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“Today’s report marks a milestone in America’s comeback,” Joe Biden bragged in March. “With today’s report of 303,000 new jobs in March, we have passed the milestone of 15 million jobs created since I took office.” Milestone or a millstone though might be a matter of opinion.
Politicians like to brag about “creating jobs” and for once it was literally true.
Of those 300,000 jobs, 71,000 or 1 in 4 were government jobs. Another 72,000 jobs came out of the healthcare industry, which is heavily government funded. And 9,000 came from “employment in social assistance” or welfare. About 1 in 2 of Biden’s jobs were funded by taxpayers in one form or another. The only non-government industry showing significant job growth was the hospitality industry, which was prepping temporary employment for vacation season.
An even more absurd story of government job growth came out of New York City, where city officials boasted of having recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic. But a Bloomberg article revealed that “virtually all of the jobs added in the 12 months ended in March were in home health care, a low-paying but rapidly swelling field. It’s technically classified as private employment, but home health care is paid for primarily through publicly funded health programs like Medicaid.” Meanwhile actual private sector jobs were vanishing in New York.
“It’s giving us this sense that our economy is growing when in fact it’s really just Medicaid that’s growing,” Bill Hammond, a senior fellow for health policy at the Empire Center for Public Policy, pointed out.
While the Education and Health and the Government job sectors boomed in New York, mostly everything else was contracting or struggling.
And it’s not just New York City.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics report for the nation in April noted 175,000 new jobs of which the majority, 95,000, were in Private Education and Health Services. This was once again the only category that showed any significant growth.
The BLS’s Occupational Outlook Handbook estimated a massive 804,000 increase in Home Health and Personal Care Aides that far outweighed any other job categories. Around 1.4 million of its projected new jobs were in the healthcare arena, far outweighing any other group like construction (61,000) or accountants (67,400).
While America’s population is aging, everyone didn’t suddenly get much older and sicker in a matter of a few years, but we have been spending a whole lot more money on healthcare.
One of the disastrous COVID-19 boondoggles was the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which forced states to keep everyone on Medicaid. As a result, Medicaid enrollment has gone on the rise each year by sizable numbers with no definitive decline in enrollment until 2024. The move wiped out all of the Republican congressional reforms during the Obama era and the sharp decline in enrollment under Trump.
The latest New York State budget spends $100 billion on Medicaid. In a state with a population of 19 million, 7.6 million or 40% are on Medicaid.
How did New York City create its massive jobs boom in the “home health industry”?
The answer, discovered by Bloomberg, is that the city began paying family members to take care of Medicaid recipients while treating them as “private sector” workers. The number of people being listed as workers because they provided some care for family members shot up from less than 20,000 in 2016 to 247,538 in 2023. The cost to taxpayers for this program rose to $9 billion and federal funding of New York’s Medicaid program comes out to $66 billion.
The added advantage is that the government was creating jobs without creating any new jobs. It had simply begun paying people for what they were doing already while taking all the credit.
The Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services began aggressively promoting an expansion in home health care workers last year and it’s paying off. Last year, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra boasted of having handed out $37 billion from the badly misnamed ‘American Rescue Plan’ for home based services and enhanced Medicaid funding.
Democratic states took advantage of COVID measures and Biden's funding to increase their workforces. The home health care workforce more than doubled in Illinois, increased vastly in California, and Wisconsin used pandemic funding to expand its home health care program.
Health care spending and other forms of welfare are a vital part of Biden’s fake jobs boom.
Front Page Investigates (FCI) revealed earlier this year that 10% of new January jobs had come from “employment in social assistance”. The current BLS report shows that “employment in social assistance increased by 31,000 in April” out of a total of 175,000 jobs.
Employment in social assistance has been gaining an average of 22,000 jobs a month.
Along with health care, welfare continues to be a leading source of Biden’s job growth. These are not the signs of a healthy economy, but a faltering socialist economy faking its job growth.
Rather than creating private sector jobs, Biden and the Democrats are creating government funded private sector jobs, some of which, like those in New York City, are not even jobs at all.
By boosting Medicaid spending and other forms of welfare assistance, Biden and the Democrats faked a jobs boom and an economic expansion that doesn’t exist.
With total Medicaid spending of over $800 billion and overall welfare spending that is too vast to even capture, the Biden administration, along with state and city governments, took us deep into debt to manufacture a recovery without doing anything more than padding out the union and welfare rolls that provide them with their voting base.
And it’s not an original idea. Health care employment has risen at a far more dramatic rate than regular employment since the Clinton administration. Health care employment has increased 100% since 1990 while other forms of employment have struggled to reach 40%. And where other jobs have not recovered, health care continues to grow. 10% of all jobs are now in the health care sector. And while health care is a necessary service, much of that job increase has been ‘padded out’ by union mandated jobs that don’t provide vital and needful services.
The Biden administration’s formula for job gains is government spending. But government spending provides nothing but a temporary boost in the market-based private sector. However, creating entitlements and boosting union rolls does create jobs. Unfortunately, those jobs tend to be a net loss and a severe drain on the economy. That's what Biden and New York did.
We're all paying the price.
Rather than rebuilding a healthy economy, Biden and the Democrats built a health care economy. Instead of creating manufacturing jobs, they manufactured jobs. And so we’re stuck in recession with persistent inflation and the only thing that’s booming is the explosive rate of government spending on propping up a fake economy that only benefits the government.
