MILWAUKEE — Although President Joe Biden has honed in on the robust labor force as perhaps the only positive economic metric to compare with the record of Donald Trump, top economic advisers to the former and potential future president released their research confirming that nearly half of all jobs added in the past year are simply government jobs.
During an economic policy forum on the third morning of the Republican National Convention, Stephen Moore and Art Laffer debuted their finding that of the roughly 2.6 million jobs added from May of last year until this year, 782,000 were in the healthcare industry and 617,000 were in government.
“Roughly half of all healthcare spending is just government,” said Moore, a key architect of Trump’s signature legislative achievement, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. (Full disclosure: this columnist’s husband works with Moore and Laffer.)
Indeed, whereas government insurance was once only responsible for a mere quarter of all healthcare spending, government insurance now comprises half of all healthcare spending. And that’s not including healthcare purchased on Obamacare exchanges.
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So the 617,000 government job gains and half of all the healthcare job gains total more than 1 million. That’s nearly half of the 2.4 million jobs added in total during the 12 months ending in May 2024.
It’s true that the labor market has remained unusually tight for some time now, with the unemployment rate hovering around half-century lows during most of Biden’s tenure in office. But Bidenomics, which Moore and Laffer found reduced real annual earnings by more than $2,000 on average, may lose its only selling point if the Federal Reserve fails at securing its soft landing, and then not even the government may be able keep the job market afloat.
