President Joe Biden took a victory lap on his first-year economic record Friday, touting low unemployment and record jobs growth even as polling shows the American public is deeply unhappy with Biden’s performance on the issue.
“There’s been a lot of press coverage about people quitting their jobs. Well, today’s report tells you why – Americans are moving up to better jobs,” Biden said from the White House after the final monthly jobs report of 2021 was released. “This is the kind of recovery I promised and hoped for for the American people.”
With a booming stock market and higher average wages, “Today, America is the only leading economy in the world where the economy as a whole is stronger than before the pandemic,” the president crowed.
Biden’s remarks – in which he also slammed congressional Republicans for “talking down the recovery” because they voted against measures Biden credited with reduced unemployment and higher wages – reflects a newly aggressive and blunt tone for a president who has long prided himself on lowering the temperature in political discourse.
Thursday, marking a year since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Biden blamed former President Donald Trump for spreading “a web of lies” about the 2020 election that led to the deadly insurrection.
And on Friday morning, Biden made it clear he was done with Republican critics who are casting the economy as disastrous, the job-creation numbers as dismal and – as Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tweeted – “just the latest sign that his economic crisis continues.”
December’s jobs report indeed showed disappointing job growth, with 199,000 jobs created – fewer than half what economists expected. But the unemployment rate dropped to 3.9%, a level considered to be full employment.
Biden has been careful in his economic addresses to note the problem of high inflation and a clogged supply chain that was making some goods scarce for a while.
But Biden said Friday the supply chain issues had been greatly resolved and that, despite GOP warnings that Christmas would be blue for celebrants awaiting gifts in the mail, 99% of packages arrived on time for the holidays.
“The much-predicted crisis didn’t occur. The Grinch did not steal Christmas – nor any votes,” Biden said with a light chuckle, referring to Trump’s repeated lies that the 2020 election was rife with voter fraud.
Biden said it was “malarkey” that he was not focused on reducing inflation and that the less-than-ideal December jobs growth was because people were taking newer, better-paying jobs in an economy where wages have increased, particularly for people in the hospitality and restaurant industry.
“This isn’t about workers walking away and refusing to work,” Biden said, addressing a common claim by Republican critics. “It’s about workers taking a step up.”
“No wonder one leading economic analyst described what we accomplished in 2021 as the strongest first-year economic track record of any president in the last 50 years,” he said, apparently citing an op-ed by Matthew Winkler, former editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News.
The dichotomy between the objective performance of the economy and the subjective opinions of voters has been a source of persistent frustration at the White House.
Polling shows that the public’s approval of Biden’s handling of the economy has dropped precipitously during his first year. A recent CNBC/Change poll found that 6 out of 10 Americans disapprove of his performance on the economy. A RealClearPolitics average of polls in the past five weeks shows that 56% of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy, with 40% approving of it.
That’s despite the fact that in Biden’s first full year in office, the White House notes, 6.45 million jobs were created.
“That is the highest number of jobs created in a single calendar year since we started keeping records in 1939,” said Gene Sperling, a senior adviser to Biden and national economic adviser to both President Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
The White House also is prickly about the disparate coverage of economic numbers, compared to other presidents.
News organizations hailed the jobs reports in spring 2018, when the unemployment rate dipped below 4% for the first time since 2000, National Economics Council spokesman Jesse Lee noted in a tweet. But Friday morning, when the unemployment dropped to 3.9%, the headlines focused on the disappointing growth in new jobs.
“Trump inherited 5% and took two years to get there. Biden inherited 6.2% and got there in a year. The jobs report today was better than the jobs report under Trump,” Lee complained on Twitter.
Part of Biden’s public relations problem is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers on job creation are estimates, and may be revised later. Last year, BLS’s revised numbers showed it undercounted new jobs by nearly 1 million. The unusually huge undercount may be due to the added difficulty of collecting the information during the pandemic, experts say.
But Biden also took Republicans to task for casting the economy as failing. “They want to talk down the recovery because they voted against the legislation that made it happen,” Biden said.
He then made a push for his “Build Back Better Act,” a sweeping domestic spending bill that would increase taxes on the wealthy, put a cap on insulin prices and establish universal pre-K. That measure is stymied in the Senate, where all Republicans and one or two Democratic senators are balking at the size and sweep of the package.
