When assessing the strength of the labor market, it’s more important to focus on the employment rate rather than the unemployment rate.

After all, economic output is a function of the quantity and quality of labor and capital in the economy.

And when I looked at employment data during the Biden years, the numbers were not good.

Moreover, we now have revised numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggesting that preliminary estimates overstated the number of jobs during Biden’s tenure.

While the number of jobs is important, it is probably even more important to know how much workers are getting paid.

So here’s the latest version of a BLS chart I’ve shared before that measures inflation-adjusted worker compensation.

The Biden years are bracketed in green to show a little bit of wage growth when he took office and a bit more in his last 18 months. But also a big drop in between when workers lost ground to inflation.

Since the above chart is a series of 12-month calculations, I went to the BLS database so I could create a chart showing absolute changes over time.

As you can see (Biden changes again bracketed in green), workers did not gain ground during the Biden years.

Last but not least, the Census Bureau just released its annual report on Income in the United States.

This is a broader measure of well-being since it counts other sources of income beyond wages and salaries.

And it does show better news for Biden. Median Household Income was higher when he left office than it was when he entered office.

That being said, the increase was not impressive. Definitely below the strong increases the nation enjoyed during the Reagan and Clinton years, when pro-market policies were being implemented.

By the way, it is perfectly reasonable to say Biden was not responsible for some of the weak numbers when he first took office. After all, the Fed’s bad monetary policy started under Trump (though it then continued under Biden).

And it’s also fair to consider how the COVID pandemic distorted economic data for both Trump and Biden (though both responded the same way, with easy money and more spending.

The bottom line is that nothing in today’s data to change Biden’s failing grade on economic policy.

———
Image credit: Gage Skidmore | CC BY-SA 2.0.