Reprinted with permission from American Independent

The economy added 943,000 jobs in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Friday morning, indicating robust growth that helped lower the unemployment rate in yet another sign that the economic damage from the COVID-19 pandemic is abating.

The July jobs report brings the total number of jobs created during the first six months of President Joe Biden's tenure to nearly 4.1 million, according to data from the BLS.

That's more than the 3 million jobs that were lost under former President Donald Trump's watch.

Trump's jobs record made him the only president since 1939 to leave office with fewer people employed than when they started, according to a report from the Washington Post.

This month was the best for job creation since July 2020, when 1.7 million of the more than 22 million jobs lost in the early months of the pandemic came back.

And economists were jubilant about the data and what it means for the recovery.

"I have yet to find a blemish in this jobs report. I've never before seen such a wonderful set of economic data," Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard, tweeted. He based his excitement over the report on the fact that there were, "job gains in most sectors," a "big decline in unemployment rate" including for Black and Hispanic populations, a reduction in long-term unemployment, and "solid (nominal) wage gains."

Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, also said that the July report is "what a robust jobs report looks like."

But economists also had a word of caution, saying that the COVID-19 pandemic threatens the progress that's been made.

"The single most important factor holding back work is the virus. Not unemployment insurance, not childcare, not government policies. It's the actual virus changing people's behavior," Betsey Stevenson, the former chief economist at the Department of Labor, tweeted. "So if we want the recovery to continue, get yourself vaccinated."

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.