President Joe Biden claimed the economy has added 15 million jobs under his stewardship — here are the facts and context.
“We created 15,000 new jobs,” Biden said, adding that the country has 800,000 new manufacturing jobs.
Biden appears to have misspoken and said 15,000 instead of 15 million, which is a common campaign talking point.
It is true that the economy has about 15.6 million more jobs than in January 2021, the month Biden was sworn into office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact, the economy has added jobs every month in a row since about that time.
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Still, the key context is that when Biden entered office, the economy was still millions of jobs short of where it was prior to the pandemic and the mass shutdowns of businesses.
A lot of those jobs that Biden has touted adding to the economy were merely positions that were lost because of the pandemic and then regained during reopening.
Additionally, employment rates have still not fully recovered. The employment-to-population ratio stood at 60.1% in May. That is down from the 61.1% level it was at in February 2020, right before the pandemic took hold.
Despite the context of the pandemic, the labor market has been performing well despite the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates at their highest level in years, a feather in the cap for Biden.
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The economy added 272,000 jobs in May, and the unemployment rate is sitting at 4%, a historically low level. Many economists expected there would have been a recession by now under Biden, but instead, jobs have been plentiful.
Still, inflation is outstripping the strong jobs market when it comes to voter satisfaction with the economy. Biden’s economic approval ratings are underwater, and Trump has repeatedly attacked the president for his handling of the economy.
