On Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that a record 4.3 million workers quit their jobs in August, the highest level in over 20 years.
“Employment vacancies fell to 10.4 million during the month, a drop of 659,000 from July’s upwardly revised 11.1 million, according to the Labor Department’s JOLTS report,” CNBC reported. “The decline was well short of market expectations for 10.96 million job postings. … The job posting rate as a percentage of the workforce fell to 6.6% in August from 7% in July.”
The food service and accommodation industries were hard-hit along with the retail and health care industries; 892,000 workers in the food service and accommodation industries quit while 721,000 retail workers and 534,000 in health care and social assistance industries also left their jobs.
“In August, the job openings rate decreased in medium establishments with 50-249 employees. The hires rate decreased in large establishments with 250-999 employees,” the JOLTS report noted.
The Associated Press admitted one reason for the increase in people quitting their jobs was the stimulus checks from the federal government, writing, “Layoffs and lockdowns, combined with enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, gave many Americans the time and the financial cushion to rethink their careers.” AP added, “Employers and business groups argue that the $300-per-week federal unemployment supplement gives recipients less incentive to look for work.”
Just after August ended, on September 3 President Biden bragged:
But despite the impact of the Delta variant — and I’ll talk a little more about that in a minute — what we’re seeing is an economic recovery that is durable and strong. The Biden plan is working. We’re getting results. America is on the move again. And today’s revision of previous month job gains, with the revision of the July numbers — this report means that we have been adding an average of 750,000 jobs per month, on average, during the past three months.
Biden admitted, “I know people were looking, and I was hoping, for a higher number.”
The same day Biden was boasting that the economy was “durable and strong,” The Daily Wire noted:
The U.S. economy floundered last month as job growth fell sharply and missed economists’ expectations by nearly half-a-million new jobs. The economy added 235,000 jobs in August, far below economists’ predictions of 720,000 and a sharp drop in job growth from the previous two months when the economy added 962,000 jobs in June and another 1.1 million in July, according to Department of Labor data released Friday.
“That is what one would call a big, big miss,” CNN White House correspondent Phil Mattingly noted.
September showed Biden should have been more worried. “The economy created 194,000 jobs in September, the smallest gain since December 2020 and down from 366,000 jobs added in August,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “Many workers gave up a job search and exited the labor force last month.”
National Review wrote on September 20, “One of the key questions facing Congress this month is whether to continue this deluge of government checks. President Biden and other Democrats who support making them permanent are already resorting to budget gimmicks to minimize the apparent cost, leaving it to future lawmakers to raise the taxes needed to pay them permanently.”