As campaign season nears, politicians are turning up the volume on campaign rhetoric. To cut through the noise, we’re launching Campaign Context, a weekly series providing clarity on the messages you’re hearing from candidates on the campaign trail. We’re digging past the politics and into the facts to provide you with the transparent, spin-free information you need to make informed decisions this election season.
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Kicking off KXAN’s Campaign Context series, we take a look at a comment from President Joe Biden touting job growth within his Bidenomics plan. Watch the video above for the breakdown.
The president, who is running for reelection in 2024, said his administration, “has created more jobs in two years than any previous administration has created in the first four years.”
The White House also tweeted this chart showing the month-to-month job growth of his predecessors. We tracked those numbers back to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that data confirms that Biden’s job creation in the past two years does tower above other administrations.
These numbers emerge as the economy recovers from a pandemic that saw disastrous job losses, and the president’s Republican detractors — including the GOP-led House Budget Committee — are quick to point out that most of what the Biden administration has called job “creation” they would call job “recovery.” The Biden administration continues to stick with the term “job creation.”
That brings this Campaign Context down to a matter of semantics.