In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden touted the strength of the nation’s job growth in 2021.
“Our economy created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs in one year than ever before in the history of the United States of America,” Biden said.
He has a point, but it’s important to put these gains into context.
The United States did finish 2021 with some 6.6 million more jobs than it started with the previous January. This far exceeded the previous one-year record of 4.2 million additional jobs in 1979.
However, as the nation’s population has grown, so has the number of jobs. Using the annual percentage increase is a better way to make comparisons across the 80-plus years for which data is available.
Using that metric, 2021 put up strong numbers but did not set an all-time record.
Read the full story and see how Biden’s claim scored at PolitiFact, and listen to an interview with PolitiFact’s Nusaiba Mizan in the audio player above.
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