Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

SHEFFIELD: While Biden Blames Others For His Failures, America’s Economy Continues To Nosedive

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It’s official, America’s job market is slowing down, and we have President Joe Biden to thank. The unemployment rate rose to 3.7% in August from 3.5% in July, thanks to Biden’s failed spending policies and a reactionary Federal Reserve that was asleep at the wheel as inflation spiked.

As we saw during his speech last night, Biden would rather drone on about conspiracy theories and demonize half the population he governs than undertake the fiscal discipline necessary to grow America’s economy. Employers added 315,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, a steep drop from 526,000 jobs added in July.

Though technically the U.S. labor market has more than recovered the topline number of pandemic job losses, this figure is not meaningful because the labor market is bleeding workers compared to pre-pandemic levels. The labor force participation rate increased by 0.3 percentage points in August to 62.4%, but this is 1.0 percentage point below its February 2020 level.

The employment-population ratio in August was little changed at 60.1% in August and remains 1.1 percentage points below its February 2020 value.

That low participation rate is behind the disappearance of 3.4 million workers — the number of workers who left the workforce according to the Chamber of Commerce. A big part of that missing workforce is the beleaguered travel industry, with “Employment in leisure and hospitality is below its February 2020 level by 1.2 million, or 7.2 percent,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics stated in its report today, and “Employment in furniture and home furnishings stores  continued to trend down (-3,000).”

Last night’s epic fail of a speech by Biden targeting former President Donald Trump is a telling split screen alongside today’s sluggish jobs report. Biden would rather deflect and distract from suffering American families.

It’s work asking who on earth approved Biden’s backdrop scene? Angry red, nerve-pulsating screams, two muscular Marines standing intimidatingly behind him. Let Biden be Biden, I suppose.

The man wants to rob the poor to pay rich college grads’ debt, permanently mask us and shut down the economy, inflate the U.S. dollar to Weimar Republic levels, and embrace racial essentialism and gender wars.

BLS also reported that in August, 1.9 million people reported they had been unable to work “because their  employer closed or lost business due to the pandemic–that is, they did not work at all or worked fewer hours at some point in the 4 weeks preceding the survey due to the pandemic.”

These workers sitting on the sidelines is in part because Biden continues to perpetuate his COVID emergency declarations.

Biden promised to unify us. Instead he’s partisan, angry and backward looking, and today’s jobs report is the fruition of his policies.

We need a president who cares about Americans’ suffering instead of blaming others for his failures. We need a president who loves all people, not just a few well-educated, liberal elites.

Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.