President Joe Biden has deflected talks about inflation the last few months by trumpeting a strong economy with low unemployment.
“Our job market remains historically strong, with unemployment at 3.6% and more than 1 million jobs created in the second quarter alone,” President Biden said in a Thursday statement. “Consumer spending is continuing to grow.”
Some economists claim the president is not comparing apples to apples but, rather, compares apples to oranges because the numbers look better.
The much-touted low unemployment number is relative. While that is an impressive number, there are still many more unemployed Americans since February 2021, weeks after the Biden administration assumed control.
Economic and political commentator Yossi Gestetner posted a graphic showing tabular data about unemployment each month between January 2019 and June 2022. There were 152.5 million Americans employed in February 2021, according to the data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics cited by Gestetner. June employment numbers show 151.9 millions of Americans had jobs.
Even if the June number is rounded up to 152 million employed in the U.S., there are still 500,000 fewer Americans with jobs than there were in February 2021. Employment numbers bottomed out in May 2021 at 145.1 million employed workers in the U.S.
So, while the percentage of unemployed in the U.S. is a reassuringly low 3.6 percent, the total number of workers with jobs shows that many people have left the workforce. Many may never return.
Lockdowns implemented by many blue states in the early days of the pandemic’s panicked response by governors and mayors, desperate to be seen doing something, cost millions of people their jobs. Trillions of dollars were sent to the states in federal relief funding for COVID-19, which helped restore many jobs.
Others were gradually added back as lockdowns were lifted and consumers returned to stores and restaurants and began travelling with gusto. Incremental monthly increases have improved the jobs picture but the reality is that more than a half million workers, many elderly, have permanently left the workforce, which skews statistics.
Faced with a choice between working to pay their retirement and risking death due to COVID or retiring, many older workers hung up their hat and punched their final time card. Some took early Social Security because they chose a smaller monthly payment that let them stay home versus a regular paycheck that required working at an office or in customer-facing job.
“President Biden has nothing to brag about, when it comes to job creation,” said Job Creators Network President Alfredo Ortiz in a Daily Caller report. “We are still hundreds of thousands of jobs short of where we were pre-pandemic.“
“The Labor Force Participation Rate remains disastrously low, lower than it was pre-pandemic, and much lower than it was a decade ago,” he added. “This is why the unemployment rate of 3.6 percent is misleading – it excludes those who can and should be working but have dropped out of the labor force.”
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