EDITORIAL: Bad economic news clouds the White House

The Harris-Biden administration has failed on many fronts — inflation, the debt, the border, to name a few glaring examples. The White House typically deflects such criticisms by touting the robust job market and low unemployment that have largely characterized the past three years.

But numbers released last week will make it much tougher for Joe Biden and his Kamala Harris to hide behind that fig leaf.

The Labor Department reported Friday that the nation added just 114,000 jobs in July, the second worst performance in the past 43 months. Unemployment jumped two-tenths of percentage point to 4.3 percent, the highest in nearly three years, when the nation was still in the throes of the pandemic. In addition wage growth slowed.

“The data,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “adds to evidence that a labor market whose strength was already fading could actually be on its way to weakness.”

The disappointing jobs figures came just one day after the Institute for Supply Management reported a drop in manufacturing employment. In addition, The New York Times reported that payroll figures were adjusted downward for both May and June, “bringing the labor market’s steady slowdown into sharper focus.”

Stock indices responded by plummeting on Thursday and Friday. “Labor demand is slowing more abruptly than we and the Fed probably expected,” Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide, told the Times. It’s unclear, she said, if the moderation in demand is “consistent with a soft landing or something harder or bumpier.”

Some observers pointed a finger at the Federal Reserve, which has been reluctant to trim interest rates for fear that inflation could rebound. The central bank opted to leave rates as is recently, hinting that a cut could be coming in September.

But let’s remember that the Fed’s interventions came in response to price hikes that devastated American families after the Harris-Biden administration overcooked the economy with a massive government spending spree following COVID. The resulting inflation — 9 percent at one point, the highest in four decades — was a complete surprise to the White House despite warnings from prominent economists. While inflation has eased in the past 20 months, Americans are remain stuck paying consistently higher prices for basic staples.

Now even the employment picture is deteriorating. “While the labor market was bound to cool down from its post-pandemic hiring spree,” the Journal observed, “the question now is whether it will keep softening right into a recession.”

That’s the economic reality many families have been forced to face under Harris-Biden — $4-a-gallon prices at the pump, $20 fast-food lunches, soaring mortgage interest rates and a potential recession. With job growth hitting the wall, the Kamala Harris spin doctors will have to become even more creative to convince independent voters that they’re too dumb to know how good they’ve had it for the past three-plus years.