We’re about to be inundated with presidential candidates who will promise that their policies will create jobs. Biden said that the recent debt ceiling deal “invests in America’s agenda — that’s creating good jobs in communities throughout the country.”
The U.S. has about 10 million unfilled jobs, according to the Fed; yesterday’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts it at 10.1 million, an increase of 348,00o from the previous month. The U.S. peaked at 11.7 million unfilled jobs in early 2022, and has had around 10 million unfilled jobs since the middle of 2021.
Different parts of the country will have different conditions, but broadly speaking, we don’t really have a national job creation problem. We have a national hiring-people-to-do-those-jobs problem, or a worker-shortage problem. (This assumes that those openings are not “ghost jobs” — openings listed by companies that they have no intention of filling, to create a perception of growth or to gauge the available talent pool.)
Just about all of the public-opinion polling during the Biden years indicates that it takes more than low unemployment to get people to feel good about the economy. We’ve lived through a long bout of the highest inflation in 40 years, interest rates are high, mortgage rates are high, grocery prices are still high, gas prices are still high by historical standards, supply chain problems still crop up, and private debt is skyrocketing. Yes, in most places, if an American wants to find a job, they can find a job. Whether they can afford everything with their paycheck from that job is another story.
What the president and many of the candidates mean is that by throwing vast sums of money around — either through infrastructure spending, or defense spending, or expanding the size of government — they will create job openings. Most of the field has much less to say about how to connect the roughly 5.3 million Americans who want a job with the open jobs.