Here we go again with the ‘I created more jobs’ thing - The Washington Post

One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s presidency — well, of Donald Trump in general — was his affinity for exaggeration. Everything he did was the best or a record or whatever; everything his opponents did was the worst thing that could be done. We all sort of got used to it.

It meant that when Trump would say things like that more Americans were working than at any other point in history, it became necessary to point out that, yes — in large part because there were more Americans than at any prior point. It’s substantially easier to put 150 million people to work in a country of 330 million people than a country of 140 million people (as at the end of World War II).

Trump also liked to reframe his response to the coronavirus pandemic as a success because the number of people working surged late last spring — after falling off a cliff a few months earlier. Trump touted the addition of 5 million jobs last June, an achievement somewhat like being proud of how many people rode your roller coaster in the week after it was reopened by safety inspectors.

But, you know. This was Trump being Trump! Always gold-plating everything.

Or maybe it was just Trump being a president.

Sigh. Okay.

So, first: It is true that the country has added more than 1.5 million jobs since January (using the common vernacular that “gains in the number of people working” equals “added jobs.”) And it is true that, since the Eisenhower administration, no president has seen more jobs added in the first three months than Biden.

(We start at Dwight D. Eisenhower because that is as far back as Bureau of Labor Statistics data go. We exclude Lyndon B. Johnson and Gerald Ford because their presidencies didn’t start in a commensurate fashion.)

But, again, it’s a lot easier to add 1.5 million jobs in a workforce that already tops 144 million than one in which only about 50 million are working (as when Eisenhower took office). If we adjust the change in employment relative to every million residents of the United States, the growth under Biden is basically the same as the gains seen under Jimmy Carter.

Here, too, the context is important. If we — unfairly! — compare employment relative to the peak in employment during the year prior to the president taking office, the number of people working is lower after three months of Biden than any of his recent predecessors. Because, again: there was a pandemic. There was a big hole that we’re still trying to fill.

Between the lines, those charts show the different position Biden is in relative to where Barack Obama was 12 years ago. Obama inherited a falling economy that kept falling for a while. Biden inherited one that was largely stagnating.

So how do we evaluate how the economy has fared under Biden? Well, we can certainly acknowledge that the rapid decline in the spread of the coronavirus has allowed the economy to get back on its feet. To some extent, that’s directly a function of Biden’s administration. To some extent, it’s also a function of the Trump administration’s efforts to secure millions of doses of vaccines.

Trump was criticized last year — including by Biden — for his failure to tamp down on the virus’s spread.

“A president who takes no responsibility for costing millions and millions of Americans their jobs deserves no credit when a fraction of them return,” Biden said last June after Trump began boasting about the surge in jobs that May.

This bleeds into an important qualifier for any claims about job growth by presidents: the economy is big and complex and job shifts often have little to nothing to do with the presidents. That’s been less true in the pandemic era, when Trump and Biden had more ability to call for business closures or to work to balance the economy with containment measures. But it’s still hard to say with certainty that Biden deserves credit for those 1.5 million jobs.

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Here we go again with the ‘I created more jobs’ thing - The Washington Post
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