The jobs picture in America darkened considerably in October with an anemic 12,000 net jobs created. That's the slowest pace in four years.

The big winners were healthcare and education (+57,000) and government (+40,000). Most healthcare and education spending comes out of your pocket in the form of tax dollars, and 100% of the salaries of government workers is also paid by taxpayers.

Ain't Bidenomics grand?

Manufacturing lost 46,000 workers, while "business services" lost 47,000. Some of the losses in both sectors are blamed on the hurricanes and the Boeing strike.

The labor force participation rate for workers 25 to 54 dropped again, to 83.5% from 83.8%. Temporary help services shed a nearly unprecedented 48,500 jobs. That sector is well below pre-pandemic levels.

"August and September were revised lower, taking a total of 112,000 jobs off earlier estimates," reports the New York Times. The average job growth for the previous three months now stands at 104,000 compared to 189,000 a month the previous six months.

It's now clear that job growth was slowing in late summer, far more than the numbers indicated. Some economists see that as an indication we're already in a recession, but other economic indices don't show that. Wages are rising faster than inflation, which is always a good sign. And the unemployment rate remained steady last month at 4.1%, a number touted by Joe Biden. Some economists believe the steady unemployment number is a bad sign meaning that more workers are dropping out of the job market entirely as job losses climb.

The Trump campaign pounced on those anemic numbers with relish. They called the report “a catastrophe and definitively reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy.” 

Washington Post:

Forecasters had predicted 110,000 new jobs. The job growth in October was far less than the average monthly gain of 194,000 over the past year.

The labor market has become a key issue in the presidential election, with Republicans using recent jobs data as political ammunition while President Joe Biden has defended his record. Last month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) called the jobs report “fake” without evidence. Allies of former president Donald Trump have been accusing the Biden administration of manipulating jobs data for political gain.

The White House is spinning the numbers furiously, pointing to the unchanged unemployment rate as a more accurate reading of the job market.

Related: White House Altered 'Garbage' Transcript Despite Objections From Stenographers

Jared Bernstein, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, observed that the jobs numbers were “noisy” compared to the payroll totals in the report. He said that signs of "softness" were probably temporary and that “anyone who is ignoring the noise in this report has a political agenda, not an economic one.”

There was a steep drop in the share of unemployed workers finding jobs last month. That could reflect storm disruptions (it’s hard to look for work when you’re trying to dig out from a flood), but the job-finding rate had already been falling. That suggests that while layoffs remain low, it’s becoming harder for people who do lose their jobs to land new ones.

Additionally, the average number of weeks that unemployed people have been out of work has been rising, and hit a two-and-a-half-year high in October. A growing number of people have been out of work for more than six months, the usual definition of long-term unemployment.

At the very least, this report should make a few fence-sitters take note. But at this late date, few American voters haven't made up their minds, and it's doubtful one arcane economic report will change anyone's choice.