When Trump announced that Biden would be a “destroyer of American jobs” during his convention speech, Trump needed to hold up a shiny mirror.
While 11 million jobs were added during the Obama-Biden terms up to 2016, millions fewer are working now than when Trump was inaugurated. According to the Department of Labor, more than 13 million people are still collecting continuing unemployment through August. See graph of continuing claims.
Even before the coronavirus catastrophe, new jobs in the first 3 years of Trump-Pence (2017, 2018, 2019) had been gaining more slowly than they did in the 3 years preceding, under Obama-Biden. That’s true even in the months ahead of the current pandemic calamity.
Here’s the unemployment rate (%) since 2001, as experienced under multiple presidents, for the entire civilian workforce, PRE-Coronavirus. During the Obama-Biden term, unemployment was driven down to 4.7% from a high of 10%.
Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics. Article source for graphic: markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/9-charts-comparing-trump-economy-to-obama-bush-administrations-2019-9-1028833119 JAN 21, 2020
That was then.
This is now. See the chart below showing the spike in the unemployment rate (%), for African Americans. The most recent figure: 13% for African-Americans, 10.5% for Latino workers, 8.4% for the total civilian workforce.
Unemployment for African-Americans during the Obama years was sliced from double-digits to 8% at the end of 2016, as marked. It continued to fall, another 2 points, after Trump became president, to 5.9% at the end of 2019. And now has jumped to 13% by August.
As a digression from the labor-market economy, it helps to look at the very long-term buoyancy of the stock market under more than 1 president, shown here for the S&P 500 index, for length of months into the presidency. [Up to 43 months covers August.] The graph shows the percent gained each month (or lost, under GW Bush).
Graphic location: macrotrends.net . At the macrotrends.net chart link, hover over any month to see the comparative gain in the stock index.
Though Trump tries to send out a siren warning that the stock market “(and your 401K !)” will tumble and crash if Biden gets elected, the advances scored under Obama-Biden show a different story.
The great increase in the stock market indices under Trump are achieved on the shoulders of impressive gains during the Obama-Biden years, when gains in the market were nearly doubled, from 2008.
If you investigate further, you can take a deeper dive into economic indicators — the trade deficit, business investment, GDP. A few indicators illustrated (factory jobs, auto sales, GDP) are covered here,
at demomentum.com [ilustrated, PRE-coronavirus].
So the claims of faster job growth were always a stretch under Trump. Not unlike Trump padding the number of floors of his buildings in NYC.