President Biden can run on his record as well as against Trump and the Republican’s authoritarianism. The economy has done quite well during his years in office.
Biden’s presence boosted the economy. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in December that the U.S. economy added 199,000 jobs in November of 2023, and the unemployment rate was inching even lower, from 3.9 percent to 3.7 percent. Further, U.S. manufacturing construction spending, an indicator of the economy’s expansion increased nearly 60 percent last year.
Trump frequently claims that before he became president, the American economy was in shambles; unemployment was at an all-time high, the stock market was in the dumps, and few people could find a job. But then, according to Trump, he stimulated new job creation, brought unemployment way down, lowered African American unemployment to near-record lows, and created a booming stock market.
A close look at the data shows that this was just another set of Trump’s lies. President Obama presided over the drop in unemployment in general and African American unemployment in particular. Between 2007 and 2020, the employment rate dropped from 10.1 percent down to 4.7 percent, the rate that Donald Trump inherited when he became president.
Although African American employment continued to decline under Trump as president, almost all of the decline in the rate of African American unemployment occurred under President Obama.
Also, the economy created some 14.6 million jobs since January 2021, more than double the combined total of Donald Trump’s first three years in office (pre-Covid). Further, the budget deficit snowballed under Trump. Many Americans lost their jobs as many companies went out of business due to the recession of 2008. The result was the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue. This caused the federal budget deficit to balloon to 1.4 billion dollars in 2009.
As the economy improved each year and millions of people returned to work, the deficit got smaller throughout the Obama presidency. However, during Trump’s four years in office, the annual deficit grew rapidly, from 700 billion in 2017 to nearly 1100 billion in 2020.
According to the Department of Labor reports, the economy added a little over 8 million new jobs during Obama’s last three years as president. Yet during Trump’s first three years, the economy created only 6.5 million jobs. That means 1.5 million more jobs were created during those three years under Obama than during the three years under Trump.
To put it another way, the rate of job creation over Obama’s last three years in office was 23 percent better than the rate of job creation while Trump was president.
Looking at the average number of jobs created each year of a presidential term, Biden has created more than twice the number of any president since and including Jimmy Carter. Perhaps surprising to many citizens, Biden is continuing the record of previous Democratic presidents. Democratic presidents Biden, Clinton, Carter, and Obama created many more jobs per month than any of the four Republican presidents during that period.
But the Republican propaganda machine tells a different-and false-story. Their story is so consistent and strong that many citizens do not believe in their economic circumstances. Half of Americans think the economy is worsening despite months of more robust economic news.
