It’s Morning in Joe Biden’s America

We’ve gained three million jobs since Biden took office, or 600,000 jobs a month. This compares with gains of 340,000 a month in the year leading up to the 1984 election.

To be fair, Reagan-era job gains took place from a lower base, so it may be more appropriate to compare growth rates. But this still gives Biden the advantage: 5 percent at an annual rate, versus 4.4 percent in 1983-84. And the disparity grows if you compare jobs with the working-age population, which was growing around 1 percent a year in the 1980s but has stagnated in recent years.

So it’s a boom. What’s behind it?

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The truth is that Reagan doesn’t even deserve much credit for the boom of 1983-84; most of the credit should go instead to the Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates in 1982.

But how much credit should Biden get for job growth in 2021? Not all of it, certainly, but quite a lot.

The American Rescue Plan, which greatly increased the purchasing power of American consumers, has surely been an important driver of growth. Even more important, however, has been the rapid rise in vaccination rates...Some of us predicted long ago that the U.S. would experience a rapid, “V-shaped” recovery once the pandemic subsided and the economy could reopen; well, the success of the vaccination drive has brought us to that moment.

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So yes, we are having another morning in America, and Biden deserves more credit for his good morning than Reagan ever did for his.

Obviously things could still go wrong. Vaccination rates have slowed down...and the large number of still-unvaccinated Americans makes a wave of new outbreaks possible. Also, while I’m in the camp that sees the current inflation as a transitory problem, we could be wrong.

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But right now the economic news is good. And Joe Biden has every right to crow about it.