“Sustainable” Employment Growth Is Only At +73K

At least according to EJ Antoni’s definition, in his critique of employment growth under the Biden administration:

gov’t and the gov’t-dominated healthcare sector [employment growth].. it’s all tax-payer funded, and it’s not at all sustainable.

OK, here’s the picture of employment growth since January, decomposed into “sustainable” and “unsustainable” components (in this latter case, health and social services, and government employmennt).

Figure 1: Month on month change in nonfarm payroll employment (black line), change in health and social services employmet (red bar), government (blue bar), and rest-of-NFP (green bar). Source: BLS and author’s calculations.

Of the cumulative change of 409K, slightly over half — 225.5K — is accounted for by the “unsustainable” component.

Dr. Antoni made no remark upon this point today.