Data shows a healthy US job market. Trump disagrees — and blames Biden | CNN Business
Washington
CNN
—
By many measures, America’s job market looks to be in good shape: In January, unemployment was at a historically low 4% as employers continued the second-longest streak of job growth in US history, according to fresh government data out Friday.
The Trump administration, however, had a more pessimistic view, pointing to an annual benchmark revision released Friday showing there were 589,000 fewer jobs added to the economy in 2024 than previously tallied.
“The benchmark told us that the downward revisions for the Biden job record were about cumulatively a whole million people, so we had a million fewer workers in the US than the (Bureau of Labor Statistics) told us right before the election than we actually had,” Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, told CNN’s Kate Bolduan Friday.
“The jobs market is way worse than we thought,” he said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed that sentiment in a statement: “Today’s jobs report reveals the Biden economy was far worse than anyone thought, and underscores the necessity of President Trump’s pro-growth policies.”
But the annual revision is a routine review of the surveys that generate monthly employment data, which are then reconciled with estimates from other statistical sources that weren’t available when the numbers were first reported.
The latest annual revision was indeed larger than usual, but not unusually so. In fact, there was a downward revision of 514,000 jobs (-0.3%) for the year ended in March 2019 during Trump’s first term before the Covid-19 pandemic.
And while federal government surveys have become less robust because of plummeting response rates in recent years, the numbers still present a vital snapshot of the world’s biggest economy.
The US job market these days isn’t running at the same red-hot pace coming out of the pandemic, but it remains solid.
Still, hiring has slowed recently, as job seekers, especially young people, can attest.
The rate at which Americans are hired continued to hover at 2013 levels in December, according to the latest data released this week, as Americans quit less frequently than they have in recent years.
In November, the number of Americans unemployed for more than 26 weeks reached its highest level in more than two years, though it declined in December and January.
Lydia Boussour, senior economist at EY-Parthenon, said in commentary issued Friday that the United States has a “frozen, but robust labor market” that’s expected to see “job growth to slow below trend this year and see the unemployment rate rising towards 4.4%.”
It could get worse if Trump proceeds with slapping 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which he delayed until March 1 from the original February 1 date.
“Steep tariffs and heightened policy uncertainty could push businesses to increasingly adopt wait-and-see behaviors and pull back on hiring,” Boussour said. “This could lead to a more severe job slowdown, weaker income and restrained consumer spending amidst much higher inflation.”
This article was originally published by a www.cnn.com . Read the Original article here. .