The January jobs report from the Labor Department showed a sudden jump across last month in the number of jobs added throughout the U.S. economy, beating the total seen for December and the monthly average across 2022.
Unemployment was also reported at 3.4 percent, the lowest since 1969. Although some of the economic progress is attributable to recovery from the economic upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, it wasn’t a given that such would take place. There’s no magic button available. On Friday, President Joe Biden spoke at the White House about the newly available numbers, directly confronting those who have talked about an economic calamity supposedly accompanying Biden spending time as president. No matter the apocalyptic and just odd posts from Trump on his knock-off social media site Truth Social, key segments of the economy are booming.
“For the past two years, we’ve heard a chorus of critics write off my economic plan,” Biden said. “They said it’s just not possible to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out. And they said we can’t bring back American manufacturing. They said we can’t make things in America anymore, that somehow adding jobs was a bad thing. Well — or that the only way to slow down inflation was to destroy jobs. Well, today’s data makes crystal clear what I’ve always known in my gut. These critics and cynics are wrong. While we may face setbacks along the way, and there will be some, there is more work to do. It’s clear our plan is working because of the grit and resolve of the American worker.” Manufacturing saw an increase in jobs in January, although unlike the numbers in some other sectors of the economy, the total was lower than the monthly average recorded across 2022.
According to the Labor Department, 19,000 manufacturing jobs were added in January. Biden was asked Friday about inflation, which he described as part of a wave of problems that began under Trump. Inflation also remains a worldwide dilemma, affecting economies throughout the G-20 group of nations — sometimes at a rate higher than what’s been recorded for the U.S., meaning the country was beating a trend in similarly grouped nations. Biden was specifically asked whether he took blame for inflation, and he said no, adding: “Because it was already there when I got here, man. Remember what the economy was like when I got here? Jobs were hemorrhaging. Inflation was rising. We weren’t manufacturing a damn thing here. We were in real economic difficulty. That’s why I don’t.”
Federal metrics have recently shown the rate of inflation dropping. In December, the rate of increase in prices over the same month in the prior year fell to five percent, the Commerce Department said on January 27. The Labor Department had a higher one-year rate of price hikes but a lower rate of price increases compared to just the prior month. The month-to-month level of price change was a 0.1 percent drop, that department said, with a 6.5 percent rise over the prior year.
