Expectations heading into this morning showed projections of about 490,000 new jobs added in the United States in March. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the preliminary tally suggests the domestic job market didn’t do quite that well, but it came pretty close. NBC News reported this morning:
The U.S. economy added 431,000 jobs in March while the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.
Note, the U.S. economy has now had 11 straight monthly jobs gains above 400,000. According to a Wall Street Journal report, that’s never happened since the government started maintaining national jobs records in 1939.
What’s more, job totals from January and February were both revised up, adding an additional 95,000 previously unreported new jobs — on top of the 431,000 jobs created in March.
So far in 2022, the economy has created 1.69 million jobs, and that’s after just three months. By any fair measures, it’s an extraordinary total.
The nation’s 3.6 percent unemployment rate is the lowest since President Joe Biden took office, and is nearly as low as the 3.5 percent rate from before the start of the economic crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic. All told, the U.S. economy has now gained back roughly 93 percent of its pandemic job losses — and it’s happened faster than hardly anyone thought possible a year ago.
As for the politics, 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 term — when the then-Republican president said the United States’ economy was the greatest in the history of the planet — the economy created roughly 6.5 million jobs. This includes all of 2017, 2018, and 2019. According to the latest tally, since January 2021, the U.S. economy created 8.43 million jobs — well above the combined total of Trump’s first three years. Related:
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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