders who sow doubt about vaccines, Republican voters had turned being anti-vax into a cause and everyone else had simply checked out of the pandemic due to sheer exhaustion.
[C]elinda Lake, a Democratic pollster working with the Democratic National Committee said she recommends that Biden and Democrats hammer to voters that GOP COVID obstruction is imperiling the economy. “Everyone should try to make the connection, stand up and make the argument that the unvaccinated are jeopardizing the economy.”
So here’s a thought: This is the economy of the unvaccinated.
Biden wanted to fight the virus, not Republicans. His failure of imagination was not understanding that Republicans would be happy to push the virus along if it undermined his presidency.
A pandemic Republicans have eagerly prolonged has pummeled Joe Biden’s presidency and he can no longer fight depravity with good will. There are no more marginal vaccine holdouts to be wooed. No more lives of people who just don’t know any better to be saved.
It’s time for Democrats to stop worrying about alienating the unvaccinated and start explaining to the rest of the country how the unvaccinated—and the Republicans who coddle and truckle to them—have screwed the rest of us.
To win this culture war, Biden and the Democrats have to actually fight it.
Otherwise, the Republican COVID radicals are going to clobber them.