R's Big Shutdown Lie; ADP is the Only Jobs Report Game in Town

Trump and the Rs are again dangling the keys: "Blame immigrants! Look over here, not at those ADP job losses!"

The R’s Big Shutdown Lie

I won’t belabor this because it’s just getting so old, but Trump, Vance and the whole Republican caucus are once again dangling the keys, as in “look over there, not over here!” And once again, they’re vilifying immigrants, and once again, they’re lying.

I think readers know that I almost always try to keep a measured tone. But I also don’t pull punches. As I’m sure you know, the gov’t shut down last night and Ds have made restoring certain health-care benefits a condition of passing a budget to reopen it. R leader Mike Johnson, in turn, along with the rest of them, are claiming that the “Democrats…want to give free health care to ILLEGAL ALIENS paid by hardworking Americans.”

Jonathan Cohn is both a highly experienced and very careful reporter on health care policy. His piece on this is a MUST-READ, and his overall take matches mine:

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S CLOSING ARGUMENT heading into the government shutdown is a big, brazen lie.

The lie is so big and so brazen that it’s almost not worth addressing, because doing so gives the claim far more credibility than it deserves.

Here’s the fact:

…people who are in the United States unlawfully cannot get federally funded health insurance. They cannot sign up for Medicaid. They cannot get federally subsidized coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s online marketplaces.

Now, we should all know by now how these folks work. They try to find some obscure crumb, some person who got through the cracks, some health dollar that may have paid for health care of an undocumented person, and blow that up to being what this debate is all about. In response, Cohn—again, he knows this stuff cold and he’s very detailed—bends himself into a pretzel trying to figure out if there’s such a crumb here, but there just isn’t.

One of those assertions is about rules that opened up “Obamacare” subsidies to a small number of non-citizens, including some who are in the country because they have protected status. Republicans might not want these people to be eligible for those subsidies. But these people are not “illegal aliens.” They have permission to be in the United States.

In this case, the R’s key-dangle has two goals. One, blame Ds for the shutdown. I don’t know if that will work, but they—the Rs—control every damn part of gov’t right now, including the SCOTUS majority. So it shouldn’t work.

But the other goal—much more important and highly consistent with much writing up here in recent weeks—is to distract Americans from how much more expensive the Rs are making health coverage. It’s a remarkable set of actions expected to affect over 20 million people, further stressing already stressed family budgets. I fear that some of these folks will be forced to drop coverage, which will be awful for them and their families, but also costly for those remaining on the exchanges, who will tend to be less healthy (coverage droppers in such cases tend to be healthier and thereby more willing risk going without coverage), leading to a classic “adverse selection” problem that will raise premiums even for those on the exchanges with unsubsidized coverage.

According to a new report from KFF:

…if Congress extends enhanced premium tax credits [this is what the Ds are pushing for—JB], subsidized enrollees would save $1,016 in premium payments over the year in 2026 on average. In other words, expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits is estimated to more than double what subsidized enrollees currently pay annually for premiums—a 114% increase from an average of $888 in 2025 to $1,904 in 2026.

While I agree with Jon that this is so brazen, so predictable, so ugly, that one wants to just ignore it on behalf of one’s own mental health, we cannot do so. This lie must be loudly called out when and wherever it is made.

ADP Jobs Down Three Out of the Last Four Months

Because of the shutdown, we do not expect to get the September jobs report this Friday. The Automatic Data Processing (ADP) company, however, has long released its own version of the payroll side of the jobs report, for the private sector only. It broadly tracks the BLS survey but certainly not on a monthly-change basis, and given that the BLS has long been the gold standard, I’ve also thought it makes more sense to wait a couple of days—the ADP report comes out on Wed, two days before the BLS report—and just go with the BLS report. But for now, we do not appear to have that luxury.

Below you see the monthly changes so far this year from both surveys. The ADP shows private sector employment declining in three out of the last 4 months, including -32,000 in September. How seriously should we take that unsettling finding?

I wouldn’t over-torque on it, i.e., I’d take this to confirm that hiring has significantly slowed to a crawl, but it’s not clear that employment is truly contracting. But let’s also not obsess over crossing zero. Whether you’re adding 10K jobs a month or losing 10K jobs a month, your job creation machine has stalled.

So, let’s take stock of where we are.

The gov’t is shutdown with no obvious path towards resolution, especially given that the Rs are blathering falsehoods, trying to blame immigrants.

They’re doing so to distract from the huge increases in health care premiums that their policies are about to mete out on millions of Americans.

The job market appears to have real cracks, most notable a very low hiring rate.

Yes, the stock market keeps rising. That’s interesting and positive, though one worries about how that sustains in this climate. But it won’t do a thing for the folks whose premiums are about to double, as per the figure above.

And virtually everything I’ve written about here is the result an own-goal kicks by the Trump administration, the result of harmful policies and dysfunctional government. If Ds cannot elevate this and explain clearly and forcefully how they’re going to change it, then they need to find new lines of work.