CORRECTION, May 10, 2024: During her interview with President Joe Biden, CNN’s Erin Burnett said he had promised that “100,000 people are going to get trained in AI here.” An earlier version of this article had a different figure in her quote.
I had my foot on a man’s neck. Since I’ve taken it off, he’s been breathing more than he was when I had it on there. If you continue to let me look after this man’s well-being, I promise you that he’ll keep breathing better and better.
You’re not really buying this argument, are you? No. Then you shouldn’t buy it when President Joe Biden tells you that he’s a job creator and his predecessor wasn’t, either.
It’s a claim Biden keeps making — that, under his administration, the jobs situation is rosier than it’s ever been before. And you can thank him for it, too!
We’ve helped create over 15 million new jobs, canceled student loans for millions of Americans, lowered health care and prescription drug costs, and are fighting for your freedoms.
Trump and MAGA Republicans want to undo all our progress.
We won’t let it happen. pic.twitter.com/aWodhQ03oQ
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 25, 2024
When he gave a rare one-on-one interview to CNN’s Erin Burnett that aired on Wednesday, it was the first thing he talked about, as well.
Burnett conducted the interview from the swing state of Wisconsin, where she noted that the president’s presumptive November opponent, former President Donald Trump, “attended a groundbreaking here where we are for [tech company] Foxconn.
“He promised 13,000 jobs and only about 1,000 of those actually exist right now,” she said. “So I know you’re promising more than 2,000 union construction jobs and that 100,000 people are going to get trained in AI here. Why should people here believe that you will succeed at creating jobs where Trump failed?”
This was the kind of softball question Biden got from Burnett all night — and his answer, which essentially bulldozed through context, was exactly what we saw from him during the entirety of the 17-minute segment.
Have you benefited from the Biden economy?
“I’ve created over 15 million jobs since I’ve been president,” Biden said. “Fifteen million in three, three and three-quarters years.” He went on to note that “Microsoft is a serious player” in AI and had picked the area for jobs. He then went on to claim regarding Trump that “other than Herbert Hoover he’s the only other president who lost more jobs than he created in his four-year term.”
This is sound logic — if you buy that I’ve done a great thing for the health and well-being of the man whose neck I took the foot off of without asking why it was on there in the first place.
However, looking at the numbers in context tells a different story. According to Trading Economics data, when Trump came into office in January of 2017, there were roughly 125 million full-time workers in the United States and, in February of 2020, this had increased to 131 million. The employment rate had increased from 59.9 percent to 61.1 percent during that same period — a healthy increase. In both cases, Trump’s administration had shepherded America through the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis after start-stop economic growth during the Obama administration.
You may remember what subsequently happened in March of 2020: America shut down thanks to COVID-19 and that 61.1 percent employment dropped to 51.2 percent with jobs plummeting from 131 million to 114 million between February and April of 2020 alone.
In January of 2021, when President Biden came into office, the situation had eased up, if just barely: 57.4 percent employment and 125 million jobs. In March of 2024, employment sat at 60.3 percent and there were 133 million full-time jobs.
Now, did Biden pull some kind of economic miracle? No — quite the opposite, in fact. Logically speaking, a president who got us out of COVID lockdowns in better shape than we went into them should have a higher employment rate and far more jobs — given population growth alone — than Trump did before the lockdowns hit.
Instead, he’s “added” 2 million jobs over pre-COVID numbers — not anywhere near 15 million — and the employment rate is below where it was under Trump.
For that matter, the reason the economy was so depressed to begin with was the insistence on lockdowns by Democrats specifically well past the point they were doing any good during the final few months of the Trump administration — and, to be fair, during the opening months of the Biden administration, as well. His party created the problem that he literally had to do nothing to solve.
He instead did less than nothing, pursuing inflationary policies, punishing corporations with tax hikes and continuing COVID-era programs that paid people to stay out of work long after they had ceased to do the job they were supposed to. If anything, few presidents have been as disappointing in this regard than Biden has been.
But, as always, he demands credit for his party finally taking its foot off the neck of the American economy, allowing it to breathe freer, if perhaps not totally freely, again. He’s banking on re-election by promising four more years of the exact same bum employment accounting figures he keeps reciting as a mantra against all visible evidence that the economy is wretched.
If you ever needed to know how stupid Joe Biden thinks you, the American voter, happens to be, there’s your answer: stupid enough to buy the misleading jobs numbers that “Bidenomics” has generated and to thank him for finally taking his boot off our throats.
