Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
US Created Only 181,000 Jobs in All of 2025
The Bureau of Labor Statistics finally issued the Non-Farm Payroll report this morning, delayed from Friday because of the government shutdown (the official pretext). It showed that, in January 2026, the US created 130,000 jobs, abd the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3% from 4.4%. That would be anemic in the Obama years, and it is not great now. Yet buried in the report is a figure that should be headline news everywhere. In all of 2025, the US created a total of 181,000 new jobs. This is markedly down from the 584,000 initially reported. On a monthly basis, that means just 15,000 jobs were created each month of last year.
The downward revision stems from the availability of unemployment insurance tax records for the period, which takes longer than the BLS household survey. By reconciling the two different ways of acquiring data, the BLS can determine with greater exactitude just what the situation is. In 2025, the job market was weak, and today's release of data for January does little to reverse that.
While the Wall Street crowd has decided that the report was good (the DJIA is up 200 points as this is written), the 2025 numbers suggest that the economy is weaker than previously believed. As a result, the 130,000 figure is impressive only if one does not factor in just how poor the labor market has been. The MAGA crowd is crowing that the Trump administration has launched a jobs bonanza, which is nonsense.
The key argument here is that the jobs market was not very good in Joe Biden's last year either. In September 2025, the BLS revised figures for the 12 months from April 2024 to March 2025. The New York Times reported then
The data released on Tuesday showed that employers added 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than had been indicated in the monthly payroll figures. That implies the economy added only about 850,000 jobs during that time -- half as many as previously reported.
The revision covered the final months of the Biden administration and the early months of Mr. Trump's second presidency. The report did not provide details on when the overestimates took place, or if they were evenly distributed across the 12-month period.
In other words, there is a structural issue here that has little to do with who is president or which party is in control of the national agenda. The job market was bad in 2024 and remained bad in 2025. The bump of 130,000 seen last month is starting from a much lower take-off spot than previously noted. It is similar to a stock-market, dead-cat bounce. Markets to not move in a straight line, and this positive January result could be a correction in a downward trend. Data for the next few months will tell the story.
CNBC quoted, Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, who said:
"The Non-Farm Payroll report checked all the boxes today with better headline results, stronger participate rates, and the unemployment rate ticking lower," he said. "This is unambiguously good news."
While the data suggests [sic] a slower pace in job postings, there is also a rebound in hiring plans by small and mid-size firms, Hogan pointed out. This implies further stabilization in the labor market, he said.
It is true that this could be more stabilization, but it is stabilization at a much lower level, implying there is something more than just bad policy at work. It implies that there is a problem with the labor market, and the way it functions. In the last 33 months of the Obama administration, the average monthly number of jobs created was 224,000. Now, it is 15,000. That is a problem.
© Copyright 2026 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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