H
Harpy Eagle
Guest
/----/ Even CNN says differently.
The unemployment rate
In an economic speech last week, Biden made a series of comments about the unemployment rate.
“We’ve made historic progress over the last 10 months. Unemployment is down to 4.6%, two years faster than everyone expected. When we started at this job, it was over 14%,” Biden said.
Facts First: Biden was wrong in two ways here. First and most importantly, his phrasing created the inaccurate impression that the unemployment rate was over 14% when he “started at this job” as president. In fact, the unemployment rate in January 2021, the month he was sworn in, was 6.3%; it had not been above 14% since April 2020. Second, while the unemployment rate has fallen faster under Biden than some experts had expected, he exaggerated when he said the 4.6% rate was achieved two years faster than “everyone” expected. It happened roughly one year faster than the Federal Reserve had projected in December 2020.
Biden strongly suggested that all of the “historic progress” in bringing the unemployment rate down from more than 14% to 4.6% happened “over the last 10 months,” the period in which he has been in office. But the majority of the decline occurred during the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency.
The unemployment rate spiked under Trump on account of the Covid-19 pandemic, jumping from 3.5% in February 2020 to a pandemic-era peak of 14.8% in April 2020. Then the rate started falling, hitting 6.3% in January 2021. So far, through October, it has fallen another 1.7 percentage points during Biden’s tenure.
Your link is from 2021, much has changed since then.
The yellow line is when we caught up to before the COVID mess. Everything after it is new jobs.