President Joe Biden offered a rosy assessment of the economy and the job market in particular during last week’s State of the Union address, saying that unemployment is at “50-year lows” and a “record” 15 million new jobs have been created on his watch.
But, based on a Real Clear Polling average, a majority of Americans aren’t buying the spin. Approximately 40 percent approve of Biden’s handling of the economy while 57 percent do not.
Promulgating fanciful jobs numbers is a problem both for Biden and his administration.
Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni noted in January that the Bureau of Labor Statistics “effectively revised away about a quarter of all the jobs initially believed to have been added last year.”
In fact, the BLS revised its jobs totals downward every month but one last year, sometimes taking away over 200,000 at a crack.
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“The biggest revision was for March [2023], which was revised down by a total of 266,000 jobs, followed by January at 234,000 and April at 205,000,” the Daily Caller reported.
With the latest revisions, the average month in ’23 was overestimated by 105k jobs – BLS didn’t exactly hit the white… pic.twitter.com/hr5iu6XHKv
— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) February 3, 2024
Altogether, 1,255,000 new jobs that the administration initially reported were added in 2023 didn’t actually exist. That works out to about 105,000 per month.
By way of comparison, the BLS only revised job creation downward for five months in 2022 for a total of 66,000, according to the Daily Caller.
Another hit to Biden’s “I’m a record job creator” narrative is the labor force participation rate, which measures the number of working adults as a percentage of the population.
In February, the rate was 62.5 percent along with 3.9 percent unemployment. In February 2020 under President Donald Trump, prior to the COVID shutdowns, it was 63.3 percent with a 3.5 percent unemployment rate.
“Labor participation has never recovered to its pre-pandemic trend following the government-imposed shutdowns,” Antoni wrote.
“Depending on which methodology one prefers, the economy is missing between 4.8 million and 6.8 million workers. Accounting for their absence yields a true unemployment rate between 6.4% and 7.5%.”
His assessment is consistent with the U-6 unemployment rate of 7.3 percent for February. U-6 is a broader measure of unemployment including those who are part-time workers but would like to be full-time, as well as others “marginally attached to the labor force.”
In December, “the economy shed a whopping 1.5 million full-time jobs, the biggest monthly plunge since 2020 when the government made it illegal for people to go to work. That wiped out essentially all the full-time jobs that had been gained in 2023,” Antoni wrote.
“December continued the trend of people with full-time jobs having to add a part-time job to their work schedule, as they tried to make ends meet. That rocketed the number of multiple-job holders to a new record high of 8.6 million,” he continued.
“This is important to know because every time someone gets an additional job on top of their first job, it’s counted as an additional payroll,” Antoni pointed out.
No wonder Americans aren’t feeling great about the economy.
During his State of the Union speech, Biden tried to convince people otherwise.
“I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now, our economy is literally the envy of the world,” he said.
Fifteen million new jobs in three years, unemployment at 50-year lows and a record 16 million Americans starting small businesses are just a few of the successes President Biden touted regarding the country’s economy.
Watch live: https://t.co/5vHhOSZL3w #SOTU pic.twitter.com/blZ38lwxc5
— NewsNation (@NewsNation) March 8, 2024
First, the economy was not “on the brink” when Biden took office, but well on its way to recovery following the COVID shutdowns.
The unemployment rate had dropped from a pandemic high of 14.7 percent in April 2020 to 6.3 percent by January 2021 when Trump left office.
After the State of the Union, multiple fact-checkers, including CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post, put in context Biden’s claim that his administration had created 15 million new jobs.
It took until September 2022 for the number of employed Americans to reach the pre-pandemic level, according to FactCheck.org, so almost 10 million of those “new” jobs were really just people going back to work after the economy began to open back up.
The Post also pointed out that during Trump’s first three years in office, 6.5 million new jobs were created. Further, after three years under Biden, the total number of employed Americans is 5.4 million higher than its peak under Trump in February 2020.
Therefore, that 5.4 million figure is arguably the better measure of new jobs added under Biden in three years, which is over 1 million less than under Trump (though the population is now almost 5 million more than in 2020).
Antoni also highlighted that many of those new jobs have been going to immigrants.
“In 2023, employment among foreign-born workers increased 1.3 million while employment among native-born workers rose by less than half that: just 625,000,” he reported.
So if you’re among the majority of Americans who aren’t buying what Biden is selling on the economy, the job market is one good reason why.
