Job Creation Still Hasn’t Recovered from the Useless Covid Lockdowns

“Dow closes at record high after blow-out jobs report” proclaimed NBC News on Saturday. It is not surprising the story would ignore all historical perspective, even history within the past few months. Incumbent presidents routinely take credit for job creation during their administrations and the gullible American public largely believes them. Perceived as prospectively continuing the policies of the Biden administration, good news from the jobs report helps Kamala Harris’s election chances.

It isn’t just ignoring that only two months ago, the Bureau of Labor statistics revised downward their previously reported number April 2023 – March 2024 by over 800,000 jobs (around 27 percent)*. It’s the surreal practice of even talking about supposed job creation over the past four years as if most of it weren’t just recovering jobs lost during the 2020 Covid lockdowns.

During March and April of 2020, the BLS reported net job losses of almost 22 million. Of course, these were not the type of job losses sustained during the 2008 financial crisis. These were people ordered to stay home by the government as part of a suite of responses to Covid that did nothing but harm.

As people were allowed to go back to work, there were several months for which the BLS reported millions of “jobs created.” But everyone understood these were mostly just people previously ordered to stay home returning to work. At least while Trump was still president.

But once Joe Biden was inaugurated, the national media started ignoring that reality and treating higher than usual jobs reports as vindication of “Bidenomics.” The truth is it took years just to recover the number of jobs lost during March-April 2020. The 22 million jobs reported lost during that period were not added back until September 2022.

That’s 31 straight months of zero jobs created on net while millions of undocumented mouths to feed entered the country. That is an economic blow the likes of which modern Americans have never experienced in their lifetimes. And the problems it created were by no means solved after September 2022 when the economy finally began adding new jobs on net.

One cannot just start counting jobs created after September 2022 as “net jobs.” One also has to recognize the opportunity costs of the lockdowns. During those 31 months of net zero job creation, one must count the new jobs that would have been created during those 31 months. Job creation 2016-2019 averaged about 184,000 jobs/month. Had the economy continued at that pace during those 31 months, an additional 5.7 million new jobs would have been created during that time.

Once you net out job creation from March 2020 – July 2024 (August and September 2024 numbers are still “preliminary”) and subtract the 818,000 job downward revision, the economy has created a net 4.8 million jobs since March 2020. That’s an anemic 94,000 jobs per month on average over the past four and a half years, about half the jobs/month the economy was reported to have been creating 2016-19.

Had the lockdowns never been imposed and job creation averaged what it had 2016-19, the economy would have created a net 9.7 million jobs March 2020 – present. It has created half that number.

This might explain why the public has failed to acknowledge the supposedly strong economy. Why the numbers say job growth is strong but no one “feels it.” Why the Biden administration “isn’t getting credit” for the supposedly wonderful job it has done.

The American economy has nowhere near recovered from the Covid lockdowns and won’t for many years to come. From one perspective, the economy never recovers from these disastrous government interventions because capital formation is like compound interest. If you artificially lower a number in the past, the losses going forward are exponential.

Historians tend to ignore these considerations. The official story still says the New Deal saved the economy rather than dealt it a blow comparable to the Covid Regime’s. It is likely they will write the history of the 2020s in much the same way, with Fauci and company the heroes rather than destroyers of the wealth of an entire generation.

It is not until the public finally begins to consider what Bastiat called “that which is not seen” that anything will change. And that seems a long way off.

*As the job losses won’t be finalized by the BLS until February 2025, the BLS web page does not yet reflect the 800,000 jobs downward revision.

This originally appeared on Tom Mullen Talks Freedom.

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