Expectations heading into this week showed projections of about 155,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in December. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the totals were far better than that. NBC News reported:
President Joe Biden will end his term with a relatively healthy labor market as the United States added a surprising 256,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1%. … On their own, the latest figures indicate the U.S. economy has largely achieved the “soft landing” scenario Biden sought: relatively low unemployment and relatively low inflation.
In addition to the very encouraging top-line data, the same Labor Department report showed that wage growth continued to outpace inflation.
As for the political picture, let’s circle back to previous coverage to put the data in perspective. Over the course of the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency — when the Republican said the U.S. economy was the greatest in the history of the planet — the economy created roughly 6.38 million jobs, spanning all of 2017, 2018 and 2019.
According to the latest tally, the U.S. economy has created over 17 million jobs since January 2021 — nearly triple the combined total of Trump’s first three years. (If we include the fourth year of the Republican’s term, the data looks even worse for him.)
What’s more, while the data from 2024 will still be revised once more, if the final tallies are in line with the available information, the U.S. economy added 2.2 million jobs last year — more than the totals from 2017 and 2019, when Trump falsely claimed that the job market had reached all-time highs.
While we’re at it, let’s also note that over the course of the last 48 months, there were literally zero months in which the U.S. economy lost jobs — the last time job growth turned negative was in December 2020, the last full month of the Trump era — and Biden is leaving the White House with a 4.1% unemployment rate, the lowest for an outgoing president since Bill Clinton, and the second lowest since Lyndon Johnson. (The jobless rate was 3.9% in December 1999. It was 3.5% when LBJ left office.)
The New York Times recently concluded that the job market “is as healthy as it has ever been” — as in, in the history of the United States — even if that’s at odds with public perceptions, even if Biden isn’t getting the credit he deserves, and even if his successor isn’t prepared to admit it.
For some additional context, consider job growth by year over the past decade, updated to reflect the latest data revisions:
2013: 2.3 million
2014: 3 million
2015: 2.7 million
2016: 2.3 million
2017: 2.1 million
2018: 2.3 million 2019: 1.98 million 2020: -9.3 million 2021: 7.2 million 2022: 4.5 million 2023: 3 million 2024: 2.2 million This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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