Bloomberg News Credits Whitmer For Economic Recovery From Harms Her COVID Policies Created

Bloomberg News recently published an analysis that claimed Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has overseen the nation’s most robust economic recovery since the COVID-19 pandemic began two years ago.

Bloomberg claimed: “Whitmer’s first year in the governor's mansion marked the beginning of the biggest manufacturing boom since the recovery from the 2008 recession. Non-farm payrolls since April 2020 surged 25%, almost double the 14.3% U.S. average and leading every state in the nation. Michigan unemployment is 5.6%, down from a pandemic high of 23.6%.”

The April 2020 starting date of the period Bloomberg examined excludes the job losses that occurred in March 2020 and most of April 2020 when Whitmer imposed a stay-at-home order that harmed an estimated 32% of the state’s businesses. That’s the highest rate of economic disruption suffered by any state due to pandemic lockdowns, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

From February 2020 to April 2020, roughly 1.05 million jobs disappeared in Michigan. But Bloomberg’s analysis ignored these job loss figures from the early days of the pandemic. Instead, it focused on measurements that apply only to the jobs lost after that.

As of December 2021, the state was still 205,200 jobs short of the 4.5 million jobs residents held in February 2020. That places Michigan in 41st place among the states in its recovery from epidemic-induced job losses.