Biden's Own Data Debunks His Great Economy Narrative

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are quick to say their economy was working for American voters during their 2024 presidential campaigns, but the data tells a different story, conservatives and researchers say.

Not only did inflation render moot gains in gross domestic product, consumer spending, if not wages — making for higher costs and spending for less goods and services — but also illegal immigration sucked up jobs for working-class Americans, while alleged Biden administration job gains were a guise for return to work from the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive expansion of the government workforce under Democrat policies, the Daily Caller News Foudation reported.

"This idea that somehow this is a great labor market, which I know is something that the Biden administration keeps saying — 'We're handing the Trump administration a robust labor market': I'm sorry; I think that the Biden administration's own data contradicts that narrative," Heritage Foundation's Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget research fellow EJ Antoni told the Daily Caller.

"There are actually fewer native-born Americans working today than there were before the pandemic in 2019. So no progress in terms of native-born Americans working. All of the net job growth has gone to foreign-born workers. That's a category that the Bureau of Labor Statistics even admit on their website, they admit that category includes an unknown number of illegal aliens. More and more job growth has gone to foreign-born workers."

And record-high inflation wipes out any claims of increased GDP, consumer spending, or wage growth, effectively making it cost more for less while showing the guise of increases, according to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo.

Smith denounced the October 2024 BLS jobs report as "more evidence of the stunning incompetence" of the Biden administration, including the expansion of the federal workforce as being a leading contributor to holding up jobs reports.

"If you look under the hood of the Biden-Harris jobs market, the facts show an ongoing struggle for blue-collar workers, a boom for bureaucrats, and paychecks that don't pay the bills anymore," Smith wrote in his Nov. 1 statement.

"Taxpayers funded over 1.6 million new bureaucrats under the Biden-Harris administration, while manufacturers cut 50,000 jobs in the last year. The average paycheck is worth 3.2% less today than at the start of the Biden-Harris administration."

Biden's job reports never reflected the return to work after the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the report.

Before the pandemic in 2020, President Donald Trump's first administration had lowered unemployment rates for the majority of his term. In the final year of Biden, unemployment rates have steadily ticked up, going from 3.4% in January 2023 to 4.2% in November 2024.

Biden touted adding 16 million jobs to the U.S economy, but that total was mitigated by illegal aliens joining the workforce, the return of post-pandemic workers, and the 1.6 million more federal jobs under Biden, according to Antoni.

"We can only assume that given the huge surge in illegal aliens under the Biden administration, that a disproportionate number of the foreign workforce now includes illegal aliens," Antoni told the Daily Caller. "I guess if you had to coin a phrase here to describe it, it would be 'America last.'

"What we have seen with this huge influx of illegal aliens into the country has been the depressions of wages for low-skill labor. Anytime that an American first enters the workforce, they almost always do it by low-skill labor. What you effectively do by pushing down those wages is greatly disincentivize Americans from getting their first job and cut down the first rung on the ladder of success for average Americans."

Biden's data covers the reality American voters felt and responded to in November, according to Competitive Enterprise Institute research fellow Sean Higgins.

"The long and the short of it is that workers are not making any more money, they are slightly less employed than they were, and prices seem a lot higher than they were," Higgins told the DNCF.

"It is not surprising that people were in an ornery mood and did not take very well to the [Biden-Harris] administration’s claim that everything was good."