In the Tweet of the day, President Biden claims to have created close to 500,000 jobs per month for the last two years. A person correcting the president made a mess of it.

Image from a Tweet by President Biden.

This context note is false. This isn’t how the calculation is done. I’ve reported it and twitter hasn’t removed it. https://t.co/w9rmgJCBiu

— Bill McBride (@calculatedrisk) June 28, 2023

As Bill McBride points out, the reader added context is incorrect. The reader context link points to BLS employment data. That is the wrong data series. When discussing jobs, the correct series is nonfarm payrolls, not employment.

Nonfarm Payrolls and Employment Levels

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Nonfarm payrolls and employment levels from the BLS, chart by Mish.

In the last two years payrolls rose by 11,009,000. That’s an average of 458,708 per month.

The rise in fulltime employment is much less, about 334,000.

But does every president get to pick his best two years?

President Biden takes credit for jobs created in the Covid rebound while blaming Trump for a Pandemic that Trump had nothing to do with. Certainly more jobs were lost due to blue state policies than red state policies.

CPI Year-Over-Year

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CPI and PCE inflation data from the BLS and BEA respectively. Chart by Mish.

If you get to make claims on jobs then do the same about inflation.

Hello President Biden, year-over-year CPI inflation was 1.4 percent in January of 2021. In March of 2021, you signed the biggest and most unwarranted fiscal stimulus in history. You also handed out free money to students and continued rent evection moratoriums.

Inflation then soared the most since 1982.

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CPI and PCE inflation data from the BLS and BEA respectively. Chart by Mish.

Of course, the Fed had a hand in this. The Fed had a hand in job creation as well.

How many jobs permanently went away due to poor policy decisions by presidents? By Democratic governors? How much inflation credit goes to the Fed and how much to Trump and Biden?

How much of the unaffordability of homes is due to Biden policies and how much is due to inept decisions by the Fed?

Certainly, the Inflation Reduction Act did nothing to reduce inflation. Free subsidies and tax credits in the IRA are guaranteed to raise inflation.

Taking credit for everything good and none of the bad is more than a bit disingenuous, but that’s where we are, and don’t expect that to change.

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