You are an idiot. This is the worst job growth, well since the last time Trump was in office.
View attachment 1217830
Since President Joe Biden took office, the economy has added nearly 14.8 million jobs, 5.4 million more than the pre-pandemic peak in early 2020. All told, it’s an average monthly job growth of more than 400,000. But Biden misleadingly contrasts that with a loss of jobs under former President Donald Trump — a loss that occurred because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Employment under Trump was positive until the economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April 2020, as efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus led to business closures and layoffs. By the time Trump left office in January 2021, employment had partly rebounded, but was still 9.4 million jobs below the February 2020 peak,
according to the official figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In a Feb. 3 post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Biden
said, “The last guy had the worst jobs record since the Great Depression,” including a chart that showed a monthly average loss of 57,000 jobs under Trump. “Our record is a little different,” Biden boasted, with his graphic revealing a monthly average growth of 409,000 jobs under his presidency. (We actually calculate the average at 411,000.)
The chart also shows monthly job growth under Biden is significantly higher than that under other presidents, going back to Ronald Reagan. The closest president to Biden is Bill Clinton, with 239,000 average monthly job growth during his two terms in office.
It’s no surprise that Biden is touting the robust job numbers on his watch — any president would. But the comparison with Trump is missing some glaringly obvious context. The average monthly job growth under Trump was 180,000 per month before the pandemic hit. We can’t predict what would have happened if not for the pandemic, but the circumstances were highly unusual.
The comparison in Biden’s chart is “unfair,”
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist, president of the “center-right”
American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, told us, noting the more than 20 million jobs lost in April 2020. “That’s 10 times more than we have ever lost in a single month.” That wasn’t “Trump’s fault.”
The country gained nearly 3 million jobs back in May 2020. “Trump didn’t do anything special,” said Holtz-Eakin, who was an adviser to the late Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “We started to recover. … We especially recovered in 2021 when Biden happened to take office,” a recovery that “was going to happen no matter who became president.”
