Another Year, Another (Just a) Dream of New Jobs in America

Feb. 12—The U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) put out a January employment report Feb. 11, somewhat delayed but otherwise just like last year’s: “Downward revisions” wiped out the claimed employment increases for the entire previous year, but January popped out, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new fake of job growth.

The BLS reported 130,000 new jobs created in January, “unexpectedly.” But in its “annual revision” performed each January, the number of net new jobs created in 2025 as a whole, was revised downward by 862,000. So it now appears that actual job creation in Trump’s first year, second term, was negligible at 15,000/month, whereas the first month of 2026 leaped up by a fantastical 130,000.

For two years in a row now, essentially all of the year’s claimed job creation has been wiped away in the “annual revision” done in the following January. This then allows the January job creation figure to be whatever they please—it will be just “penciled in” for later, less noticeable decapitation.

The Grim Reaper of all those jobs, once again, is the Labor Department’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, compiled with a six months’ delay, from actual employment tax data, and therefore fairly accurate.

Stock prices on Wall Street leaped first thing this morning in response to the fake, but once traders and algorithms read the actual story, it seemed that Hickey did something to the booze.