It's very hard to give Joe Biden a good grade for economic policy after examining issues such as subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, red tape, employment, and poverty.
So I was surprised last night when Governor Gavin Newsom of California said Biden deserved high marks. And his main piece of evidence was that Biden supposedly created millions and millions of new jobs.
Politicians don't create jobs, of course, but let's ignore that bit of rhetorical sloppiness. And let's also ignore the absurdity of a politician trying to take credit for the economy's bounce-back from the pandemic.
Instead, let's dispassionately analyze the job market's performance during Biden's time in office
Looking at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank's data, the good news (from the Biden-Newsom perspective) is that there has been a big increase in employment since January of 2021.
But there's also bad news. If you extrapolate based on the job market's performance before the pandemic - which I did with the dashed line - you can see that the economy is still lagging.
To be sure, this data is not evidence that Biden's policies have prevented the economy and job market from fully recovering.
But the numbers also show that it is silly to assert that the president has overseen some sort of employment miracle. Or even that he's done a good job.
Biden's track record on employment looks even more suspect when you review the Labor Department's data on job market participation. I've created a dashed trend line and once again we see that that economy is lagging its pre-pandemic performance. In this case, the lag is even greater.
These numbers are very revealing. After all, it is not exactly great news if the unemployment rate is low merely because workers have given up and dropped out.
Which seems to be one of Biden's big legacies, especially when you compare the United States to other industrialized nations.
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