For the Record: Good News for Joe Biden—Why That's Bad News for Joe Biden

Remember that Dana Milbank piece about how unfairly the press treats Biden as opposed to Trump at the beginning of December?

Even the extraordinary news that jobless claims had dropped to the lowest level in 52 years came with a qualifier: “BUT, BUT, BUT … don’t expect [the numbers] to immediately change Americans’ negative perceptions of the economy.”

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman taking it, as she seems to take most things, as a personal attack on her, had a pretty snippy subtweet response, to which I happened to respond myself:

Here’s a perfect example, Maggie pic.twitter.com/GYMTpW9TuW

— Rob Wagner 😷😷🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@wagner_rob) December 4, 2021

You haven't read it very well then. Sorry, I really value your work, but you should have found out that the job numbers were drastically and unprecedentedly underestimated through the summer and had to be hugely revised, and that's why we should be skeptical about November.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) December 5, 2021

Because all year, if you were reading, the "mainstream media" had been highlighting monthly job numbers coming in under expectations as DISASTERS FOR BIDEN and, in the very same stories, just whispering the fact that the previous month's numbers were much better than originally reported.

Résumé

Trump told Republicans he doesn't want impeachment on his 'resume': report

Wonder what he's planning to apply for.

Trump's plan to increase immigration

Not that I necessarily have a problem with that—I like immigrants! Still, it's going to be ironic.

I can't remember where I read this, but one of the more secret purposes of the NAFTA agreement among the US, Canada, and Mexico, was supposed to be decreasing immigration, including undocumented immigration, from Mexico into the United States, by enabling Mexico to provide good jobs for its citizens at home. In fact it wasn't exactly a secret, as The Times reported at the time,

The Clinton Administration contends the pact would also discourage illegal immigration from Mexico by creating jobs there; critics say that the pact would fuel illegal immigration by throwing thousands of Mexicans out of work in uncompetitive industries like corn farming.

And the Clinton administration was right on that: it has definitely succeeded in the long run. The effective thing being that the corn farming jobs didn't pay enough to keep people alive anyway and the maquiladora jobs did. After five or so years when the most alarmist predictions seemed to be coming true, the rate started to decline, ending up pretty near net zero (as many people now emigrate from US to Mexico as make the trip the other way).

Who says?

Everybody keeps telling us that small business is the "engine of job creation" in the United States, but it's not so clear. Following up a post from Ontario at Kos:

According to Who creates jobs? Small vs. large vs. young by John C. Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda, NBER Working Paper No. 16300 (2010), small business is not that much of a job creator. Looking at Census Bureau data for the decade from 1992 to 2005, they found that

businesses tend to create jobs in proportion to their importance in the economy. Thus, large mature firms—those more than ten years old and with more than 500 workers—employed about 45 percent of all private-sector workers and accounted for almost 40 percent of job creation and destruction in this study.

 Where small size of the firm had an effect, it wasn't because it was small but because it was new:

The real driver of disproportionate job growth, they find, is not small companies, but young companies. It is the startup firms that generate the surge of jobs that earlier research attributed to small companies.

After which they sell out to Microsoft (that's the program), or fold and put together a job-creating emo band or gourmet taco truck.