President Joe Biden touts a positive jobs report for the month of January capping off his first year as president.
U.S. employers added 467,000 jobs in January, seemingly unaffected by a surge of Omicron cases.
The Department of Labor (DOL) report released Friday also revised its estimate of job gains for November and December, increasing those estimates by a combined 709,000.
“You can’t remember another year when so many people went to work in this country. There’s a reason: it never happened,” said Biden following the release of the report.
The report also notes a slight increase in unemployment last month from 3.9 percent to 4 percent.
Still looming over the news economic gains remains a four-decade high inflation rate of 7 percent, and the prospect of the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates to try to level off the inflation increase.
“Average people are getting clobbered by the cost of everything today,” Biden conceded.
In the 12 months leading up to December, the consumer price index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs rose 12.5 percent. The gasoline index rose 49.6 percent during that time, according to the DOL.
While Biden says he wants to address these costs, his attention remains focused on pushing through “chunks” of his “Build Back Better” social spending plan that was recently declared dead in the Senate.
He said Friday that gas and food “are necessities, but that’s not the totality of what a family needs. They still have to pay for childcare; they still have to pay for prescription drugs; they still have to pay for health care.”
Biden also pointed to recent private sector announcements including Intel Corporation saying it is investing $20 billion to build two new “leading-edge” chip factories in Ohio. General Motors also said this week it will invest $7 billion in a Michigan factory to boost production of full-size electric pickups. And Union Pacific announced it plans to buy 10 battery locomotives from Caterpillar.
“Look we all know we’re in competition with the world,” Biden said. “These announcements are the drumbeat of a job resurgence unlike anything we’ve seen in our history, and it didn’t happen by chance. It’s the result of the economic plan I put into action on day one when I said it’s going to be ‘buy America.’’’
