Stalling Jobs Numbers, Biden's Record, and Trump's Economic Mission

WSJ Opinion: Potomac Watch

The Wall Street Journal

Society & Culture, News

4 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

New figures show hiring slowed in August, the U.S. economy was worse than reported in 2024, and real wages for the median American barely went up last year. Do the data revisions help explain why voters were so unhappy with Joe Biden? And is Donald Trump losing track of his economic mandate, amid a raid on a Hyundai site and an expanding loophole for tax free tips? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Energy demand is rising, and the infrastructure we build today will provide affordable energy for generations.
0:06.5	When America builds, America wins. Read API's plan to secure America's future at permitting reform now.org.
0:13.0	Pay for by the American Petroleum Institute.
0:17.6	From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.
0:23.6	New federal jobs numbers, including revisions going back more than a year, show the economy in a weaker position than expected.
0:31.8	As the Trump administration demands Federal Reserve rate cuts, detains Korean workers in a raid on a Georgia electric vehicle
0:39.2	battery plant, and unveils rules for its new policy of tax-free tips. Welcome, I'm Kyle
0:46.0	Peterson with the Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues on the editorial page,
0:51.2	columnists Alicia Finley and Joe Sternberg. The data on Friday from the Bureau
0:56.4	of Labor Statistics was jobs numbers for August. Employers added a net 22,000 jobs with revisions
1:04.6	also downward for previous months. Then on Tuesday, the BLS reported a downer revision for the period between April
1:12.9	2024 and March 2025 of 911,000 jobs lower than previously estimated. Let's listen to the White
1:22.3	House responding to those figures in a press briefing on Tuesday. This is Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt.
1:29.2	And this was one of the biggest revisions in absolute terms in decades.
1:33.9	In the benchmark year, March 24 to 2025, shows that the job growth was vastly weaker during the Biden administration than ever previously reported.
1:43.7	Between this revision and last year's
1:45.6	job growth was actually overstated by approximately 2 million jobs. And the Biden administration
1:51.4	stood up here and vouched for that data and told you that data was real. And when President
1:55.9	Trump calls into question the veracity of that data like he did before he took the oath of office
2:00.8	and even now as President of the United States,
2:02.6	he was ridiculed for that. And turns out this revision proves two things.
2:06.6	Number one, the President was right. And this is why we need new leadership at the Fed.
	...

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