Bye, Bye Biden’s Jobs Boom
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) this week performed its annual ritual of self-correction and admitted that the U.S. economy added 911,000 fewer jobs in the twelve months through March 2025 than it had previously reported. It was the largest downward revision on record.
Instead of creating 1.8 million jobs in that span, the economy managed only about 850,000. Instead of average monthly payroll gains of 147,000, the real figure was about 70,000.
This follows last year’s revision, which wiped away nearly 600,000 jobs from the tally for the year ended March 2024. Two years in a row, the government’s most closely watched jobs series painted a rosier picture than reality. Two years in a row, the cheerleaders of Bidenomics assured us that any discontent was in our heads—a trick of bad vibes and social media.
It turns out the voters were right, and the official statistics were wrong.
The Great Vibecession Fable
For much of 2023 and 2024, respectable opinion held that the U.S. was suffering not a real recession, but a “vibecession.“ The data, we were told, showed strength. Only voters, marinating in misinformation, imagined weakness.
Paul Krugman was the most diligent enforcer of this catechism. In July 2024, he wrote that “claims that Americans are much worse off than the official numbers say fail across the board.” A couple months earlier he assured readers that “by normal measures… the U.S. economy isn’t in bad shape. In fact, it’s doing quite well, better than almost all its global peers.”
When confronted with the suggestion that Americans might be weighing their lived experience above the charts, Krugman deployed his signature move: he just sighed at the gullibility of Americans who refused to believe the experts.
The sigh has not aged well. The statistics were wrong. The “booming” labor market was in fact crawling along at half the pace advertised. The vibecession wasn’t a mirage conjured by Fox News, TikTok, or right-wing vibes. It was reality, noticed first by the public and last by the experts.
Lectured from on High
The tone was always the same: experts scolding the deplorables. Voters said the economy was weak; pundits replied that they didn’t understand how good they had it. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell declared in December 2024 that “the U.S. economy has just been remarkable.” Jared Bernstein of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers proclaimed in June 2024: “It’s beyond question that this is one of the strongest labor markets that we’ve ever seen.”
It was all very fashionable to dismiss public skepticism as ignorance. Inflation had fallen, after all. Employment reports showed hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Anyone saying otherwise was accused of letting partisan narratives or “vibes” cloud their judgment.
Now we know the public was reading the economy better than the experts who claimed to speak for it.
The Fed Buys Its Own Press
The Federal Reserve wasn’t just a bystander in this myth-making. It believed the hype. Because it thought the economy was still adding jobs at a healthy clip, the Fed lowered interest rates only cautiously in late 2024—and then suddenly stopped lowering them with the restoration of Donald Trump’s presidency.
With the benefit of hindsight, the central bank was already behind the curve. A labor market eking out 70,000 jobs a month was one calling for urgent relief, not timid quarter-point trims. That is far less than most estimates of what the economy needs to produce just to keep up with an expanding population.
President Donald Trump speaks to Fed Chair Jerome Powell during a tour of the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC, on July 24, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
Future historians of monetary policy will surely look at the first half of 2025 as a lost opportunity for the U.S. economy and the Fed’s stand-pat policy as yet another mistake under Powell’s leadership. By August 2025, unemployment had climbed to 4.3 percent, the highest in nearly four years. That makes two institutions now facing questions about credibility: the BLS for publishing overstating job counts by unprecedented amounts and the Fed for building policy on them.
Trump’s Inheritance
This revision also recasts the political inheritance. The story last year was that Donald Trump was being handed an economy already matching his campaign promises: strong growth, rising jobs, cooling inflation. The New York Times ran a December headline calling the economy “remarkable” and noting that America was outstripping its global peers. Commentators marveled at the supposed paradox of a historic job market coexisting with voter pessimism.
But there was no paradox. Biden’s jobs boom was a mirage. Voters sensed weakness because weakness was there. Biden’s supposed gift to his successor was, like so much else in his presidency, inflated by bad data.
Two Years of Overstatement
What makes this more than a statistical quirk is the pattern. In February 2025, the BLS finalized a nearly 600,000-job downward revision for the year through March 2024. This September, it acknowledged another 911,000-job shortfall for the following year. Two years running, the government overstated the strength of the labor market by margins that would make a Chinese communist economic planning committee blush.
The vibecession wasn’t a psychological problem among voters or evidence that a GOP narrative had taken over the minds of the American people. Instead, it was a myth created to explain a mismatch between sentiment and statistics that was rooted in a measurement problem among government economists and statisticians.
The lesson of the past two years is straightforward: ordinary Americans saw the slowdown before the experts admitted it. They noticed the paychecks stretched thin, the jobs harder to come by, the security less certain. They were right, and the experts were wrong.
If there’s a reason Trump is back in the Oval Office, this is it. Voters weren’t duped by narratives or living in a fantasy. They simply recognized reality before the statistical establishment did.
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