By comparison, Donald Trump’s first 12 months in office notched a gain of 2 million jobs.
The jobs numbers from the Labor Department go back to 1939, when Franklin Roosevelt was in his seventh year in office. No president other than Carter has enjoyed even half as many jobs being added during their first year as Biden’s record: No. 3 Bill Clinton posted an addition of 2.8 million jobs.
On a percentage basis, jobs are up 4.6% from where overall employment stood in January 2021 when Biden was sworn in as president. That’s the second-best percentage gain ever, just behind the 4.8% gain during Carter’s first year. Lyndon Johnson, with a 3.4% gain in his first 12 months in office after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, is the only other president to crack the 3% mark.
Timing is everything
Much of the gain under Biden is due to timing: He took office just as the vaccine became available and the economy was enjoying a natural recovery.
Timing is everything when looking at a first-year jobs record. For example, Barack Obama had the worst first-year jobs record of any president, with a loss of 4.3 million jobs in his first 12 months. He took office in the depths of the Great Recession, when the economy was losing more than 700,000 jobs a month. The job losses in his first three months in office alone — before any of his policies could take effect — represented more than half the losses over the course of his first 12 months. And during that 12th month he was in office the job count was essentially unchanged from the month before.
“That’s the rule of presidential history: We tend to over-credit presidents when the economy is good and beat them to a pulp when it’s bad,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, a professor at Rice University.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, noted that the amount of stimulus pumped into the economy over such a short period of time was unprecedented. While the economy would have added nearly 3 million jobs even without the package’s passage, that unprecedented level of stimulus likely created 3.7 million of the added jobs under Biden.
“It was a big package. It was supporting demand. It supercharged the economy,” he said. Items such as direct cash payments to most households, enhanced unemployment benefits and aid to cities and towns came at a time that the economy was still struggling with the effects of the pandemic.
Poor public polls
Biden seems to be getting relatively little credit from the general public for the improved state of the labor market, however.
Read More:Biden sets first-year record with 6.6 million jobs added
2022-02-04 18:15:00