Over the weekend, the White House claimed that President Joe Biden had added more than 10 million "new" jobs to America's beleaguered economy during his first two years in office. That doesn't sound dubious at all. Let's look at the numbers.
CLAIM: Biden's "economic plan helped create 10.5 million new jobs..." the White House tweeted Saturday, touting in a separate tweet that the total jobs "created under President Biden" is "more than any Administration in history at this point in a presidency."
President Biden’s economic plan helped create 10.5 million new jobs – including 750,000 manufacturing jobs.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 3, 2022
In November, our economy added 263,000 jobs.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 2, 2022
That’s a total of 10.5 million jobs created under President Biden – more than any Administration in history at this point in a presidency. pic.twitter.com/7HVQTjLzbG
The jobs creation claim is becoming a go-to talking point for the Biden administration, which Biden himself regurgitated in recent remarks: during Tuesday's prewritten speech at a semiconductor plant, where he got very confused about "chips," and Friday's signing of H.J. Res. 100, a bill to avert a nationwide railroad strike that was set to cost the U.S. economy $2 billion per day.
Biden's social media Gen-Z interns also tweeted the claim Friday on the president's personal and official accounts.
FACTS: Birdwatch fact-checkers part of Twitter's expanding Community Notes feature "added context" to yet another misleading White House tweet, countering that the U.S. lost more than 20 million jobs between mid-March 2020 and mid-April 2020 due to the government-mandated coronavirus shutdowns. So, in reality, it's simply adding those jobs back. Twitter users pointed out that many Americans have decided to give up on government handouts and head back to work after months of "pandemic vacation."
Meanwhile, there are still 10-plus million unfilled jobs as employers are still scrambling to find job seekers willing to work, indicating that worker shortages persist. Since January 2021, the private employment sector saw the smallest gain last month when job creation "slowed by the most," adding 127,000 jobs, according to the ADP National Employment report for November.
The ADP National Employment Report is a big swing and miss. Only 127k, the weakest number since the Fauci-induced Recession.
— Rich Baris "The People's Pundit" (@Peoples_Pundit) November 30, 2022
Forecasts ranged from a low of 150k to a high of 220k, with the consensus being 200k.
So much for holiday hiring.
Here we go.
And on the last business day of October, the number of job openings nationwide—a measure of labor demand in the country—dipped to 10.3 million, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in its Nov. 30 job openings and labor turnover summary.
It marked the 16th straight month that job openings in the U.S. remained above 10 million and left vacancies 40% higher than the figures we saw before the COVID-19 pandemic, Reuters reports, with 1.7 job openings for every unemployed person in October.
With more than 10.3 million job openings and 6.1 million #unemployed, there's still 1.7 unfilled positions for every #job seeker, however, indicating that the imbalance between labor demand and supply persists, albeit at a slightly lower level. pic.twitter.com/cNZ5i37KS6
— Statista (@StatistaCharts) December 7, 2022
Among the unemployed, the number of "permanent job losers" rose by 127,000 to 1.4 million in November, per a BLS news release. The amount of long-term unemployed, meaning those jobless for 27 weeks or more, was little changed at 1.2 million last month, accounting for 20.6% of all unemployed Americans. The BLS reports that the number of Americans not in the labor force who currently want a job barely changed at 5.6 million in November and remains above its February 2020 level of 5.0 million.
Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich grilled White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on the jobs creation claim in October, noting that the assertion "feels like smoke and mirrors." Jean-Pierre responded by claiming that the American Rescue Plan "got those small businesses open again" and "put us in a place where the economy turned back on."
RATING: The White House's claim that "10.5 million new jobs" have been "created" since Biden took office is MOSTLY FALSE.
The White House's definition of job creation conflates the generation of new jobs with workers naturally returning to the workforce following the government-enforced COVID-19 lockdowns that shuttered businesses, devasted U.S. industry, and drove working-class Americans home. Hence, the jobs creation claim doesn't calculate net gain. America's inflation-ravaged economy is slowly struggling to heal itself, even as the Biden administration tries to paint the trying times as a miraculous recovery.