US Economy Added 428,000 Jobs In April, CNN Doubts Good Times Will Ever Return
Last month's job gains were fairly consistent with the roughly half-million jobs the economy has added every month since Joe Biden took office, so naturally, CNN Business fretted that the bloom is off the recovery, because maybe everything is terrible!
After an electric economic recovery from the pandemic, the job market is showing signs of returning to normal. It’s still growing at a remarkably strong pace, but the months of millions of jobs added are probably over.
Oh no! That sounds like huge drop-off in growth! At least, it might sound like it was until you look back over the actual job stats from the beginning of the pandemic recession. The BLS recorded catastrophic job losses in March and April 2020, with 20 million jobs vaporized in April 2020 alone, before the economy started coming back.
But here's the thing: Those wondrous days of "millions of jobs" being added to the economy were limited to the summer of 2020, as most businesses that had temporarily shut down in response to the pandemic reopened. Here, have a chart from Forbes in September 2020; the numbers here show the initial monthly jobs numbers without taking later revisions into account:
The 1.4 million new jobs in August 2020 would be, in fact, the last time the economy added over a million jobs during the current recovery. Donald Trump took credit for the jobs gains — which were real, but had more to do with businesses starting to dig out from the crash than any economic genius on his part.
On the other hand, the Trump administration's catastrophically inept handling of the pandemic did mean that the early return of jobs didn't hold: The pandemic came roaring back in the fall wave of 2020. In fact, job growth slowed for the rest of that year: 919,000 new jobs in September, 647,000 in October, 333,000 in November, and an actual loss of 115,000 jobs in December 2020.
Since Joe Biden took office in 2021 and the vaccines began to help control the coronavirus, the economy has grown pretty steadily, as you can see in this nice chart from the New York Times today. See how we're almost back up to the pre-pandemic jobs level?
In a statement, President Biden noted that since he took office, the economy has added 8.3 million jobs; he also noted that back in January 2021,
there were around 20 million people relying on unemployment benefits to feed their families; today, that number is around 1 million – the lowest since 1970. We are building an economy that values the dignity of work.
In short, shut the fuck up about there no longer being any "millions of jobs" gained in any given month, CNN, because the only time that happened was right after the economy fell off a cliff — and that growth didn't continue because we had that second big COVID surge.
You dipshits.
Also too, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by half a point Wednesday in an attempt to rein in inflation without slowing the economy enough to cause a recession, so here's hoping the former happens and the latter doesn't. Now we have to go and work on programming our EconoBot 3000 with a range of sober-sounding statements about the economy.
