How do you know the employment numbers were good under a Democratic president? CNSNews.com’s lead story focuses instead on a different number than the unemployment rate. Susan Jones’ lead story on October’s employment numbers again put the labor force participation rate in the headline and buried the good news:
In the final jobs report before Election Day, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said the October employment situation weakened from the prior month.
In October, the unemployment rate increased two-tenths of a point to 3.7 percent; and the labor force participation rate declined a tenth of a point to 62.2 percent.
The number of employed Americans — 158,608,000 in October — dropped by 328,000 from September’s all-time high of 158,936,000. At the same time, the number of unemployed Americans increased by 306,000 to 6,059,000, and the combination of that unemployed up/employed down produced the higher unemployment rate.
The nonfarm economy added 261,000 jobs last month, well above the consensus estimate of 200,000. Notable job gains occurred in health care, professional and technical services, and manufacturing.
And as before, Jones was still touting how great the economy was under Donald Trump:
The labor force participation rate reflects the active workforce — the percentage of civilian, non-institutionalized workers available for the production of goods and services, so the higher, the better.
The participation rate was 61.4 percent when Joe Biden took office as the pandemic raged. Today’s number, 62.2 percent, is still more than a point below the Trump-era high of 63.4 percent recorded in February 2020, just before COVID shut things down.
Editor Terry Jeffrey served up his usual sidebar about government employment, complaining that it increased “despite the fact that state government employment actually declined during the month.” Jeffrey didn’t explain why he doesn’t think government jobs are real jobs.
For the first time in a while, there was a second sidebar in the form of an anonymously written piece:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) put out a statement expressing her satisfaction with the October jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and arguing that Republicans are not happy with good economic news.
[…]“The October jobs numbers are the latest evidence that, under President Biden and the Democratic Congress, America continues to create jobs at a strong, steady, sustainable pace,” Pelosi said.
“While Republicans want to send costs soaring and make working families pay the price, Democrats will always put People Over Politics: lower costs, better-paying jobs and safer communities for all,” she said.
The anonymous author offered no evidence that Pelosi was wrong.