Larry Kudlow Throws Cold Water On New Job Numbers

Former Director of the National Economic Council and Fox Business host Larry Kudlow threw cold water on the April jobs report on Friday during a Fox News appearance.

A total of 253,000 jobs were added in April, but the Labor Department announced that the February and March jobs numbers were actually incorrect, revising March’s number down to 165,000 from 236,000. February’s total gain is now in at 248,000 from the original 326,000 estimate.

“How do you take this number, which is a strong jobs number, and put it into that calculation, what comes out?” host Dana Perino asked.

“Actually, the big story here is it’s not a strong jobs number because it turns out the two prior months were revised lower by a substantial amount,” Kudlow said. “March was revised lower by 71,000 and February was revised lower by 78,000. That’s a total of 149,000 lower reductions, which means, from the number today, which is 253,000 actually, on net, you only increased jobs by 104,000, okay? That’s awfully important because that’s the way the math goes. So, this was a sloppy number.” (RELATED: The Biden Admin Overestimated Recent Job Growth By Over 10,000%, Fed Report Says)

Kudlow went on to call the revisions “breathtaking,” saying, “I’ve been in this game for a long time, you seldom see this kind of thing.”

“When you get a series of lower revisions, okay, downward revisions, that’s usually a leading indicator for a poor or weakening jobs market.”

The April unemployment rate sat at 3.4% in April. Healthcare-related employment was a major contributor to the April job growth, with 40,000 jobs added.

E.J. Antoni, a research fellow for Regional Economics at Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the data, nonetheless shows a “deterioration in real wage growth.”

“Consumers are getting desperate in the face of a stubbornly high inflation and are taking any job they can to cover expenses.”