Apparently Wednesday night on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, Pence said, “We’ve been creating more jobs over the last three months than Joe Biden and Barack Obama in their eight years in office.”
Facts first: The time frame of Pence’s ‘last three months’ is absurd: he is worried about the addition of about 9.3 million jobs in May, June and July immediately after a loss of about 22.2 million jobs in March and April; the economy is still down nearly 13 million jobs due to the coronavirus crisis. (Also, many of the jobs added were people returning to their previous jobs after temporary layoffs.) And even if you accept Pence’s unfair premise, it’s not true that these last three months saw more jobs than added in the eight year of the Obama administration.
The coronavirus crisis caused a record loss of about 22.2 million total jobs in March and April.
The work situation began to recover in May. In the three months from May to July, about 9.3 million jobs were added.
That’s good news. But the country is still in a deep hole. Less than half of the jobs lost in the pandemic – about 42% – were returned as of July. The unemployment rate was still at 10.2%.
And many of the jobs Pence talks about being “created” in May, June and July were actually cases in which people were allowed to return to work on temporary pandemic-related dismissal. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its July report: “As in May and June, the July decline in unemployment was driven primarily by a decline among people on temporary layoffs.”
The comparison with Obama
It clearly makes no sense to compare the last three months of his tenure of Trump with the entire Obama administration. But even if you feel like doing this comparison for some reason, Pence is still wrong.
About 11.6 million jobs were added under Obama and Biden in February 2009, their first full month in office, through January 2017, when Trump took office – far more than the 9.3 million added under Trump in May, June and July of this year. (If you start the Obama calculation in the month of January 2009, even though George W. Bush was in office for most of the month, and the end ends in December 2016, even though Obama for it most of January 2017 was in office, the profit under Obama was about 10.6 million jobs.)
It is also worth noting that Obama inherited a steep recession, and the economy threw jobs for most of his first year in office before embarking on a rigid climb. If you feel like starting the clock at the lowest job point of the recession in early 2010, as Obama’s allies gladly did, more than 15 million jobs were added under Obama.
The unemployment rate under Obama reached 10.0% in October 2009, slightly lower than in July 2020.
Anneken Tappe contributed to this fact-checking.
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