March 04, 2022
In his State of the Union Address, President Biden claimed the economy creating over 6.5 million jobs in his first year in office, which he said was the most ever. The New York Times boasted about fact-checking this claim. It rated it “partially true.”
The fact-check said: “Biden is correct on the numbers. But the government only started collecting this [sic] data in 1939.”
Okay folks, at the start of 1939, when the government started publishing this series, we had fewer than 30 million jobs by this measure (non-farm, payroll employment). An increase of more than 6.5 million jobs would have been a rise of more than 20 percent. That would be an increase of more than 30 million jobs in today’s labor market.
Does anyone at the NYT think we ever had a year where employment grew by 20 percent? That’s scary, if true.
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