October 21, 2024
Donald Trump seems to have forgotten what the economy was like when he left office. He talks as though it was booming and then Biden sank it. In fact, the opposite is the case.
The economy took a massive hit in the spring of 2020 from pandemic shutdowns, while it did regain many of the lost jobs in the summer, momentum slowed sharply in the fall.
In the last three months of the Trump administration we were creating jobs at a rate of just 140,000 a month. We were still down 9.4 million jobs from the pre-pandemic level. At the Trump rate of job creation it would have taken us more than 5 ½ years to get back the jobs we lost in the pandemic.
The Biden recovery package hugely hastened the pace of job growth. In the first two years of the Biden administration we created jobs at a 555,000 monthly pace. We got back the jobs lost in the pandemic in less than a year and a half. This was far faster than almost anyone expected.
Trump also seems confused about the state of the economy before the pandemic. While the economy was healthy, there was nothing resembling a boom. Essentially it was just continuing the recovery that Obama had set in place after the Great Recession.
The monthly rate of job growth in the Trump administration, pre-pandemic, was actually somewhat lower than it had been in the last three years of the Obama administration. We created an average of 180,000 jobs a month under Trump before the pandemic. That compares to an average of 225,000 jobs a month in the last three years of the Obama administration.
That may look like a boom in Donald Trump’s head, but not in the real world. For completeness we can include in the chart the 349,000 monthly pace of job growth in the Biden administration through September of this year.
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