Pennsylvania swings to Joe Biden’s jobs
Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton might as well be the 46th president’s lodestar for guiding his reelection campaign.
That’s because Americans are constantly reminded that so much depends on the seven so-called swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that will determine whether Biden or Donald Trump gets a second shot at running the country.
If good jobs mean anything, unemployment in these key states is much lower on average during Biden’s first three years in the White House than during Trump’s first term, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Even when the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is excluded, job creation under Biden is unsurpassed.
Nowhere is the contrast more vivid than in Pennsylvania, where unemployment in Scranton is a record-low 2.9% and its cost of living is at least seven percentage points less than the national average. The fifth-largest state after California, Texas, Florida and New York similarly has its lowest unemployment rate ever under Biden, 3.2%, and is leading the rest of the U.S. by an unprecedented margin in modern times.
The Keystone State’s almost 13 million people enjoy a more robust economy under Biden than Trump, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s US Coincident
Index, which tracks each state by metrics including nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing by production workers, the unemployment rate and wage and salary disbursements deflated by the Consumer Price Index.
The outlook for northeast Pennsylvania continues to brighten now that the Scranton region, including Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton and almost 570,000 people, will for the first time in more than half a century be connected to New York City with passenger rail service as a result of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. The Scranton rail corridor is poised to receive $84 million annually when 500,000 passengers use the commuter rail service each year, according to an Amtrak analysis published last year.
“The first thing you learn in the economic history of the United States is that economic development follows lanes of transportation,” Matt Cartwright, the Democrat and U.S. representative from Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District since 2013, said in a Zoom interview from his Scranton office earlier this month.
“Fifty years, we went without rail service between the two places. I’ve been working steadily on that for the last 11 years when people said it was a long shot. President Biden’s right that the shovels are just about ready to go in the ground on so many of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act projects. This one should be transformational for northeastern Pennsylvania,” the Democrat said.
Cartwright cites Amtrak’s Downeaster route from Brunswick and Portland in Maine to Boston as an example of the booming commerce he anticipates with the new rail line, including stops in Mount Pocono and East Stroudsburg, as well as Blairstown, Dover, Montclair, Morristown and Newark, New Jersey.
“I expect that same pattern will hold” here, he said, and “that we will sell out five or six roundtrips a day” because “Scranton to New York City is a much bigger area of commerce.”
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which helped finance the Scranton-New York rail line, was among several pieces of legislation Biden signed into law, along with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the $280 billion Chips and Science Act of 2022, that helped make U.S. gross domestic product growth the best in the developed world. Never mind that Republicans who voted against these acts and the money they bring to communities across the country are now rushing to take credit for them in an election year.
The Philadelphia Fed’s Coincident indexes are especially relevant because they show that even when the sudden spurt of inflation caused by the COVID-19 disruption is included, Pennsylvanians are benefiting from a higher standard of living under Biden than his predecessor. The Pennsylvania index gained 19% under Biden, making it the sixth-best performing state when the U.S. improved 14% on average. During the four years when Trump was president, Pennsylvania was eighth-worst among the states, with the index declining 3% between 2017 and 2020 when the country advanced 4%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Throughout 2017, Trump’s first year in the White House, Pennsylvania suffered an unemployment rate that was 0.8 percentage point higher than the U.S. average, a gap that was the widest in 32 years at the time and which later expanded to as much as 1.3 percentage points in April 2020. The spread began to narrow in April 2021 during Biden’s first year in office and reversed in May when the Pennsylvania jobless rate fell below the national average and it has continued to fall at a faster pace.
Pennsylvania’s rebound reflects the employment boom across the nation. No president since Gerald Ford was in the White House can match the 273,000 average monthly jobs created starting in July 2022 with Biden in the White House. Bill Clinton comes closest with 239,000. Jimmy Carter is third with 216,000, followed by Trump (ending in February 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic) with 182,000, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Biden spent his first three years enacting legislation that’s paying dividends to every part of the country, especially Pennsylvania, and will continue to do so in the years to come. He now gets to spend his fourth year on the hustings defying the polls armed with a raft of policies that put people to work and made them prosperous.