Joe Biden issues dire jobs warning: US will take 10 years to get full employment
President Joe Biden on Friday, February 5, issued a caution on the future of the economy, saying at the current rate of job growth, the US will have to see another 10 years before getting back to full employment. The Democratic leader’s dark note came after the latest reports cited that the country added 49,000 jobs in January with only 6,000 of them appearing in the private sector.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the same day that the unemployment rate fell but only by 0.4 percentage point to 6.3 percent last month, while non-farm payroll employment changed by only 49,000. “The labor market continued to reflect the impact of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic and efforts to contain it. In January, notable job gains in professional and business services and in both public and private education were offset by losses in leisure and hospitality, in retail trade, in health care, and in transportation and warehousing,” the bureau said.
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Biden, who took over last month amid a massive healthcare crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic turmoil caused by it, said: “At that rate, it’s going to take ten years to get back to full employment. That’s not hyperbole, that’s a fact.”
'This is about people's lives, not just numbers'
The 78-year-old president spoke on the matter during a meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic members of the House at the Oval Office on his $1.9 trillion spending plan on the pandemic. “This is about people’s lives, it’s not just about numbers,” he said, noting the increase in mental health cases, drug abuse and suicides in the country.
Biden, who succeeded Donald Trump as the president in January, unveiled the trillion plan the same month to put an end to “a crisis of deep human suffering” by speeding up vaccines and extending financial help to those who are struggling to cope with the economic consequences of the pandemic. The proposal, called the “American Rescue Plan”, is set to facilitate Biden’s target of administering 100 million vaccines by the time his administration completes 100 days in office and reopening most schools by spring.
Biden, who thanked the Democratic members of the Senate for passing a budget reconciliation bill to move his plan with a simple majority, said people were feeling the hole and were clueless about how to get out of it. He told the senators that their move gave them a lot of hope.
The commander-in-chief, who has vowed to speed up the US recovery with new spending, said: “We can fix it. We can fix it.” “And the irony of all ironies is, when we help them we are also helping our competitive capacity for the remainder of this decade,” he added. Biden was the vice president of the former Barack Obama administration and played a key role in the country's fightback against the Great Recession of the late 2000s.
The experts, meanwhile, were not too hopeful about the economic situation. The Wall Street Journal quoted Sarah House, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities, as saying: “The recovery is only stumbling along at this point. Yes, we managed to eke out a gain, but we’re still 9.9 million jobs shy of where we were back in February” of 2020 before the pandemic hit hard.