The Federal Reserve, for one, projected in December 2020 that the unemployment rate would average less than 4.6% – 4.2%, to be precise – in the fourth quarter of 2022. He certainly didn’t make it clear that, for this particular claim, he was reaching back to a starting point during the last year of the Trump era.Īs for Biden’s claim about the 4.6% rate being achieved “two years faster than everyone expected”: “Everyone” was too strong. So far, through October, it has fallen another 1.7 percentage points during Biden’s tenure.Ī White House official, who responded to CNN’s questions on condition of anonymity, said that when Biden spoke about unemployment being above 14% “when we started at this job,” he was referring to the peak of the pandemic, not the start of his presidency.īut this section of Biden’s speech was focused on the achievements of his administration over the past 10 months. Then the rate started falling, hitting 6.3% in January 2021. The unemployment rate spiked under Trump on account of the Covid-19 pandemic, jumping from 3.5% in February 2020 to a pandemic-era peak of 14.8% in April 2020. But the majority of the decline occurred during the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency. It happened roughly one year faster than the Federal Reserve had projected in December 2020.īiden strongly suggested that all of the “historic progress” in bringing the unemployment rate down from more than 14% to 4.6% happened “over the last 10 months,” the period in which he has been in office. Second, while the unemployment rate has fallen faster under Biden than some experts had expected, he exaggerated when he said the 4.6% rate was achieved two years faster than “everyone” expected. In fact, the unemployment rate in January 2021, the month he was sworn in, was 6.3% it had not been above 14% since April 2020. First and most importantly, his phrasing created the inaccurate impression that the unemployment rate was over 14% when he “started at this job” as president. When we started at this job, it was over 14%,” Biden said.įacts First: Biden was wrong in two ways here. Unemployment is down to 4.6%, two years faster than everyone expected. “We’ve made historic progress over the last 10 months. In an economic speech last week, Biden made a series of comments about the unemployment rate. Let’s look at four of the things he said in November and on the first day of December. And some of them are missing important context. īut some of Biden’s economic claims aren’t true. President Joe Biden has spoken regularly about the economy in the past month – trying at once to reassure Americans about inflation, draw attention to job growth and earn support for his signature infrastructure and social spending proposals.
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