Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. This past summer, with just a few months to go before the midterm elections, the Biden administration faced a huge problem called the economy. Most voters vote on the basis of the economy and how they feel they're doing and how they feel their country is doing. And their country at the time was not doing well.

The US economy had just recorded two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. That's not just an academic observation. That's a technical definition of a recession. Two quarters. Declining GDP. Recession. We're not making that up. You'll find it in every economics textbook ever written. Go look up the one you used in college. But the Biden administration could not admit that. If they admitted that the US was in a recession, they would lose the Senate. They would lose control of both chambers of the Congress. So they had to lie about it.

But how do you lie about something that's so easily defined, that everyone can see? Well, you just change the definition. And that's what they did. They came up with a new definition of recession. So don't look at GDP. That's the old way, the racist way of assessing the economy. Look at holistic factors. Let's look at the labor market, for example. The labor market. 

Well, then, in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave them ammunition for their case. The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a report that showed the labor market was strong. They determined that the US economy had added more than a million jobs in the second quarter of this year, from March to June. A million jobs. That's a big deal. It's a big story. And of course, Joe Biden wasted no time in touting it. Watch.

[VIDEO]

JOE BIDEN: Our job market remains historically strong. Our economy created more than 9 million jobs since I came to office, in no small part because of the people on this stage. Our economy created more than 1 million jobs in the second quarter.

A million new jobs in the second quarter despite negative growth. Wait a second. How do you get a million new jobs with negative growth? That seems like magic. How is that possible? But no one in the media asked questions. Instead, they repeated the White House line, which was the BLS report -- the Bureau of Labor Statistics report -- showing a million new jobs proves we can't be in a recession. They all said it, quote, "The jobs report suggests the Biden economy is not in a recession," wrote The New York Times. And then, of course, there were other stories like that, too. So on the basis of that and other factors, they won. They now have control of the Senate.

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And now we get to learn the truth. A million new jobs, really? The Philadelphia Fed decided to check those numbers and they found the US economy did not add more than a million jobs in the second quarter of this year. Instead, the net additional jobs was about 10,000. So that's less than 1% of the job growth the administration claimed. That's not a rounding error. That's not a minor math mistake. This is a country that supposedly sent a man to the moon. We can do math, right? This isn't like thinking you had 100 bucks in your pocket and finding out you had 85. This is like claiming you had $1,000,000 in your pocket and finding out you had $10,000. This is like claiming you were rich when you were actually bankrupt. This is a lie.

So how'd they get it wrong by more than a million jobs? How did they construct this lie? Well, as of tonight, we're not really sure. We now know the BLS numbers didn't just help Joe Biden, though. There was another purpose. These fake numbers also gave the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, a justification to continue raising interest rates. On the basis of that report, they can raise rates. Here was Powell just a few days ago.

[VIDEO]

JEROME POWELL: Today, the FOMC raised our policy interest rate by a half percentage point. We continue to anticipate that ongoing increases will be appropriate in order to attain a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive, to return inflation to 2% over time. Despite the slowdown in growth, the labor market remains extremely tight, with the unemployment rate near a 50-year low. Job vacancy is still very high and wage growth elevated. Job gains have been robust.

Ooh. Every word of that a lie. The justification is a lie. And in fact, as Powell well knows, there are 7 million American men of working age who are not working. They're watching the Internet all day. So why are they lying to us about this? Well, the effects are very obvious. Go try and take out a car loan or a home loan or any kind of loan. Or if you have a loan, it's got an adjustable rate, watch how much more you're paying per month. So why are they doing this? Well, the administration wants Powell to raise rates because they think it'll offset the inflation that Joe Biden's policies have caused.

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But this is a huge problem for everyone else. Raising rates when the economy is faltering and people don't have jobs. If you keep doing that, you could cause an actual collapse. That seems like the course they put us on. The Biden administration got the interest rate hike it wanted even when the labor market has been flatlining. William Beach runs the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Marty Walsh runs the Department of Labor. They need to explain why anyone should ever trust the most basic economic numbers the government issues ever again. And it's one thing to get the numbers wrong, but then to base future policies on numbers you know are wrong, what is that? That's what they're doing. Jerome Powell should probably answer that question fairly soon. He won't join us tonight either.