JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

Trump promised to "supercharge" the economy. Biden actually did it.

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Back in the not-so-good-old-days of April 2019, as con artist Donald Trump’s reckless trade policies had already plunged US manufacturing into recession, the Carnival-Barker-in-Chief continued his relentless hyping of the “Trump Economy” by tweeting “JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!” to celebrate the creation of 196,000 jobs in March 2019.

Forget the fact that when Obama was President, Trump responded to a sub-200,000 jobs report by telling us it was “not a good sign” and “we could be facing another recession.”

The Obama-Biden recovery, of course, powered on for several years beyond Trump’s 2012 prediction of imminent recession. It was an economic expansion strong enough even to survive three years of Trump’s corruption and incompetence (even as job growth during Trump’s first 36 months slowed dramatically compared to Obama’s last three years).

By July 2019, the Obama-Biden recovery became the longest U.S. economic expansion in history, ending only after Trump’s dumb trade wars and general economic mismanagement led us into the recession that began, pre-lockdowns, in February 2020.

After that, thanks to Trump’s psychopathic recklessness in the face of the oncoming pandemic, things got much worse.

Under Trump, U.S. GDP plunged 3.5% in 2020, which was the worst year for jobs since World War Two.

Trump botched the Covid response. Jared Kushner tried and failed to cause a “Blue State Genocide.” The economy crashed. And after a crushing election defeat and a failed coup attempt, Trump left office in shame, having cost the country three million jobs over the course of four years.

If that wasn’t bad enough, “Bankruptcy Expert” Trump also mortgaged your children’s future, adding $8 trillion to the debt (and exposing the utter hypocrisy of the Tea Party GOP’s pretense of “fiscal conservatism”) in a single term.

As a candidate, Trump promised a minimum of 3% annual GDP growth, but once in office, didn’t achieve that a single time. He upped that promise in 2017 when he gave massive, unfunded tax cuts to the rich and corporations, telling us they would “supercharge” the economy far beyond 3% to deliver growth in the 5-6% range.

America didn’t see growth in that range until… *checks notes*… Biden’s first year in office.

Under Biden, despite GOP efforts to sabotage him at every turn, the U.S. economy roared quickly back to life.

As The Washington Post reported:

The U.S. economy grew by 5.7 percent in 2021, the fastest full-year clip since 1984, roaring back in the pandemic’s second year despite two new virus variants that rocked the country.

On Friday June 3, the May 2022 jobs report smashed expectations, with 390,000 jobs created vs. Wall Street’s expectations of 328,000 jobs.

As economist Justin Wolfers pointed out in a Twitter thread: “Over the past three months, payrolls growth has averaged +408k per month. That's a cracking pace. The fact that it’s not slowing will likely concern the Fed.”

Wolfers also pointed out the vast disconnect between media coverage of the economy and actual economic reality:

That disconnect was reinforced by the data in a June 3 thread by Simon Rosenberg, who pointed out that since 1988:

• 33.8 million jobs were created in 16 years under Clinton and Obama
• 1.9 million jobs were created under 16 years of the two Bushes and Trump
• 8.7 million jobs have already been created in Biden’s first 16 months

Biden has already created FOUR times more jobs than the last three Republican Presidents combined.

On a monthly basis, Biden’s job creation rate—543,000 jobs per month—is 50X that of the last three Republican Presidents.

Rosenberg also points out that: “GDP growth under Biden is more than twice the rate than the average of the last 3 GOP Presidents.”

Even before Covid hit and lockdowns began, I spent the first weeks of 2020 telling readers of this newsletter how badly the media was failing them. Too many lazy journalists were simply parroting Trump’s lies and snake-oil promises about the economy without actually highlighting the weakness that was already apparent. (See examples of what I wrote in Jan and Feb 2020: here, here, here, here, here and here.)

In 2022, the media is going overboard to promote the opposite idea—hyping a recession before it starts and that may never happen. Once again they’re parroting a viewpoint popular with GOP leaders, lying conservative “journalists”, and the troll who has assumed Trump’s Twitter mantle, Elon Musk.

A recession may indeed happen at some point. But despite the complete opposite being true right now, the media has most people convinced that we’re already living in a downturn.

Lost in the current narrative is the astonishing and historic job creation that has been happening in America month after month after month for the past 16 months. America’s unemployment rate had the biggest single year drop ever in 2021. Already, 8.7 million jobs have already been created under Biden. The monthly jobs numbers blew away expectations again just last Friday.

If anyone ever deserved to tweet “JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!” it’s President Biden.

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