| US President Joe Biden. © Archyde.com=News1 © News1 Correspondent Kim Hyun |
U.S. President Joe Biden said in his employment report for December last year that it was a “historical day for economic recovery” as the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a speech at the White House after the U.S. Department of Labor’s December employment report was released on the same day, President Biden said, “Today the unemployment rate has fallen from 4% to 3.9%.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, non-farm payrolls rose only 199,000 in December, but the unemployment rate fell 0.3 percentage points to 3.9 percent from 4.2 percent in the previous month. The unemployment rate in December was lower than the Archyde.com self-reported estimate of 4.1%, the lowest since the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020. It was close to the unemployment rate of 3.5% in February 2020, the lowest in 50 years just before the pandemic.
“For the first time since the pandemic, the unemployment rate was below 4%,” he said, stressing that he achieved it in his first year of office faster than analysts had expected.
President Biden also introduced that 6.4 million new jobs were created in one year from January of last year, emphasizing that it was “the most jobs in any year, more than any president in history.” “American labor participation is growing at the fastest rate since 1996,” he said.
He explained that last year, wages for women and men in the toughest jobs, such as restaurants, hotels, travel and waiters, rose by almost 60 percent. “That’s why they quit their jobs,” he said. “It’s not that workers refuse to work.”
“America is a world with a stronger economy today than it was before the pandemic, as a whole today,” Biden said, referring to one economist’s assessment of what the Biden administration achieved in 2021 as having the strongest economic performance of any president in the past 50 years. It is the only developed country,” he said.
President Biden also rebutted “I don’t understand” when Republicans devalued his economic recovery and criticized the Biden administration for not responding to inflation.
He stressed that Republicans had voted against bills such as tax cuts for middle-class families, the normalization of face-to-face classes and the distribution of a vaccine against coronavirus, he said. .
President Biden also urged the US Congress to process a pending $2 trillion social welfare budget. He stressed that the budget would help deal with high inflation.
He said the record inflation was “still a concern” and that the Federal Reserve would act to contain inflation.