In the early months of 2021, as the U.S. economy recovered from the recession that began a year earlier, Republican leaders thought it’d be a good idea to complain bitterly about the progress. Then-House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted that President Joe Biden’s economic policies “have stalled our recovery,” adding, “Bidenomics is bad for America.”
Around the same time, Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, the then-chair of the Republican Study Committee, argued that the Democratic White House’s agenda was sending the economy into a “tailspin.”
Such talk was difficult to take seriously at the time, and it’s much worse now. Americans are seeing historically low unemployment, economic growth, shrinking inflation, rising wages, falling gas prices, a rising stock market, and improved economic optimism.
But perhaps most important of all are the number of jobs being created in the United States. Yahoo News summarized the totals from the year that just wrapped up.
The US labor market just finished a year that many thought would see a recession with one of the highest 12-month job totals seen in the last decade. Including an unexpectedly strong December report, the US labor market added a total of nearly 2.7 million jobs in 2023. Excluding outsized gains from the rebound from pandemic-era firings and re-hiring in 2021 and 2022, the most recent year was the most robust for job increases since 2015 and the third highest since 2000.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, before Biden’s inauguration, the recent high point for job creation came during Barack Obama’s second term. In Republican circles, it’s taken as a given that Donald Trump oversaw an unrivaled economic boom that saved us from Obama-era doldrums, but reality tells a different story.
In fact, before 2021, Americans saw the best annual job growth in the 21st century in 2014, when the economy created roughly 3 million jobs. The second best came a year later, when the economy created an additional 2.7 million.
Soon after, Trump took office, at which point job growth in the United States slowed down — even before 2020 recession caused by the Covid pandemic. But in 2021, the economic recovery, fueled in part by the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, generated job gains unseen in generations. Growth has since moderated in predictable ways, but it’s remained strong.
I put together this chart to help drive home the point, showing job growth by year since the Great Recession.
As we discussed last week, over the course of the first three years of Trump’s term, the economy created roughly 6.35 million jobs, spanning all of 2017, 2018, and 2019.
In 2021, however, the economy created over 7 million jobs, followed by another 4.8 million in 2022. This past year, brought another 2.7 million jobs, which is a total that also topped every individual year of Trump’s term.
What’s more, when Biden took office, the unemployment rate was 6.4%. Now, it’s 3.7%. In fact, the jobless rate has been below 4% for 23 consecutive months — a streak unseen in the United States since the 1960s.
As recently as September 2021 — a month in which the U.S. economy created more than a half-million jobs — the Republican National Committee said domestic job creation was “disastrous.”
As it turns out, Republicans aren’t saying that anymore.
