Bedeviled by bad news on virtually every aspect of daily life, President Joe Biden and his defenders have focused on one singular achievement: the number of jobs created in 2021. “We’ve added nearly 6 million jobs this year — the most of any first-year president in history,” said White House spokesperson Jen Psaki just before Christmas. Earlier this month, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) encouraged Democrats to “brag more about what we have been doing” in office. The central boast? “President Biden has already produced 6 million jobs. His predecessor was producing 30,000 jobs a month, he’s [Biden] already produced 6 million jobs with his initiatives,” Pelosi told Punchbowl News. The president has repeatedly engaged in economic chest-thumping over his alleged role in generating “more jobs in the first eight months of my administration than any president in American history” — an assertion that Politifact rebuffed in part.
But a new analysis shows that the Biden administration’s economic policies did not add a single job to the U.S. economy in the last year; in fact, they may have cost more than 100,000 jobs. Last February, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the U.S. economy would add an average of 521,000 jobs a month between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the fourth quarter of 2021 — creating a total of 6,252,000 jobs. One year later, data show that the U.S. economy added 6,116,000 jobs during that time period — 136,000 fewer jobs than the CBO estimated. But the CBO based its estimate on the economic policies of the Trump administration; the 6.252 million jobs would have been created if Joe Biden had done nothing, according to Matt Weidinger of the American Enterprise Institute.
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