https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/07/dont-let-biden-gaslight-you-about-the-jobs-situation/
The one thing he’s good at is lying about statistics.
Whatever the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports today about job growth and the unemployment rate, you can bet that President Joe Biden will use it as an opportunity to brag about his superb handling of the economy. The one thing Biden is good at is lying with statistics.
Biden will probably claim that he’s overseen a record number of new jobs – the most in history. The press will dutifully regurgitate White House talking points.
But the numbers getting bandied about these days about job growth and unemployment are wildly misleading because they ignore important bits of context. Such as:
The pace of job growth slowed considerably once Biden started “rescuing” the economy.
It took just nine months under President Donald Trump for the economy to regain 57% of the 22 million jobs lost during the COVID lockdowns. It took 17 months under Biden to regain the other 43%.
The economy was adding jobs at an average of 1.3 million a month in Trump’s last nine months in office. In the first nine months of Biden’s term, job growth averaged 620,000.
As a result, job growth is now behind the pace set by most recoveries since 1948, according to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. Nearly three years after the COVID recession officially ended, we are still just 2% ahead of the previous employment peak. At the same point after the 1981 recession, there were 3.5% more jobs. Three years after the 1969 recession, the job market was 5.7% bigger.
The jobs picture would be far worse had it not been for Republican-run states that defied the Biden administration’s intrusive COVID policies. By mid-2022, red states were 350,000 ahead of their pre-COVID highs, while blue states were still 1.3 million jobs short of where they were before the COVID lockdowns.
But what about the low unemployment rate Biden brags about?