By Chuck Warren
Last week, President Joe Biden went on X (formerly known as Twitter) to boast about his job creation record. Using his campaign account, he wrote, “Today, we learned that the economy created 187,000 jobs last month. We've added 13.5 million jobs since I took office, and the unemployment remains below 4%,” adding his new sign off signature at the end, “That’s Bidenomics.”
That’s not Bidenomics, however, it’s returning to normality. The American economy goes through natural periods of boom and bust. Recessions cause job losses, and the president in charge at the time gets the blame for it. The end of recessions creates jobs, and the president in charge gets the credit. But this time was a bit different, as the recession was not a part of the natural economic cycle but an artificially created one.
As I pointed out in the replies to Biden's post, the end of Covid restrictions allowed the economy to recover the jobs lost due to Covid. A Biden supporter took issue with it, replying to me that Biden “regained all jobs lost under Covid and has added over a million more. Sorry, it's just #facts.”
There are nuances to consider here. First, being where we were three years ago is still a loss. It means we are three years behind. The number of jobs alone is not enough of an indication—only one of many factors to consider. It is true that there are more people employed than before Covid started, but it is also true that the U.S. adult population has grown since. Let us compare some numbers between February 2020, the last month before Covid lockdowns, and today.
Labor force participation rate is the percentage of the work-eligible population who are either employed or are looking for employment. This excludes people in the military, disabled, too young to work, or in prison. It is a better indication than mere job numbers because it shows whether the country is adding jobs as fast as it is adding workers.
February 2020: 63.4%
January 2021: 61.4%
August 2023: 62.8%
Another good indicator is employment-to-population ratio, or simply employment-population ratio. It is like the previous metric, but it only accounts for employed workers and excludes those looking for jobs.
Employment to Population Ratio
February 2020: 61.1%
January 2021: 57.5%
August 2023: 60.4%
Considering these numbers, to return to pre-pandemic labor force participation, we need 1.6 million more jobs. To return to pre-pandemic employment-population ratio, we need 1.8 million more jobs. It is a metric that doesn't fit in a tidy White House tweet or sound bite, but it is required for a truly growing economy to rebuild the ruins of Covid wake and progressives’ lockdown economy.
Now let’s move on to consider who deserves the credit for the jobs created—and the blame for the slowing down of the recovery.
Covid Job Loss Recovery and Participation Rates
Covid cost the American economy 25 million jobs. During the Donald Trump administration and in under a year, the U.S. economy recovered 17 million of those jobs. In the two and a half years that Biden has been president, 11 million more jobs have been added. Why did it suddenly slow down?
One factor is that the fundamental aspects of the Trump economy, which had driven substantial growth before the pandemic, remained in place. However, when Biden became president, the regulatory burden returned with a vengeance, slowing down economic growth.
But more importantly, a partisan split caused the quick recovery in 2020 and its slowdown in 2021. Broadly speaking, and with some exceptions, Republican-run states were driving the comeback by ending Covid restrictions early, while Democratic-run states insisted on keeping those restrictions even after their populations were largely vaccinated. It was only after their poor electoral performance in 2021 that Democrats finally agreed to fully end Covid restrictions. Biden himself was no innocent bystander. In August 2020, he said that he would consider a nationwide lockdown and he only agreed to end the Covid federal emergency last April, two years after vaccines had become available. And only because Congress had passed a bipartisan bill.
In March 2020, everybody agreed that we had to shut down everything. The virus was new, and we knew very little about how it spread and how it could be treated. Death or severe illness was very likely. After weeks and months, we had learned a lot. Republican governors like Greg Abbott, Doug Ducey, Brian Kemp, Kristi Noem, Kim Reynolds, and Ron DeSantis considered the new scientific evidence about the virus and decided to open their states, leading the nation’s recovery. Democrats observed, learned from the example, and follow the lead.
Kidding!
They condemned Republicans for not caring about the loss of life and praised themselves as the pro-science party that wanted to save lives—even though they were dismissing the new scientific evidence. And that’s why they lagged behind in economic recovery.
When Biden became president, the United States was 10 million jobs shorter than when Covid started because of his party’s policies. Our current employment number is 161 million, compared to 158 million pre-Covid peak. It is good that today we have nearly 3 million more jobs than before Covid, but relative to the population, fewer people are working today, and we are still behind where we were because Democrats insisted on keeping the economy closed.
Next, let’s analyze the jobs created.
1.15 million Government Jobs
Total jobs “created” under Biden are 11.543 million. 1.15 million of those are government jobs.
It takes two American households to pay for one government employee. In 2020, 157.5 million Americans households paid, by one estimate, $9.48 trillion federal, state, and municipal taxes. This means that the average American household paid $60,000 in taxes. The average compensation of government employees that year was $110,000 a year. Counting for additional costs of employment such as business reimbursements and office costs, the cost of one government employee is twice the average taxes paid.
710,300 of these government jobs are in education. One estimate suggests that there are 76,000 fewer schoolteachers today than in 2021. Higher education faces a similar problem. The most recent available data dated back to 2021 shows that the number of university administrators is increasing while the size of faculty workforce is decreasing. This means that none of these new “education” jobs have gone to educators, but all to administrators.
This is not a natural evolution of free markets; it’s a deliberate self-service of the Democratic Party being paid by American families. Government bureaucrats, school administrators who become members of teachers’ unions, and woke college administrators are all Democrat constituencies.
To sum it up, here are the highlights of the Bidenomics job market:
1.15 million new government jobs, paid by 2.25 million families
255,000 new state government jobs
35,000 bureaucrats
220,000 college administrators
819,000 local government jobs
328,500 bureaucrats
490,500 school administrators
76,000 new federal bureaucrats
Super majority Democratic voters
We want people working. We don’t need administrations to create jobs that serve their own parties but for the private sector to create jobs that serve Americans. Biden and his cheerleaders won’t be honest about the state of the U.S. workforce and the jobs they are creating, so we must work harder to break through the mainstream media and spread this message:
Covid was a natural disaster at first, but then Democrats turned it into a human disaster. Biden cannot take credit for slowing a natural disaster he and his fellow Democrats unnecessarily exacerbated. More than anyone, the Republicans who opened their states at the right time deserve the credit.