It turns out that the economy in Joe Biden’s last year in office was not the ‘best in decades’ as certain progressives claimed.
I’ll leave it to Dominic, Andrew, and the Capital Matters gang to analyze the details of the revisions of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, indicating that between April 2024 and March 2025, instead of creating 1.8 million new jobs, the U.S. economy created less than half that, only 847,000 jobs. That looks pretty tepid – not a recession by any means, but a disappointingly sluggish and slow rate of job creation.
But I will point out that if you are cursed with the ability to remember more than five minutes ago, you may recall a whole bunch of people arguing that first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris were not getting enough credit for the allegedly “red hot economy.”
In early October 2024, the New York Times reported, “After months of wobbling, a fresh jobs report showed that hiring and wage growth are strong, aligning with other robust economic data… In fact, the report reinforced that by many measures, the job market is as healthy as it has ever been.”
A few days later, Politico contended, “Harris is riding a dream economy into the election.”
As the month came to a close, the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip declared, “The Next President Inherits a Remarkable Economy.”
Jonathan Levin of Bloomberg News declared, “The US Economy Is in a Sweet Spot… The nation is experiencing a dream combination of strong growth and low inflation.”
And as the Biden presidency ended, the Center for American Progress claimed, “the U.S. economy was at its best in decades, right before President Trump took office for his second term.”
Eh, not so much, it turns out.
Poll after poll throughout the 2024 presidential election cycle showed that voters consistently ranked the economy highest in their concerns. Voters usually rated the economy pretty badly; as Pew found in October, “A quarter rate economic conditions as excellent or good, while 37 percent say they are only fair and 38 percent rate conditions as poor.” Some analysts contended that the voters were still suffering a hangover from the sky-high inflation of the previous years, while others contended the Americans were just perceiving the state of the economy incorrectly.
Eh, maybe the American people could tell in their guts that their economic lives didn’t feel anything like “the best economy in decades” and that they were being told happy talk by the Biden administration, congressional Democrats, and their cheerleaders in the press. The initial BLS numbers told a pretty darn happy story, and the revised ones suggest a much less positive narrative of the American economy. Score one for everybody whose impression of the economy was shaped by their grocery bills, gas prices, rents, mortgage rates, and general sense of whether they felt like they were getting ahead.