Citing a quote often attributed to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Mark Twain famously said there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address this week somehow managed to combine all three in claiming credit for job creation on his watch.

Here’s what Biden said: “Two years ago, our economy was reeling. As I stand here tonight, we have created a record 12 million new jobs, more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years.”

Somewhere between a lie and a damned lie is the president’s suggestion that he personally “created” 12 million “new jobs.” Naturally Biden is not the only politician to make such self-congratulatory claims, but his statement is especially farcical coming on the heels of massive job losses from the pandemic. As the chart below displays, the lion’s share of the “new” jobs the president supposedly “created” simply reflect the continued return of jobs lost at the onset of the pandemic:

US Nonfarm Payroll Employment, Seasonally Adjusted (2020-2023)

The US economy experienced a record drop in payroll employment when COVID-19 struck, with 22 million jobs lost between February 2020 (152.4 million) and April 2020 (130.4 million). But payroll employment has shown almost continuous improvement since then. Between the low point in April 2020 and the latest data for January 2023 (155.1 million), payroll employment has bounced back by 24.6 million, more than filling the deep hole created by the pandemic shutdowns.  

But hold on—the president claims to have created 12 million new jobs. What about the other 12-plus million jobs included in that 24.6 million job recovery? As the chart shows, they returned in the nine months before Biden took office, when 12.5 million jobs were “created” (using Biden’s term), at over twice the monthly pace for which the president is now taking credit. So much for his claim that the economy, as reflected by job creation at least, was “reeling” when he took office.

Still, statistics confirm that the US has never before witnessed payroll employment rise by 12 million during the first two years of any prior administration. Of course, no prior administration took office as the US labor market was rapidly recovering from an unprecedented pandemic lockdown, either. Just like when he said in last year’s state of the union address that “our economy created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs in one year than ever before in the history of the United States of America,” the president this week saw no need to provide that important context.

Especially given that “dig a hole and take credit for filling it back in” dynamic, it’s worth considering how recent job levels compare with expert projections made before the pandemic. We can turn to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for that. In their January 2020 report “The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2020 to 2030”—issued immediately before the pandemic struck—CBO projected “135,000 jobs per month” would be created during 2020, followed by an average of 59,000 per month in 2021 and 17,000 per month in 2022. Add it up and prior to the pandemic CBO projections suggested that payroll employment would average 154.156 million by the end of 2022.

The figures below show how that compares with actual payroll employment (that is, counting the effects of the pandemic and the subsequent job recovery):

It turns out that actual payroll employment at the end of 2022 was just 130,000 higher than what CBO projected it would be before the pandemic. That’s certainly impressive given all that has occurred in the past three years, but it’s still a very far cry from Biden’s boast that he “created a record 12 million new jobs.”

The post The President’s Latest Bogus Job-Creation Claims appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.