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During the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency, the economy has performed quite well. The unemployment rate hit a 50-year low, income growth doubled, and the economic expansion it inherited became the longest in American history.
But it all stopped when COVID-19 hit.
Over a two-month period, from February to April 2020, the unemployment rate has hit an 80-year high and the number of Americans employed increased from 152.5 million to 130.3 million. These 22.2 million job losses brought employment in the United States back to 1999 levels.
Since, the economy went from contraction to expansion and saw the return of 12.3 million jobs. However, this was not enough to make up for the job losses that occurred during the pandemic.
This means Trump will become the first post-WWII president to see employment drop during his presidency. This last happened when Herbert Hoover left office in 1933 in the midst of the early years of the Great Depression.
When Trump took office in January 2017, employment in the United States was 145.6 million. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its final employment report on Friday ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration. This shows that as of December there were 142.6 million Americans employed, 3 million less than Trump’s own inauguration.
For comparison purposes, Fortune annualized job gain rates under all former leaders since Reagan. During Obama’s eight years as head of the nation, Employment in the United States maintained an annualized return of 1%. This level of growth began to climb during the Trump years; in February 2020, employment was increasing on an annualized basis of 1.5% during his presidency. Still, in the final tally, Trump will step down after overseeing an annualized employment growth rate of -0.5%.
Simply put: The historic job boom candidate Trump promised during the 2016 election campaign was another victim of COVID.
More to read absolutely financial cover of Fortune:
- It’s officially a blue wave. What this historically means for stocks
- Democrats plan to use Senate victory spend $ 2,000 stimulus checks
- This calculator shows the “sinister calculations” of how much it will cost you to leave the workforce during COVID
- the fundamental fault in capitalization-weighted index funds
- 2 U-turns in 2 days: why the NYSE finally decided to deregister 3 Chinese companies
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