Pages

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Trump Takes Undue Credit on Black Unemployment

“The number of employed black Americans rose by 354,000 in the first 11 months under Trump. But that rise is dwarfed by the gains in the previous three years: 541,000 in 2016, 767,000 in 2015 and 710,000 in 2014.”

(FactCheck.org) - When Trump took office in January 2017, the black unemployment rate was 7.8 percent, the lowest it had been in nearly 10 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Under Trump, it dropped a full percentage point to 6.8 percent in December. That’s the lowest rate since the bureau began regularly breaking out unemployment rates by race in 1972.

A similar drop of 1 percentage point was recorded during the same 11-month period in 2016. The drop was even more pronounced in each of the three years before that. It fell 1.9 percentage points in 2015, 1.5 percentage points in 2014 and 1.8 percentage points in 2013.

In other words, the downward trend has continued under Trump, albeit at a slower pace than in recent years.