I’ve already given my Biden economy retrospective, but I want to come back and double down on the main point there, because I think it is incredibly important and largely overlooked. The one thing that Biden’s economic performance should clearly establish is the importance of running a full employment economy. There is no better way to give large benefits to tens of millions of people, especially groups facing discrimination in the labor market like Black workers and people with criminal records.

Here’s the picture on unemployment over the last 75 years.

Under Biden the unemployment rate fell sharply from 6.4 percent when he took office in January of 2021 to 3.9 percent in December. It stayed at 4.0 percent or lower until June of last year. That is the longest stretch of low unemployment in seventy years. The low of 3.4 percent, hit in April of 2023, was the lowest single month rate since the 1960s.

This recovery was far faster than anyone had predicted, and the unemployment rate dipped lower than most economists thought possible. When Biden took office, The Congressional Budget Office had projected that we would end the year with 5.3 percent unemployment. It projected the rate would continue to decline slowly, hitting 4.2 percent in the last months of his term.

In the Biden years, many pundits argued that unemployment doesn’t matter much because a one percentage point drop in the unemployment rate just means another 1.6 million people have jobs. That doesn’t seem like a very big deal in a workforce of 160 million.

But this reasoning is badly confused. Full employment matters not just because it reduces the number of people who are unable to find jobs, but also because it improves the bargaining position of tens of millions of workers. The point is simple, but huge.

In a normal month 5-6 million people lose or leave their job,........

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