It was always asinine for President Joe Biden’s administration to claim that they “nearly” added 15 million jobs since the pandemic, and it apparently stank so much that even leftist fact-checker Snopes didn’t let it pass the smell test.
In a shocking twist, Snopes analyzed that the Biden administration’s propagandized claim on how star-spangled awesome its job creation numbers were was “misleading” in a March 21 fact check. According to Snopes, “About 9 million of those jobs were lost during the pandemic, so the net jobs gain from pre-pandemic levels was 5.5 million.” In other words, the “15 million” claim was bunk. But even the 5.5 million number is way too generous, but more on that later. The author of the fact check, Anna Rascouët-Paz, addressed the Biden propaganda on her personal Twitter account: “Did the US economy really add 15 million jobs under Biden? *squinty face* mmmm let's not push it.” No kidding.
However, Rascouët-Paz stopped short of outright calling the Biden administration liars by still dubbing their claim a true/false “mixture” because the U.S. economy technically “gained 14.9 million jobs in total” from the pandemic recovery. Yes, the very claim that Rascouët-Paz deemed “false” was spun to seem like it still contained a modicum of honesty.
But for an outlet that routinely goes to bat for Biden, protecting him from most any scrutiny, “Mixture” is about as close as we can hope Snopes will get to red-flagging a leftist president’s economic falsehoods. The Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni told MRC Business in an exclusive interview that “[t]he word ‘added’ implies an increase over the preexisting trend, but we’ve had precisely the opposite.”
Did the US economy really add 15 million jobs under Biden?
— Anna Rascouët-Paz (@rascouet) March 21, 2024
*squinty face* mmmm let's not push it. https://t.co/JVjYWz8DWR
Rascouët-Paz attempted to throw Biden a bone by drawing readers’ attention to the supposed “Signs of a Strong Economy,” claiming that the “data shows [sic] that the U.S. economy has been strong overall under Biden.”. She waved around the February jobs report showing that the economy allegedly added 275,000 jobs, the 3.9 percent unemployment rate and 3.1 percent 2023 GDP growth as data points, but conveniently left out important context that blew up her pro-Biden spin.
Rascouët-Paz failed to mention the inconvenient little factoid that the February jobs report was drastically undercut by the simultaneous news that the previously robust January jobs numbers had been downwardly revised by more than a whopping 35 percent, from 353,000 to 229,000. If that wasn’t bad enough, the February jobs report also reduced the December 2023 jobs numbers from 333,000 to 290,000, totaling a 167,000-job overestimate for December and January combined. In addition, new data from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve showed that the U.S. economy added two-thirds fewer jobs in the third quarter of 2023 than previously reported by the BLS report, according to The Daily Caller.
Antoni told MRC Business that any attempt to sugarcoat the decrepit state of the jobs market under Biden as Rascouët-Paz did is downright ludicrous. “There are a variety of ways to measure how” far the labor market is below its pre-pandemic trend, he said, “but each of them shows that we’re missing at least 4.8 million jobs.” In fact, argued Antoni that “it seems more accurate to say Biden is short jobs than he has added them.”
But that isn’t the only area where Rascouët-Paz dropped the ball. A chunk of the so-called “growth” in 2023 that she praised as a win for Biden happened because the federal government debt exploded by over $6.6 trillion against a nominal GDP increase of $5.6 trillion, as Antoni pointed out in a February X post. Antoni argued that the government was effectively “borrowing to create the illusion of ‘growth,’ and getting only 89 cents on the dollar… .”
Reiterating this point to MRC Business, Antoni concluded, “[T]he only thing keeping both consumer and government spending levels afloat is debt. The government basically borrowed over $800 billion last quarter to ‘buy’ $300 billion of GDP ‘growth.’”
And the argument that the U.S. is experiencing healthy growth gets even worse when one tears off the false veneer, as Antoni revealed:
Likewise, consumer debt is through the roof as people attempt to maintain their standard of living amid the sharp drop in real earnings over the last 3 years. Furthermore, many people, especially the young, have turned to doom spending. This is where they give up on ever being able to own a home or other big ticket items, so they stop saving for a down payment and other investments, and spend that money instead. That’s increasing consumer spending today, but also killing savings and long-run growth. Indeed, the savings rate today is less than half the pre-pandemic level, and that’s after the government handed out thousands of dollars to everybody.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Snopes and tell it to stop trying to save the Biden administration from the political fallout of the falsehoods it peddles on the state of the economy.
