CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed during his State of the Union Address that he has created nearly double the number of jobs that the next-closest president created in four years on average.
VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. While many jobs have been created coming out of the pandemic-era lockdowns after former President Donald Trump encouraged the reopening of the economy, “Biden is comparing his monthly jobs record for the first two years of his term to the full four-year or eight-year terms of the six previous presidents,” according to the Washington Post.
Biden is comparing apples and oranges. He has miscalculated by including future times for which no job data is available.
Importantly, most of the jobs “created” during the Biden presidency were jobs that were reopened as the pandemic’s shackles on the economy were taken off. The economy only recently reached the level of employment hit during the Trump administration prior to the pandemic.
In addition, Biden’s first two years in office have benefited from Trump-era policies, such as trying to open up the economy so businesses can hire workers and various impacts from stimulus packages.
Biden’s January job numbers were strong, however. The U.S. economy added 517,000 jobs. “The median forecast by analysts surveyed by Econoday was for 185,000 jobs, which would have been a steep decline from the 223,000 jobs initially reported for December,” Breitbart News’s John Carney reported.
Biden’s speech comes as Monday polling shows fewer than four in ten — under 40 percent — Americans say the state of the union is strong, while fifty-eight percent say it is not strong.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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