President Joe Biden often credits his agenda for producing record-breaking job growth and economic expansion.
Out of context, the eye-popping numbers suggest a roaring recovery.
But in truth, he has taken advantage of the economic collapse that occurred in 2020 thanks to a pandemic that shuttered businesses and drove everyone inside.
As a result, 2020 gives Biden an artificially low baseline, helping him paint a misleading picture of the economic recovery he’s overseen.
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And the statistics Biden cites as evidence of his success story appear far less impressive when compared to economic numbers recorded in 2019, the year before the pandemic.
“Our economy created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs created in one year than ever before in the history of America,” Biden boasted during his State of the Union address earlier this month.
Biden had made similar claims previously, highlighting employment numbers periodically as evidence that his policies were inspiring employers to hire workers at record rates.
However, the claim ignores how many more jobs were lost at the height of the pandemic and how far the economy still has to go to recover.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the job losses that occurred in 2020 as “unprecedented.” The year before Biden took office, the economy shed 9.4 million jobs, according to the BLS.
While Biden has highlighted the 6.5 million jobs that returned in 2021, millions of other workers remained unemployed relative to before the pandemic.
In January 2020, under then-President Donald Trump, two months before shutdowns sparked by the pandemic began, the national unemployment rate was 3.6%.
In February 2022, in the midst of what Biden described as a record-breaking economic victory, the unemployment rate was 3.8%.
Biden has also pointed to the increase in the U.S. gross domestic product as proof that the economy has grown significantly during his presidency.
During his State of the Union address, he highlighted last year’s GDP growth of 5.7%, calling it the “strongest growth in nearly 40 years.”
While the GDP did grow in 2021, the economic expansion came after a major contraction in 2020, leaving plenty of ground for the economy to make up heading into Biden’s first year in office.
GDP shrank by 3.5% in 2020 — the biggest drop since the 1940s, when World War II ravaged the global economy.
Biden has also frequently highlighted wage growth since the pandemic as a measure of the positive effects his economic agenda has yielded.
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“The typical American family has more money in their pockets than they did last year,” Biden said during a speech in November.
Inflation has mostly eaten away at the wage growth experienced by most workers on Biden’s watch.
In fact, the average worker took a 2.4% pay cut last year when accounting for the rising cost of consumer goods.
