President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Actually, that's not true (not that it matters). The spending bill Joe Biden signed was $1.9 trillion. The one Donald Trump signed was $900 billion (not trillion). The one Obama signed in 2009 was $800 billion.

Regardless, that has nothing to do with my point. Joe Biden (or Donald Trump) has very little impact on the month to month jobs number, which is why I always find those reactions silly. Our economy has operated for a long time on the relative growth of the money supply (i.e. -- how much mispriced debt a central bank is enabling). The president doesn't directly control that.

What I was saying was that the closest Joe Biden personally has come to having an impact on the economy in that granular of a way, was the spending bill. Putting money in people's pockets didn't create any jobs (in fact, we have created so many disincentives to work the kinds of lower wage jobs that remain unfilled, that the labor force participation rate is less than 63 percent), but they essentially helicopter dropped money and created a lot of artificial demand for which there was not enough supply (and labor to meet that supply). That artificiality looks to have mostly filtered through, but not entirely (which is why the monthly job gains are getting smaller, just not small enough for the Fed, which is eager to create unemployment right now, because they think they need it to stem the consumer price inflation).

If you look at what they put out this morning, it was the second straight monthly decline in average hours worked, and the 34.3 hours was the lowest since April 2020, when Covid was hitting. Employers typically cut hours. ... before they start cutting jobs. If you look (anecdotally), the layoffs have started already with the largest companies that are more likely to get in front of what they think is coming.

Salesforce to Lay Off 10% of Staff and Cut Office Space
Amazon will lay off more than 18,000 workers | CNN Business
Goldman to cut thousands of staff as Wall Street layoffs intensify -source