White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest Discusses Jobs & Wages
Press Secretary Josh Earnest stated:
Happy Friday, everybody. Nice to see you all. Before we get started, as you might judge from the monitors behind, we got a couple things we want to do at the top before we get started.
As all of you saw this morning, today the final monthly jobs report of the Obama administration was released, and I want to go over a couple of the highlights here.
Like many of you, I've spent the first Friday morning of each month of the last eight years anticipating the monthly jobs data. At the beginning of the administration, the earliest days of this presidency, the day that was in the minds of many people down right terrifying, our economy was losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month and the unemployment rate was climbing sharply. Eight years later, driven by the policies this administration put in place and the resilience of the American workforce, the data looks quite different and the numbers tell a very different story about the health of our economy.
In December, the U.S. economy added a 156,000 jobs, extending the longest streak of total job growth in our nation's history. U.S. businesses have now added 15.8 million jobs over the course of the economic recovery. Wages are continuing to rise, and the unemployment rate continues to be less than half of what it was during the peak of the recession.
Over the eight years that President Obama has been in office, you all have held us to an extraordinarily high standard when it comes to the economic recovery, and we're proud of the progress that America has made. This progress shows that policy matters. Without the policies the President fought for, it would not have been possible. And so I recount the facts today, because acknowledging how far we have come as a country is an important part of understanding what's needed to create an economy that provides good job opportunities and generates higher wages for all Americans who are willing to work for them.
The President-elect, of course, has promised a different approach. His approach includes rolling back regulations that have protected middle-class families from having to foot the bill for Wall Street's risky behavior. His approach includes leveling high tariffs on foreign goods that drive up costs for consumers in the United States and put at risk higher-paying U.S. jobs that are tied to exports. And, of course, he's also vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would add trillions to the deficit.
As you evaluate the impact of the President-elect's policies over the coming years, here are some metrics that should be used to evaluate the approach that we have taken and compare it to the approach that's been pursued by the other side. Since job growth turned positive in October of 2012, the U.S. economy has added jobs for 75 straight months. This is, as I referred to earlier, the longest streak of job growth on record, and it's actually more than two years longer than the previous record. So this is quite a streak, and we'll see if it continues.
In 2016, hourly wages increased 2.9 percent. That's the fastest 12-month pace since the start of the recovery. Real hourly wages have grown faster over the current business cycle than in any business cycle since the early 1970s. Wages are obviously a metric that this administration has watched closely, and we're pleased to see that wage growth is accelerating and has accelerated over the President's tenure in office.
The third metric -- the unemployment rate has been cut by more than half since its peak of 10 percent in 2009 to 4.7 percent in December of this year. As recently as 2014, just a couple of years ago, many economists expected the unemployment rate to remain above 5 percent until at least 2020. So we've repeatedly beaten the predictions about driving down the unemployment rate.
Fourth, since 2010, the United States has put more people back to work than all the other G7 economies combined. That is a strong validation of the economic strategy that President Obama pursued. It does stand in contrast to the economic strategy that was pursued by some of our closest allies, but the results speak for themselves and it's why we regularly describe the U.S. economy as the envy of the world.
Finally -- and I don’t have a chart for this -- we can also cite a metric that we know is one that is certainly closely watched by the incoming President's economic team. That's the stock market. And the S&P has more than tripled since the lows that it reached in March of 2009 within President Obama's first couple of months in office. So we certainly set a high bar. It's a bar that we are proud of, and it's one that the incoming administration will be challenged to meet.
One other piece of news I want to share briefly this morning before we get started is, today is the last day for Pete Boogaard in the White House Press Office. So Pete has served in the White House for a little over a year now, and has served with distinction. But, notably, Pete spent a lot of time working in other critically important agencies of the Obama administration, including at the Department of Homeland Security. And he is somebody who has time and again showed a lot of cool under fire.
Those of you who have worked closely with Pete understand that -- we were reminiscing shortly before the briefing that he's had some of the more challenging issues to discuss in his portfolio, everything certainly from questions about immigration policy, which includes a wide bucket of issues both that are related to homeland security and national security, but also issues like Zika. And so we're obviously very proud of Pete's service. He showed himself to be a dedicated professional. And wherever he ends up next is going to be a place that's extraordinarily lucky to have him.
Source: White House Office of the Press Secretary
