Breaking down Biden’s economic agenda ahead of the State of the Union

President Biden is preparing to lay out the roadmap for the rest of his term in the state of the union address tonight As we mentioned earlier, he's likely going to highlight his economic policy victories everything from Inflation on the decline to strong job growth and low unemployment numbers So let's dig into the president's economic record and where he goes from here joining us as NBC News business and data reporter Brian Chung Brian let's start with the job market here The economy is seeing some strong job growth and low unemployment right now That's good news and just last week we saw better than expected jobs report numbers So walk us through how the jobs market looked when Biden first took office and where things stand now Yeah, let's take a look at the numbers since inauguration in a june of January of 2021 We could see it's been a pretty sharp fall in terms of the unemployment rate. It was actually much higher It was a 14% during the depths of the pandemic during the talent of the Trump administration went down to 6.3% Basically since then it's continued to go down a lot This is associated with the economic reopening leisure and hospitality bars and restaurants reopening was a big reason For this drop But what's really interesting is that it hasn't gone up and that was the expectation as the federal reserve started to hike interest rates in 2022 instead what happened the unemployment rate actually continued to drift down and as of the last week that we got just on Friday The u.s economy at a 3.4 percent unemployment rate guys you would have to rewind to 1969 to see an unemployment rate that low so certainly a good state of the unemployment market and the labor market headed into the state of the union So brian in the president's last state of the union address He set a goal of lowering prices for consumers Spoiler alert that didn't happen what followed was a year of historic inflation with levels not seen in decades in peak last summer Gradually declining since since remind us what happened there Do economists see this as a lasting turnaround especially as we try to avoid what could or could not be a recession coming up Yeah, and that's what makes this economy so weird because look the labor market looks really good But you know what doesn't look good this this is the chart showing year over year Paces of inflation since a biden took office in january 2021 and you can see it's been elevated up right We were actually below 2 percent as the trump administration turned over to the biden administration Skyrocketed up now a lot of this was due to the demand that americans were doing as they went out and bought things and Sawed services as the economy reopened But another big story here was specifically beginning in 2021 We started to hear about those supply chain snags right lots of issues with factories not being open around the world And then also you remember actually the suez canal boat getting jammed up that was in march of 2021 So it peaked at around 9.1 percent That was the yearly pace of inflation that we saw but it has been coming down again Thanks to the federal reserve's efforts to raise borrowing costs, which they hope will discourage people from spending as much and firms from investing as much That has led to the inflation rate falling to about 6.5 percent as of the last read But the economy really is a lot healthier if it's somewhere closer to 2 percent So the job is not done the biden administration has said they're going to let the federal reserve do its part on that That's the reason why they're signaling that further interest rate hikes are likely and brian briefly here from an economic standpoint Where does the government stand on its budget deficit and the federal debt ceiling? Yeah, that's going to be a big focus in the state of union today because of the concern over perhaps not paying our bills again As a reminder the debt ceiling covers any sort of payments that have already been made But it just seeks to pay off the debt that we have there's been no agreements so far And the expectation is that june 5th is going to be the day when the economy runs out of money Sorry, my writing is not so great here But june 5th is the day that apparently will run out of money to pay our bills until then the treasury can turn to these Extraordinary measures to get through early june but reminder congress has moved 78 times to raise this debt ceiling Hopefully they can make it 79 times this time as well.

Hmm. Brian bring us the latest and greatest. Thank you Thanks for watching our youtube channel follow today's top stories and breaking news by downloading the nbc news app.

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