Liz Wolfe:

Liar, liar: Back in August 2022, when some of us were fresh-faced and naive, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assured us that their $80 billion infusion of cash (over the course of a decade, so they could hire some 87,000 new workers, including but not limited to men with guns) would actually be a means of targeting millionaire and billionaire scofflaws, not ordinary middle-class earners.

At the time, I voiced skepticism: correspondence audits and other audits on low- and middle-income earners are simply the easiest to conduct. The IRS has historically spent an awful lot of time targeting these groups, not monied tax dodgers who can hire teams of accountants, so why would this time be different?

Vindicated: “The Internal Revenue Service got an audit of its own in time for Tax Day, and two irregularities jump out,” reports The Wall Street Journal, having labored through the latest Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reports. “President Biden’s plan to hire a new army of tax collectors is falling flat, and the agents already at work are targeting the middle class.”

“As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000,” reports the Journal. “Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million.”

Compare these real-world outcomes with the assurances of the IRS, given less than two years ago.

Empty assurances: “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,” wrote IRS commissioner Charles Rettig in an August 2022 letter to concerned senators.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was a bit sassier. “Contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited,” she wrote in a letter to Rettig.

It’s almost like they didn’t tell us the truth the first time around. But that’s not even the most embarrassing thing in the report: The IRS had set a goal of hiring 3,700 new agents in the first year of boosted funding. Instead, in the first six months, they’d hired 34.

Awkwardly, “revenue agent staffing had actually decreased by 8%, or more than 650 employees, between the end of fiscal 2019 and March 2023,” per a previous watchdog report. And it’s not just hiring that’s in trouble: The agency has completed just 33 percent of its fiscal year 2023 milestones outlined in its strategic operating plan, which is…tough given that the year is over.

If anyone tells you the economy is doing great, that person is either mistaken or lying, and here’s the evidence.

Tyler Durden:

First things first: unlike the last two months when both the January and February jobs prints were beyond ridiculously manipulated and goalseeked to pass a terrible number as a strong one, the March print was not a complete disaster.

To be sure, superficially the March report was another artificially goalseeked blowout that guaranteed it would have zero credibility: with 303K payrolls added which was a 4 sigma beat to the median estimate of 214K and above the highest Wall Street forecast. There is just one problem: the number of multiple-sigma beats in recent months has been so high, the entire concept of “beats” has become laughable.

Consider this: January was a 5-sigma beat to expectations; February was a 3-sigma beat and March, we just learned, beat the median estimate by 4-sigma. Not only that, but in every of the last 3 months, the actual payrolls number (at least before it was revised lower the next month), has come in higher than the highest Wall Street estimate! We kinda feel bad for Biden trying so hard to manipulate the economy and population into liking Bidenomics and approving of his disastrous economic policies. Maybe he should just report one month that jobs rose by 10,000,000 and sit back and wait for his approval rating to hit 100… or something.

Still, despite the modest rebound in employment, it still lags payrolls by almost 9 million jobs since the covid trough.

However, that’s where the mitigating factors end, because while there was some improvement in the quantitative aspect of the March report, when it comes to the qualitative aspect, it was another disaster for one simple reason: all the job gains were part time jobs!

Here is exhibit A: in March, the number of part-time jobs soared by 691K to 28.632 million, up from 27.941 million while full-time jobs dropped by 6,000, to 132.940 million from 132.946 million.

This number only gets scarier when we extend the period to the past year: as shown in the next chart, since March 2023, the number of full-time workers has collapsed by 1.347 million while the number of part-time workers exploded by 1.888 million!

There’s more.

Regular readers are aware that all the job gains since 2018 have gone to immigrants, mostly illegal immigrants, something we spent last month’s jobs post discussing in detail.

So what happened in March? It will come as no surprise that there was more of the same, and after the collapse in native-born workers in the last three months when nearly 2.5 million native-born workers lost their jobs, March saw some pick up, and 929K native-born workers were added. Meanwhile, after last month’s record increase in foreign-born workers, in March illegal immigrants added another 112K jobs, pushing the total number of foreign-born workers to a new record high of 31.114 million.

Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers…

… but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since July 2018!

This, as we have been saying for months now, is a huge issue – especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the southwest border…

… and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened – i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.

To this point, we are delighted to observe that after everyone had been ignoring what we have been saying for months, namely that all job growth has gone to illegals…

… overnight none other than Goldman admitted that not only has all job growth in recent years gone to illegal immigrants, but that America is now being invaded. Below we excerpt from the note from Goldman economist Elsie Peng, who amusingly calls illegal aliens “unauthorized immigrants” in her note (available to pro subs in the usual place):

Net US immigration surged in 2023. Recent reports from the Congressional Budget Office and border encounter data from the Office of Homeland Security suggest that net US immigration was running above the estimate implied by the change in the foreign-born population in the household survey over the last couple of years. We estimate that net US immigration surged to roughly 2.5 million in 2023, the highest level in the last two decades (Exhibit 1). In today’s note, we look at where recent immigrants are coming from, what parts of the US they are heading to, and how they compare to the rest of the US labor force.

Unauthorized immigrants from South America, Central America, and Mexico have accounted for most of the recent surge in immigration. Using immigration court case data, we estimate that the number of unauthorized immigrants from these three regions likely tripled in 2023 from its pre-pandemic average (left side of Exhibit 2). We note that these estimates of unauthorized immigration inflow carry some degree of uncertainty because some immigration court cases also reflect visa overstays. In contrast, the overall level and origin composition of authorized immigrants is similar to pre-pandemic trends (right side of Exhibit 2).

Where are they going? According to Goldman, the most popular destination states for new immigrants are Florida, California, Texas, and New York, which together have received over 50% of recent immigrants.

And the punchline, or how the establishment is trying to spin the flood of illegals into a positive feature for the US economy: apparently all these illegals are little gifts from god, keeping wages low and taking jobs that nobody else would ever want.

Data from the 2023 Current Population Survey suggest that recent adult immigrants are more likely to be young or prime age (90%) than the native-born adult population (62%) or adult immigrants who arrived earlier (64%). Recent immigrants have a higher labor force participation rate than the native-born population but a lower rate than immigrants who have been in the US for longer, have a higher unemployment rate than either group, are more likely to work in construction and food services and accommodations, and earn significantly lower wages on average.

This is hardly a surprise: none other than Fed Chair Powell fired the starting gun one month ago when in his 60 Minutes interview he effectively said Americans are lazy and that it was the illegals that have been critical in keep wages lower even as jobs have grown substantially in the past year (at least according to the Establishment survey). Recall this exchange from the interview:

PELLEY: Why was immigration important?

POWELL: Because, you know, immigrants come in, and they tend to work at a rate that is at or above that for non-immigrants. Immigrants who come to the country tend to be in the workforce at a slightly higher level than native Americans do. But that’s largely because of the age difference. They tend to skew younger.

PELLEY: Why is immigration so important to the economy?

POWELL: Well, first of all, immigration policy is not the Fed’s job. The immigration policy of the United States is really important and really much under discussion right now, and that’s none of our business. We don’t set immigration policy. We don’t comment on it.

I will say, over time, though, the U.S. economy has benefited from immigration. And, frankly, just in the last, year a big part of the story of the labor market coming back into better balance is immigration returning to levels that were more typical of the pre-pandemic era.

PELLEY: The country needed the workers.

POWELL: It did. And so, that’s what’s been happening.

But that’s not all: just in case praising illegal immigration wasn’t enough to keeping wage growth low (completely ignoring that all these millions in illegals will require trillions in additional welfare spending, and are the primary beneficiaries of the latest explosion in US debt), there has been a second angle this time courtesy of the CBO which recently hilarious “calculated” that illegal immigrants will boost US GDP by $7 trillion in the next decade.

This is how CBO Director Phill Swagel summarized it: “as a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenue will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”

And there you have it: yes, the US hasn’t added any jobs to native-born Americans in six years, as instead all jobs have gone to immigrants, mostly the illegal variety, but that’s good news you see, because if it wasn’t for these lovely creatures flooding into the US, wages would be higher (that’s a bad thing according to the Fed), and the US economy would not grow by $9 trillion. Just please ignore that that $9 trillion in “growth” will come only thanks to $20 trillion in debt, almost all of it soaked up by these same illegals, and of course, a handful of corrupt, embezzling politicians.

Robert Schmad:

A major real estate company released a survey on Friday which found that renters and homeowners are significantly reducing their quality of life to afford housing under President Joe Biden.

Nearly one in five homeowners and renters reported skipping meals to afford housing in Biden’s economy, according to a new survey conducted by Redfin. The median asking rental price increased from less than $1,700 when Biden took office in January 2021 to nearly $2,000 as of February, according to Redfin’s data.

Americans made other sacrifices to stay in their homes, with 20.7% reporting working more hours, 20.6% saying they have sold their belongings, more than one in six having dipped into retirement savings and 15.6% reporting that they’re putting off medical care to afford housing payments.

As of February, the median household earned $30,000 less than it would need to afford the median home in the United States, according to Redfin. When Biden took office in 2021, the median household earned thousands more than would be required to afford the median home.

The median home in the United States cost $417,700 as of the fourth quarter of 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Some states, like California, are even more expensive, with the median costing $675,667 as of January, according to Zillow.

In May 2022, the Biden administration announced an action plan intended to increase the supply of housing and reduce the burden of rent on Americans.

As interest rates remain high and the nation faces a shortage of construction workers, however, the number of new homes being built declined between 2022 and 2023, according to Census Bureau data.

Thousands of construction workers are tied up in green transportation projects pushed by the Biden administration.

Experts are concerned that Biden’s spending, particularly his recent proposed budget, may increase inflation, further increasing the cost of living for Americans.

As of April 6, an average of 57.8% of Americans disapproved of Biden’s handling of the economy, according to ReaClear’s aggregation of survey data. By contrast, 68% of Americans recall the economy being better under former President Donald Trump, according to a poll released by CBS News in March.

The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Ed Antoni:

When people couldn’t afford housing during the Great Depression, they built shantytowns from scrap construction supplies and named them “Hoovervilles,” after President Herbert Hoover. Today, Americans increasingly live out of their cars because they can’t afford housing. If history is any guide, will parking lots full of Americans soon be known as “Bidenvilles”?

The problem has gotten so bad that Sedona, Arizona, recently set aside a parking lot exclusively for these homeless workers. The city is even installing toilets and showers for the new occupants.

Apparently, the City Council thought installing temporary utilities was cheaper than solving the area’s cost-of-living crisis.

And what a crisis it is. The average home in the city sells for $930,000, while most of the housing available for rent is not apartments but luxury homes targeted at wealthy people on vacation.

With such a shortage of middle-class housing and starter homes essentially nonexistent, low- and even middle-income blue-collar workers have nowhere to go at night but their back seat.

Much like America’s Great Depression in the 1930s, this marks a serious regression in our national standard of living. But shantytowns were not prevalent in the 1920s (a decade that began with a depression) or the 1910s. Nor were they ubiquitous following the Panic of 1907, which set off one of the worst recessions in American history.

Indeed, Americans in the Great Depression faced such a cost-of-living crisis that many were forced to accept a standard of living below what their parents and even their grandparents had.

Fast-forward about 90 years, and countless families are in the same boat. Many young people today don’t think they’ll ever be able to achieve the American dream of homeownership that their parents and grandparents achieved. The worst inflation in 40 years, rising interest rates, and a collapse of real (inflation-adjusted) earnings mean a huge step backward financially.

That inflation has pushed up rents so much that young Americans are moving back in with their parents at rates not seen since the Great Depression because they can’t make it on their own. Sometimes, they can’t even make it with multiple roommates.

But many people cannot move back in with family, so the car it is.

The housing problem is not limited to wealthy towns in Arizona, however. It is systemic. The monthly mortgage payment on a median-price home has doubled since January 2021, and rents are at record highs. Like the Great Depression, this disaster stems from impolitic public policy.

For the last several years, the government has spent, borrowed and created trillions of dollars it didn’t have. The predictable result of this profligacy was runaway inflation, followed by equally foreseeable interest rate increases.

The deadly combination of high prices and high interest rates has frozen the housing market and reduced homeownership affordability metrics to near-record lows. In several major metropolitan areas, it takes more than 100% of the median household after-tax income to afford a median-price home.

Since rents and virtually all other prices have risen so much faster than incomes over the last three years, even renting is unaffordable today, so many people have to go into debt to keep a roof over their heads. And for some, that’s a car roof.

This is the kind of story you might expect from a Third World country or somewhere behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, not the largest economy in the world—at least not outside of a depression like the one in the 1930s.

Hoover certainly deserved some blame for the Great Depression, but so did the progressives in Congress, who came from both parties and repeatedly voted to meddle in the economy instead of allowing it to recover from the initial downturn.

Similarly, President Biden deserves blame for constantly advocating runaway government spending. But today’s multitrillion-dollar deficits are also made possible by the big spenders in Congress, who come from both parties.

If this bipartisan prodigality of Washington continues, Bidenvilles will only become more widespread as the housing affordability crisis worsens.

If a Republican president was presiding over this kind of economy, that president would have been impeached yesterday. Or worse.

Matthew Foldi:

The Biden administration is bracing for a second Trump term by rolling out a rule that would complicate Donald Trump’s pledge to fire tens of thousands of federal workers if he wins in November. The new rule is also a huge gift to the public-sector unions that Joe Biden needs firmly in his corner.

The latest edict, issued by the US Office of Personnel Management, is an almost direct response to Trump’s stated plans to purge the bureaucracy. That’s not how the OPM is framing it, of course; instead, OPM deputy director Rob Shriver said it “is about making sure the American public can continue to count on federal workers to apply their skills and expertise in carrying out their jobs, no matter their personal political beliefs.”

Those political beliefs caused never-ending ire in the Trump years, of course. One political appointee in the Trump administration relayed a story to The Spectator about how when his boss, a cabinet secretary, needed to have his color printer ink restored during the Covid-19 pandemic, he was stymied by career employees, who told him that the office needed to be vacated for ten days before they felt safe showing up to work. Despite several stages of escalation, the most they were willing to do was turn on a different printer on another level in the building. “There’s a career mindset that they were here before you and will outlast you,” he said.

While this new rule would complicate Trump’s proposed plan — dubbed “Schedule F” — it would ultimately be more of a road bump than a full-blown road closure. It can be overturned almost immediately, since it does not carry the weight of actual legislation.

“Schedule F is an important tool for holding the federal bureaucracy accountable. It is functionally impossible to dismiss a tenured federal bureaucrat for poor performance or misconduct,” James Sherk told The Spectator.

Sherk served on Trump’s domestic policy council and authored the expansive executive order, signed by Trump and immediately rescinded by Biden, that would allow an incoming Trump administration to ax thousands of federal workers who they see as opposing their policies — a well-documented phenomenon that dogged the Trump team during his first term.

“During the Trump administration a lot of career employees acted like they — not elected officials — set policy. Many bureaucrats refused to enforce laws they disliked or slow-walked implementing policies they opposed. Such behavior undermines democracy. Voters — through their elected representatives — must set policy, not unelected bureaucrats,” Sherk said.