Biden’s Numbers (First Quarterly Update)

Summary

Here’s how the U.S. has been performing since President Joe Biden assumed office:

• The economy regained 7.9 million jobs, getting within 1.6 million of the peak employment before the pandemic.
• Unemployment fell to 3.6%; unfilled job openings surged, with 1.8 slots for every person seeking work.
• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years. Consumer prices are up 9.7%. Gasoline alone rose nearly 72%.
• Wages rose briskly, by 6.5%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 3.8%.
• The economy grew 5.7% last year — the highest rate of growth since 1984.
  
• The monthly average number of migrants apprehended at the border with Mexico over the last year increased by 309% compared with the average during President Donald Trump’s final year.
• The percentage of Americans without health insurance dropped by 1.4 points from the last quarter of Trump’s presidency to the third quarter of Biden’s.
  
• The U.S. admitted 18,766 refugees in Biden’s first 14 full months in office — lagging far behind his goal of 125,000 refugees a year.
• Annual corporate profits increased last year for the first time since 2018, topping $2.6 trillion and setting a new record.
• Homicides in U.S. big cities were up 6.2% from 2020 to 2021.
  
• The U.S. trade deficit grew by more than 34% and is on pace for a new record high.
• Crude oil production has increased by nearly 1%, with larger gains projected for this year.
• Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman confirmed to the Supreme Court. 
• The public debt rose another 10%, although federal deficits are on the decline.
• Stock prices are up since Biden took office, but have fallen since the start of the year.

Analysis

As our regular readers know, we have been tracking the nation’s progress — or lack thereof, in some cases — since October 2012, when we introduced “Obama’s Numbers,” which we updated on a quarterly basis. We did the same for Trump.

This is our first quarterly update of “Biden’s Numbers,” which debuted in January.

Here we include the latest statistics from authoritative sources on the state of the nation’s economic and social well-being. We don’t assign blame or credit, knowing full well that opinions will differ on that.

We should note that some statistics are not available at this time. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has yet to release either an interim or final report on 2021 gun manufacturing data. We also won’t have Census Bureau poverty and household income figures for 2021 until September. We’ll cover those and more in quarterly updates to come.

Jobs and Unemployment

The economy continued to rebound under Biden, regaining millions of jobs lost during the pandemic and driving the unemployment rate down to almost as low as it had been before.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 7,908,000 jobs between January 2021, when Biden took office, and March, the latest month for which data is available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Biden boasted when the March numbers were released: That’s “more jobs created over the first 14 months of any presidency in any term ever.” That’s true enough, measured in the sheer number of jobs. In percentage terms, Biden’s 5.5% job growth runs a close second to the 5.9% gain during the first 14 months of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

And employment still hasn’t fully recovered from the pandemic. There were nearly 1.6 million fewer people working in March than there were in February 2020, just before COVID-19 forced much of the economy to shut down.

Unemployment — The unemployment rate plunged during Biden’s first 14 months, down to 3.6% in March from 6.4% when he took office.

“There have been only three months in the last 50 years where the unemployment rate in America is lower than it is now,” Biden said of the most recent report. 

That’s correct, though Biden failed to mention that those three months were during Trump’s presidency. The rate was 3.5% in September