[OC] Job growth under Trump lagged behind Biden and Clinton
August 1, 2024
[OC] Job growth under Trump lagged behind Biden and Clinton
Posted by nytopinion
28 comments
So was Trump’s net job creation number including COVID -60K or 122K? I am not sure how I am supposed to read that chart.
So even without Covid Biden created more jobs?
It weirds me out that the NYTimes sees value in posting to this sub on reddit
Well, Trump’s policies led to Biden’s gains, and Clinton benefited from the dot com boom. Overall, looks like Trump’s numbers are pretty damn good.
Am I reading this right?
If Trump’s net job loss is -60k, then I’m assuming that means he created 182k, but in total 242k were lost due to Covid.
Biden created a total of 384k, 97k of which were jobs that were initially lost due to Covid.
What happened to the other 145k jobs that were lost due to Covid?
Overall great chart. However, the elephant in the room:
> Even when the **effect of the pandemic is excluded,** the Trump administration’s figures are **lower than those of other recent presidents**.
What an… interesting conclusion. The Trump Administration was #3 of all administrations since the 1970’s if you don’t include Covid. Interesting way to frame it.
Even then, not all jobs are the same. How many of these jobs (for now and in previous terms) are full time vs part time? What are their wages? How many went to people already working a job or 2 other jobs? What sectors?
How are Covid gains greater than Covid losses?
That’s a wild conclusion to draw. I’d frame it more like “90’s job gains under Clinton saw a setback from the 2008 crisis, after which Obama, Trump, and Biden all oversaw increasingly good periods of growth”
I wonder how they tried to control for COVID
[removed]
Would be interesting to also show including/excluding 2008 crash job losses for both G. W. Bush and Obama, if that’s feasible.
I am genuinely amazed that they actually make graphs excluding Covid losses.
I hope next someone can show me a graph of all the times Troy won the Trojan War.*
*Excluding occasions where they let a big wooden horse through the gate, lolz.
With data like this the raw number of jobs alone feels like only half the picture. Are we distinguishing between part time versus full time? How are we counting people who started a second or third job? How are we counting private sector versus government jobs? Are we considering how many workers entered and left the workforce? How many jobs went to immigrants versus citizens?
As useful as data is, drawing effective conclusions often requires more than a single set of data points.
It makes zero sense to visualize this in terms of monthly averages. Especially when there were massive loss periods. If jobs fell precipitously in the last year of Trumps presidency, and rapidly rose back to initial levels under Biden, of course his monthly average will drastically exceed Trump’s.
While presidents tend to steer directions for the country, I’d hesitate to attribute a causation, especially since many policy changes have a lagging effect and outside forces on the economy might play a larger role in employment.
And since this is reddit, I feel I have to include the disclaimer that I am not trying to defend Trump: I loathe the man. Just trying to remain objective.
Ehhh, I’m not gonna say B.S. but would be curious to see the data sets and sources. Times are historically left leaning with hard support for democratic policies since the 60’s. Anyone who works with data sets or statistic knows that if the data modeler wanted to, they can skew the data to fit personal or political needs. Maybe it’s right, maybe not… but I would bet there is definitely bias in this chart.
What do I say to my MIL when she says democrats create government jobs to boost their numbers? She likes to throw out these things that seem kinda valid and based in truth, but I know there’s more to the story.
Are we going to consider 1 lost good full time job with benefits, to a gain of 2 gig or contract workers are job growth.
Any trying to apply for jobs right now knows.
I recently read on Yahoo Finance that a large percentage of the job growth here combined from government jobs.
I wonder how this would look if broken down by commercial vs. Government jobs. I’m mostly interested because the inference here is that businesses are doing better and hiring more people under Biden rather than other administrations. This may be true but definitely can’t be deduced from this graph.
too bad Biden isn’t running again
This is not meant to be a criticism or support for any of these presidents, just trying to lay out some of the economic facts.
1. Many of the policies that led to the 08 financial crisis were put in place by Clinton. Bush then piggy backed off of the short term financial gains until they collapsed in on themselves.
2. A wet paper bag could have gotten the jobs gains that Obama did. One of the biggest criticisms of his economy is that we never got back to the status quo. If you assume the real economic GDP is an equation of y = mx, since WW2, that line has remained relatively stable despite valleys and peaks (it’s actually faster than that really). After 08, we were at y = mx – b for the entirety of the Obama administration.
3. Under Trump, pre-Covid, the line shifted back to y = mx. Covid obviously destroyed all that.
4. Under Biden, the line actually got to mx + b for a brief period until the inflation issues.
All that said, the president doesn’t really have a ton of impact on jobs or the economy.
There is a reason Carter is not on this chart. Also Bush I was only 1 term as with Trump, not the dunk on Trump the OP thought.
The economy had no where to go but up under Obama. With Trump, it kicked into high gear until COVID.
Biden is simply regaining COVID losses under the burden of inflation and an overdue return of realistic interest rates.
I cannot wait for the return of simple data analysis where I cannot be sure of the politics of the person collecting or presenting the data.
Is this surprising?
When Trump took office the unemployment rate 4.7%. That is already a pretty low number.
And if you remove COVID it looks like he did pretty good despite that handicap.
I always wondered what the appropriate lag is for this stuff. Presidents don’t instantly change job growth rates so decisions of one will affect growth during the next ones term.
Look at more important categories numbers like how much Americans had in savings accounts with each president? Those numbers paint a better picture as far as the economy in my opinion!
Where did the Times get their numbers? Probably should note that so people don’t think they’re just making stuff up.
I am not a trump fan.
However, the job growth under Biden is bullshit.
Most of those “jobs created” are part time only jobs and many are even “ghost” jobs. Where companies put out ads for employment and never actually intend to hire anyone to fill those roles.
28 comments
So was Trump’s net job creation number including COVID -60K or 122K? I am not sure how I am supposed to read that chart.
So even without Covid Biden created more jobs?
It weirds me out that the NYTimes sees value in posting to this sub on reddit
Well, Trump’s policies led to Biden’s gains, and Clinton benefited from the dot com boom. Overall, looks like Trump’s numbers are pretty damn good.
Am I reading this right?
If Trump’s net job loss is -60k, then I’m assuming that means he created 182k, but in total 242k were lost due to Covid.
Biden created a total of 384k, 97k of which were jobs that were initially lost due to Covid.
What happened to the other 145k jobs that were lost due to Covid?
Overall great chart. However, the elephant in the room:
> Even when the **effect of the pandemic is excluded,** the Trump administration’s figures are **lower than those of other recent presidents**.
What an… interesting conclusion. The Trump Administration was #3 of all administrations since the 1970’s if you don’t include Covid. Interesting way to frame it.
Even then, not all jobs are the same. How many of these jobs (for now and in previous terms) are full time vs part time? What are their wages? How many went to people already working a job or 2 other jobs? What sectors?
How are Covid gains greater than Covid losses?
That’s a wild conclusion to draw. I’d frame it more like “90’s job gains under Clinton saw a setback from the 2008 crisis, after which Obama, Trump, and Biden all oversaw increasingly good periods of growth”
I wonder how they tried to control for COVID
[removed]
Would be interesting to also show including/excluding 2008 crash job losses for both G. W. Bush and Obama, if that’s feasible.
I am genuinely amazed that they actually make graphs excluding Covid losses.
I hope next someone can show me a graph of all the times Troy won the Trojan War.*
*Excluding occasions where they let a big wooden horse through the gate, lolz.
With data like this the raw number of jobs alone feels like only half the picture. Are we distinguishing between part time versus full time? How are we counting people who started a second or third job? How are we counting private sector versus government jobs? Are we considering how many workers entered and left the workforce? How many jobs went to immigrants versus citizens?
As useful as data is, drawing effective conclusions often requires more than a single set of data points.
It makes zero sense to visualize this in terms of monthly averages. Especially when there were massive loss periods. If jobs fell precipitously in the last year of Trumps presidency, and rapidly rose back to initial levels under Biden, of course his monthly average will drastically exceed Trump’s.
While presidents tend to steer directions for the country, I’d hesitate to attribute a causation, especially since many policy changes have a lagging effect and outside forces on the economy might play a larger role in employment.
And since this is reddit, I feel I have to include the disclaimer that I am not trying to defend Trump: I loathe the man. Just trying to remain objective.
Ehhh, I’m not gonna say B.S. but would be curious to see the data sets and sources. Times are historically left leaning with hard support for democratic policies since the 60’s. Anyone who works with data sets or statistic knows that if the data modeler wanted to, they can skew the data to fit personal or political needs. Maybe it’s right, maybe not… but I would bet there is definitely bias in this chart.
What do I say to my MIL when she says democrats create government jobs to boost their numbers? She likes to throw out these things that seem kinda valid and based in truth, but I know there’s more to the story.
Are we going to consider 1 lost good full time job with benefits, to a gain of 2 gig or contract workers are job growth.
Any trying to apply for jobs right now knows.
I recently read on Yahoo Finance that a large percentage of the job growth here combined from government jobs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/biden-administration-job-growth-numbers-175321823.html
I wonder how this would look if broken down by commercial vs. Government jobs. I’m mostly interested because the inference here is that businesses are doing better and hiring more people under Biden rather than other administrations. This may be true but definitely can’t be deduced from this graph.
too bad Biden isn’t running again
This is not meant to be a criticism or support for any of these presidents, just trying to lay out some of the economic facts.
1. Many of the policies that led to the 08 financial crisis were put in place by Clinton. Bush then piggy backed off of the short term financial gains until they collapsed in on themselves.
2. A wet paper bag could have gotten the jobs gains that Obama did. One of the biggest criticisms of his economy is that we never got back to the status quo. If you assume the real economic GDP is an equation of y = mx, since WW2, that line has remained relatively stable despite valleys and peaks (it’s actually faster than that really). After 08, we were at y = mx – b for the entirety of the Obama administration.
3. Under Trump, pre-Covid, the line shifted back to y = mx. Covid obviously destroyed all that.
4. Under Biden, the line actually got to mx + b for a brief period until the inflation issues.
All that said, the president doesn’t really have a ton of impact on jobs or the economy.
There is a reason Carter is not on this chart. Also Bush I was only 1 term as with Trump, not the dunk on Trump the OP thought.
The economy had no where to go but up under Obama. With Trump, it kicked into high gear until COVID.
Biden is simply regaining COVID losses under the burden of inflation and an overdue return of realistic interest rates.
I cannot wait for the return of simple data analysis where I cannot be sure of the politics of the person collecting or presenting the data.
Is this surprising?
When Trump took office the unemployment rate 4.7%. That is already a pretty low number.
And if you remove COVID it looks like he did pretty good despite that handicap.
I always wondered what the appropriate lag is for this stuff. Presidents don’t instantly change job growth rates so decisions of one will affect growth during the next ones term.
Look at more important categories numbers like how much Americans had in savings accounts with each president? Those numbers paint a better picture as far as the economy in my opinion!
Where did the Times get their numbers? Probably should note that so people don’t think they’re just making stuff up.
I am not a trump fan.
However, the job growth under Biden is bullshit.
Most of those “jobs created” are part time only jobs and many are even “ghost” jobs. Where companies put out ads for employment and never actually intend to hire anyone to fill those roles.
Working 2 jobs to afford gas isn’t really a flex