there are also cities and states around the country where there are no covid. the next step on the road outside of covid, bring the sidney whole again. thank you so much for that. covid broke the american jobs market and fixing it won t be quick or simple. the latest evidence, hiring slowed in september. a setback as the delta variant raged through the american economy. 194,000 jobs were added back last month. well below the strong hiring last summer. the economy is still down 5 million jobs since the pandemic began. at this pace it would take more than 2 years to recover all of the jobs lost. the issue isn t companies aren t hiring. many report they would hire but they can t find workers. many thought people would rush back into the jobs market but that has not happened.
democrats are scrambling to keep the president s economic agenda alive. we re actually making real progress. reporter: president biden wants americans to be patient, even as the latest jobs report shows the u.s. economy is still struggling. the labor department reports employers added 194,000 jobs last month. far fewer than the 500,000 economists expected. we know we have work to do, no question about it. reporter: new polling shows most americans feel the same way. a quinnipiac university survey shows 38% of americans approve of the president s job performance. our focus is, yes, not exactly on the day-to-day up and downs of the polls. reporter: some democrats are warning the white house fights within the party over spending priorities puts the president s agenda at risk go i keep saying that. if we don t get the bills passed, democrats are in real trouble. reporter: republicans argue the polls prove americans don t back the spending plan. the last thing we need to do
our children, to provide for a lower cost of healthcare, are exactly why we re now going to move forward with president biden s build back better agenda. chris: we do have to put it in context. the economists expected half a million jobs to be created last month and 194,000, and it s been a steady drop over that period of time. child care didn t get more expensive in september than it was in july or august. i want to i know i want to take your point that one of the ways that joe biden thinks that he can change things is by passing his big tax and spending bill. question. democrats can t agree, continue to not agree on what to pass. where is the sweet spot between bernie sanders $3.5 trillion social spending bill and joe manchin s $1.5 trillion spending bill. what i think matters most is the policies that we agree on as democrats, that we should reduce
something and the shelf is empty. i think a lot of this is also the function that a lot of people have not got back to work. even though it looks like we passed through the worst hoff the covid crisis. people should be going back in to the economy. the economy should be humming. that s not happening. if you look at the latest job stats, forget the stats themselves. look at the labor force participation rate, which suggests a lot of people have decided to permanently opt out of the work force. that makes it word. you reported on this. we have almost 11 million jobs that go begging right now. only 194,000 americans took employers up on that last month. what is keeping them from at least looking in to those jobs? well, people are asking all sorts of questions. normally the answer is for employers to raise wages and
vaccine and mandates and not, you know, acknowledging the immunity one gets from actually having the infection, pushing these mandates on everybody or, you know, the afghanistan debacle and, you know, nobody told him to keep bagram air base open before taking all the troops out and leaving, you know, individuals on the ground behind enemy lines. it s hard to keep up with all of the mistruths. let s talk facts. this economy is much worse today than when joe biden walked into the white house. and this month in september it was a glaringly obvious because we had the slowest job growth of the year. you re talking about an expectation of half a million jobs added to the economy in the last year. in fact, we saw 194,000 jobs added to the economy. why? because there is so much money sloshing around in this economy, and they re actually negotiating now another $5 trillion of money going to be coming at people