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TUCKER CARLSON: Why are they lying to us about this?
Tucker Carlson says the Biden administration changed the definition of ‘recession’
Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. This past summer, with just a few months to go before the midterm elections, the Biden administration faced a huge problem called the economy. Most voters vote on the basis of the economy and how they feel they’re doing and how they feel their country is doing. And their country at the time was not doing well.
The US economy had just recorded two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. That’s not just an academic observation. That’s a technical definition of a recession. Two quarters. Declining GDP. Recession. We’re not making that up. You’ll find it in every economics textbook ever written. Go look up the one you used in college. But the Biden administration could not admit that. If they admitted that the US was in a recession, they would lose the Senate. They would lose control of both chambers of the Congress. So they had to lie about it.
But how do you lie about something that’s so easily defined, that everyone can see? Well, you just change the definition. And that’s what they did. They came up with a new definition of recession. So don’t look at GDP. That’s the old way, the racist way of assessing the economy. Look at holistic factors. Let’s look at the labor market, for example. The labor market.
Well, then, in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave them ammunition for their case. The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a report that showed the labor market was strong. They determined that the US economy had added more than a million jobs in the second quarter of this year, from March to June. A million jobs. That’s a big deal. It’s a big story. And of course, Joe Biden wasted no time in touting it. Watch.
[VIDEO]
JOE BIDEN: Our job market remains historically strong. Our economy created more than 9 million jobs since I came to office, in no small part because of the people on this stage. Our economy created more than 1 million jobs in the second quarter.
A million new jobs in the second quarter despite negative growth. Wait a second. How do you get a million new jobs with negative growth? That seems like magic. How is that possible? But no one in the media asked questions. Instead, they repeated the White House line, which was the BLS report — the Bureau of Labor Statistics report — showing a million new jobs proves we can’t be in a recession. They all said it, quote, “The jobs report suggests the Biden economy is not in a recession,” wrote The New York Times. And then, of course, there were other stories like that, too. So on the basis of that and other factors, they won. They now have control of the Senate.
TUCKER CARLSON: BORDER CRISIS IS AN ‘INVASION OF OUR COUNTRY’
And now we get to learn the truth. A million new jobs, really? The Philadelphia Fed decided to check those numbers and they found the US economy did not add more than a million jobs in the second quarter of this year. Instead, the net additional jobs was about 10,000. So that’s less than 1% of the job growth the administration claimed. That’s not a rounding error. That’s not a minor math mistake. This is a country that supposedly sent a man to the moon. We can do math, right? This isn’t like thinking you had 100 bucks in your pocket and finding out you had 85. This is like claiming you had $1,000,000 in your pocket and finding out you had $10,000. This is like claiming you were rich when you were actually bankrupt. This is a lie.
So how’d they get it wrong by more than a million jobs? How did they construct this lie? Well, as of tonight, we’re not really sure. We now know the BLS numbers didn’t just help Joe Biden, though. There was another purpose. These fake numbers also gave the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, a justification to continue raising interest rates. On the basis of that report, they can raise rates. Here was Powell just a few days ago.
US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testifies before the House Oversight And Government Reform Committee hearings on oversight of the Treasury Department’s and Federal Reserve’s Pandemic Response, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, September 30, 2021. (Photo by Al Drago / various sources / AFP) (Photo by AL DRAGO/AFP via Getty Images) (Photo by AL DRAGO/AFP via Getty Images)
[VIDEO]
JEROME POWELL: Today, the FOMC raised our policy interest rate by a half percentage point. We continue to anticipate that ongoing increases will be appropriate in order to attain a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive, to return inflation to 2% over time. Despite the slowdown in growth, the labor market remains extremely tight, with the unemployment rate near a 50-year low. Job vacancy is still very high and wage growth elevated. Job gains have been robust.
Ooh. Every word of that a lie. The justification is a lie. And in fact, as Powell well knows, there are 7 million American men of working age who are not working. They’re watching the Internet all day. So why are they lying to us about this? Well, the effects are very obvious. Go try and take out a car loan or a home loan or any kind of loan. Or if you have a loan, it’s got an adjustable rate, watch how much more you’re paying per month. So why are they doing this? Well, the administration wants Powell to raise rates because they think it’ll offset the inflation that Joe Biden’s policies have caused.
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But this is a huge problem for everyone else. Raising rates when the economy is faltering and people don’t have jobs. If you keep doing that, you could cause an actual collapse. That seems like the course they put us on. The Biden administration got the interest rate hike it wanted even when the labor market has been flatlining. William Beach runs the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Marty Walsh runs the Department of Labor. They need to explain why anyone should ever trust the most basic economic numbers the government issues ever again. And it’s one thing to get the numbers wrong, but then to base future policies on numbers you know are wrong, what is that? That’s what they’re doing. Jerome Powell should probably answer that question fairly soon. He won’t join us tonight either.
Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network in 2009 as a contributor.
Government over-reported job growth numbers by 99% this year
The government has been caught spiking job growth numbers. In investigative research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, job numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) were inflatedby over 1,000,000 when growth should have been just over 10,000 jobs.
That is an unmistakable departure from the true numbers according to the Federal Reserve. The grossly-inflated numbers were touted by the Biden administration ahead of the November mid-term elections.
“In the aggregate, 10,500 net new jobs were added during the period rather than the 1,121,500 jobs estimated by the sum of the states; the U.S. CES [Current Employment Survey] estimated net growth of 1,047,000 jobs for the period,” the report stated.
The discrepancy was reported in the Federal Reserve’s quarterly report and raises serious concerns about the politicization of job numbers by the BLS and the Biden administration. The discrepancies were not a one-off report but, rather, wrong in 33 states.
According to the regional central bank’s second-quarter “Early Benchmark Revisions of State Payroll Employment” report (pdf), researchers’ estimated employment changes that occurred between March and June were different in 33 states and the District of Columbia from data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
During this period, Philadelphia Fed researchers found that there were higher adjustments in four states, lower changes in 29 states and the nation’s capital, and lesser revisions in the remaining 17 states. This included a 4.1 percent drop in payroll employment in Delaware and a 1.2 percent decrease in jobs in New Jersey.
As a result, employment gains might have been overcounted by more than 1.1 million.
This also means that payroll jobs were little changed in the March-to-June span. In addition, current estimates indicate that employment growth was 2.8 percent in the four months since June.
E.J. Antoni, a research fellow for Regional Economics in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation, says the government pushed “job growth” early on without actual facts to back it up.
“The Philly Fed data aligns well with the household survey that shows a flat job market since March, contra the robust growth from the establishment survey,” he said. “The seasonal adjustments to the monthly headline jobs numbers this year from BLS have been abnormally large to the upside. December’s number will have to be revised down 30% more than normal to essentially balance out the earlier large upward revisions. Job growth was technically ‘front loaded’ in 2022.”
Will this force the BLS to revise its figures lower in the coming months?
Government fudging the numbers
Critics say that there’s something wrong with the monthly jobs report.
The BLS report is comprised of two chief surveys: establishment (businesses) and household. The former has recorded stronger-than-expected growth for most of 2022, while the latter has been roughly flat. Since March, the divergence has skyrocketed to 2.7 million workers.
The main explanation for this gap is that the BLS allows double counting. This means it will count every extra job a person possesses as another payroll. The household component doesn’t permit this feature.
Because the number of people holding two or more jobs has risen by more than 8 percent since November 2021—to roughly 7.8 million—double counting has increased significantly over the last year.
Despite overcounting issues, federal government data in November suggest that the U.S. labor market is slowing. Full-time employment decreased from October to November, part-time job growth was flat, and the Department of Labor’s diffusion index—a metric that calculates the percentage of 256 industries adding jobs—slumped to 63.5, down from 74.8 last year.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, pictured July 28 at a press conference, writes: “I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels.” (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The Biden administration has promised not to raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year. And despite estimates from official congressional scorekeepers that the Schumer-Manchin-Biden tax increase indeed would raise taxes on those Americans, the administration has doubled down on the claim as a final vote nears on Democrats’ bill.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a letterWednesday to IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig that includes this statement:
Specifically, I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels.
Yellen’s directive follows Rettig’s Aug. 4 letter to U.S. senators declaring the same objective:
These resources are absolutely not about increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans. As we’ve been planning, our investment of these enforcement resources is designed around the Department of the Treasury’s directive that audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.
But considering the sheer magnitude of 87,000 new IRS agents and an estimated $204 billion in new revenues from enforcement, is it possible for all those new audits and revenues to involve only taxpayers making over $400,000?
—Returning to 2010 audit rates for all individuals making over $400,000 would generate only 28%, or $9.9 billion, out of the estimated $35.3 billion in new IRS enforcement revenues in 2031.
—Even increasing recent audit rates thirtyfold for taxpayers making over $400,000—including 100% audit rates on taxpayers with incomes over $10 million—still would fall more than 20% short of raising the estimated $35.3 billion in new revenues in 2031.
Note: This assumes a 98% increase in the number of tax filers making over $400,000 between 2019 and 2031, based on annual growth rates between 2014 and 2019. Audit rates from 2010 to 2019 by income group and additional tax per individual tax return audited for 2021 is available here from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
Estimated revenues from a thirtyfold increase in audits almost certainly is overstated, since 30% to 40% of audits in these income groups result in no additional tax being owed, and audits already target returns with higher likelihoods of underpayments.
—Auditing every single taxpayer with annual income over $1 million would require only 25,000 new IRS enforcement agents, but Democrats’ bill calls for 87,000 new agents. What will all those extra agents be doing?
Note: Estimates are based on the Treasury Department’s estimated new full-time-equivalent agents, and the Government Accountability Office’s estimated hours per audit by individual income level.
Calculations conservatively assume that only 57.3% of the Treasury Department’s estimated 86,852 new IRS agents (49,754 in total) would be assigned to enforcement, based on $45.6 billion of the bill’s $79.6 billion increase for the Internal Revenue Service dedicated to enforcement.
Calculations also assume that 8.9% of IRS enforcement agents would be assigned to corporate audits, based on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that corporations account for 8.9% of the tax gap. Enforcement agents are assumed to spend 75% of their paid time auditing tax returns.
Despite the Biden administration’s claims, it’s almost certain that households making less than $400,000 a year would face increased audits under Democrats’ bill.
And that seems to be the true intent of the IRS. According to a 2021 report from the Government Accountability Office, “From fiscal years 2010 to 2021, the majority of the additional taxes IRS recommended from audits came from taxpayers with incomes below $200,000.”
That recommendation is based on audits of lower-income tax returns producing more bang for the buck, as the report noted:
Audits of the lowest-income taxpayers, particularly those claiming the EITC [earned income tax credit], resulted in higher amounts of recommended additional tax per audit hour compared to all income groups except for the highest-income taxpayers.
The Treasury Department’s report on the proposed new funding includes a footnote highlighting the already-high prevalence of IRS audits among low-income households:
“Work by former IRS economist Kim Bloomquist points out that the five counties with the highest audit rates are predominantly African-American, rural counties in the South,” the report says.
High rates of return from auditing low-income households alongside the average large corporate tax filing totaling nearly 6,000 pages says that our current tax code is far too complex.
Instead of increasing taxpayer audits, policymakers should simplify taxes across the board. That way, it would be easier for everyone to pay the correct amount to the government.
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Several scholars have pointed out that Lois Lerner waived her right to invoke the 5th!!!! The Heritage Foundation, The Washington Post, and The Week, all have articles on this issue. Here is one below I found on Townhall.com:
There was no way Lois Lerner’s part in the IRS saga would end quietly, even as she invoked her right to remain silent.
Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, boldly asserted this afternoon that Lerner “waived” her right to plead the Fifth Amendment when she made an opening statement at this morning’s hearing. From POLITICO:
The California Republican said Lerner’s Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination was voided when she gave an opening statement this morning denying any wrongdoing and professing pride in her government service.
“When I asked her her questions from the very beginning, I did so so she could assert her rights prior to any statement,” Issa told POLITICO. “She chose not to do so — so she waived.” …
“The precedents are clear that this is not something you can turn on and turn off,” he told POLITICO. “She made testimony after she was sworn in, asserted her innocence in a number of areas, even answered questions asserting that a document was true … So she gave partial testimony and then tried to revoke that.” …
“I understand from her counsel that there was a plan to assert her Fifth Amendment rights,” he continued. “She went ahead and made a statement, so counsel let her effectively under the precedent, waive — so we now have someone who no longer has that ability.”
Essentially, he argues, her opening statement, in which she proclaimed her innocence, constituted a forfeiture of Fifth Amendment protection because she spoke on her own behalf about her involvement in the matter. Issa intends to invite Lerner before the committee again in the hopes of conducting a proper grilling, and others–including Rep. Trey Gowdy–agree that she must now give testimony.
“Mr. Cummings just said we should run this hearing like a courtroom, and I agree with him,” Gowdy thundered. “[Lerner] just testified. She just waived her Fifth Amendment right. You don’t get to tell your side of the story and then not be subjected to cross examination — that’s not the way it works. She waived her right to Fifth Amendment privilege by issuing an opening statement. She ought to stand here and answer our questions.”
However, it’s not so simple as that. Legal scholars say that the Fifth Amendment works differently in Congressional fact-finding hearings than in a court of law–one cannot simply conflate the two, as they exist for different purposes. Fifth Amendment expert James Duane gave the following explanation (h/t to Allahpundit for the link):
First, unlike in a trial, where she could choose to take the stand or not, Lerner had no choice but to appear before the committee. Second, in a trial there would be a justifiable concern about compromising a judge or jury by providing them with “selective, partial presentation of the facts.” But Congress is merely pursuing information as part of an investigation, not making a definitive ruling on Lerner’s guilt or innocence.
“When somebody is in this situation,” says Duane, a Harvard Law graduate whose 2008 lecture on invoking the Fifth Amendment with police has been viewed on YouTube nearly 2.5 million times, “when they are involuntarily summoned before grand jury or before legislative body, it is well settled that they have a right to make a ‘selective invocation,’ as it’s called, with respect to questions that they think might raise a meaningful risk of incriminating themselves.”
In fact, Duane says, “even if Ms. Lerner had given answers to a few questions — five, ten, twenty questions — before she decided, ‘That’s where I draw the line, I’m not answering any more questions,’ she would be able to do that as well.” Such uses of selective invocation “happen all the time.”
Unfortunately for Issa and company, it seems Lerner was within her rights to make a statement and then clam up. Of course, drawing greater attention to her silence could, ultimately, help in the investigation of the IRS; if they ask her back and she stonewalls, the public might want to know why. Hopefully, in any event, someone–anyone–will bear some legitimate responsibility for the whole affair, and lose the job they clearly never should have had in the first place.
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