IF YOUR TIME IS SHORT
• Biden can claim successes with falling unemployment rates, steady gains in job creation, and labor-force participation rates that are nearing their pre-pandemic levels.
• Several other measures on his watch initially worsened but now seem to be headed in the right direction. These include inflation, gross domestic product, gasoline prices, inflation-adjusted wages and consumer confidence.
President Joe Biden has reasons to be satisfied with the nation’s economic performance under his watch, including low unemployment rates and efforts he led to help the economy rebound from COVID-19. But his time in the Oval Office has also been consumed by frustration over 40-year-high levels of inflation.
On the occasion of Biden announcing his re-election bid, PolitiFact examined how 14 key economic markers have changed since Biden took office in January 2021.
Even though presidential policies can affect the nation’s economic health, no president can be fully credited with, or blamed for, everything that goes into the economy.
With that in mind, let’s examine the performance of manufacturing job gains, gasoline prices, the stock market, consumer confidence and other factors under Biden’s watch.
The good economic news for Biden
The nation’s overall unemployment rate has dropped sharply on Biden’s watch, from 6.3% when he took office to 3.5% in March. Although Black and Hispanic Americans continue to have higher unemployment rates than whites do, the trend has been declining unemployment rates for every racial and ethnic group.
The Black unemployment rate has fallen from 9.2% to 5% over the same period, and the Hispanic unemployment rate has fallen from 8.5% to 4.6%.
The March 2023 rates, the most recent available, show unemployment rates for all categories at or near historical lows.
The pattern of job gains has likely helped to cool inflation. Although the economy has gained jobs every month during Biden’s presidency, the scale of monthly job gains has generally declined since August 2022.
From the start of Biden’s presidency until July 2022, the economy averaged a net increase of 553,000 jobs per month. Since August 2022, the average has averaged a solid, but more modest, 324,000 jobs per month.
The declining scale of monthly job gains is considered good news. The more the economy cools on its own, there is less pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.
Biden has prioritized creating manufacturing jobs, building the sector into his legislative priorities.
Overall, Biden’s record in this sector has been strong: The economy created manufacturing jobs every month between May 2021 and January 2023, by between 6,000 and 73,000 per month. Preliminary data for February and March 2023 show small decreases, though these could be revised in future months.
Industrial productivity has also risen on Biden’s watch. A productivity gain comes when something can be produced more quickly or more cheaply than was possible previously. It’s an important statistic, because greater productivity means wages can be raised without nudging inflation higher.
During Biden’s presidency, the standard measure of the economy’s productivity has risen fairly consistently.
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