Since the election (even before his inauguration) President Trump has made a number of announcements about jobs created or retained in the United States thanks to his policies, actions, and influence. The nonprofit investigative journalism group ProPublica has followed up on all 31 of these announcements through late January, and you can read their detailed report here. The upper section of the page is an interactive graphic and below that is a table summarizing the jobs created (or saved, in the case of those businesses had previously planned to cut).

For example right after the election President Trump announced that he and his vice presidential running mate Mike Pence had saved 11,000 jobs that were otherwise going to be moved from Indiana to Mexico. At the time Mr Pence was still governor of Indiana, and he had helped arrange for $7 million in grants and tax breaks to convince Carrier to keep jobs in the state. It turns out, however, that Carrier had never intended to move 300 of the jobs in question, and after the announcement the company ended up laying off more than 500 employees anyway, leaving fewer than 300 jobs actually retained. That was still good news for the people who were able to keep their jobs, of course.

In total, some 2.4 million new or saved jobs were announced, but only about 206,000 of those existed as of January 29, and of them, around 70,000 had actually already been planned before the election. Of the remaining 136,000 jobs, the companies doing the hiring credited around 63,000 partly or entirely to President Trump’s actions.

Some additional information not in the ProPublica support:

The U.S. economy needs to create an average of over 100,000 new jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. (See the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta’s Job Calculator page for more on how this is computed.)

The U.S. economy added 2.17 million jobs in 2017, which isn’t bad. It is, however, the smallest number since 2012 (which was tied with 2017). For comparison, the last four years of the Obama administration saw job growth of 2.3 million in 2013, 2.99 million in 2014, 2.71 million in 2015, and 2.24 million in 2016. These figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Blogger Steve Benen provides a monthly summary of the Bureau’s jobs reports, the latest of which is here, and from which I have extracted this graph of monthly increases and decreases in jobs numbers going back to the Great Recession. The different bar colors mark different presidential administrations.

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