amplify the things we did. and i think that getting outside of d.c. will help us do that, so we can explain to people we ve cut child poverty in half by 50% in this country. reduced black poverty by 30%, aapi poverty by 22%. and so those are the things that getting outside of the d.c. circle will help us, one, show people that government can work for them, showing people that when we took office 2 million people were vaccinated, now over 200 million people are vaccinated and that 20 million people almost were unemployed. and now it s less than 2 million people. we created 6.4 million jobs. all of those things are great thing, great significant accomplishments. but people need to hear it. people need to see it, and our
many times to meet them in the middle and do the things that are necessary for the american people. we had to pass the american rescue plan so that we could get vaccines into arms so that we could help businesses that are shutdown, so we can open up schools again. when we took office 350% of the schools in this country were closed. now 96% of them are open. businesses are open instead of shutdown. we added 6.4 million jobs. we are working, but the republican talking points will always be, one, fiction or flat out false. but we are we re really working to meet the needs of the people. and if the republicans want to join us, that s great and we look forward to it. they just had a chance to join us in term of protecting our democracy and the right to vote and not one of them did. there was the president said a number of times in his press conference yesterday he was surprised by how
6.4 million jobs added, american rescue plan right at the start of the administration, 200 million americans fully vaccinated, the bipartisan infrastructure law is now the law of the land. and a whole bunch of other stuff that the administration needs to be talking about more and more. but i got to go to something that the president said during his press conferences, marathon press conference. let s play it and i ll get you to talk about it on the other side. i did not anticipate there would be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that president biden didn t get anything done. think about this. what are republicans for? what are they for? name me one thing they re for. what is mitch for? what is he for on immigration? what is he for? so, chairman dean, how hard is it going to be?
answer. people were given a lot of money during the pandemic, a lot of stimulus checks, unemployment insurance, they still have health concerns and a lot don t want to go back to the old jobs they had. you can see on this chart notwithstanding that we had 6.4 million jobs created last year compared to an estimate of 4.7. if you look back, this chart goes back to 1951. it is 50% more jobs than have ever been created in a single year. to your point, there s still 10.6 million open jobs in this country, a record number of jobs. wow. and 2.3 million people have left the labor force, all to your point, not actively looking. let s look before you finish on a couple of noneconomic things that happened last year to president biden. so first we all know build back better isn t passing, but you can see in this chart a way to sort of look at the overall picture which is the fact congress has been doing less and less every year. if you go back to the 1980s it was passing 230 bill as year.
modestly lower. i would call that unchanged here. and on wall street stock index futures are also barely moving here. look, stocks closed lower friday. that december job gains less than expected. both the s&p 500 and the dow ended the week just basically flat. the u.s. added just 199,000 jobs in december. that s the weakest job growth of the year. still, the economy added a record 6.4 million jobs for the entire year and the unemployment rate fell to 3.9%. that is the lowest of the pandemic. wages up 4.7% over the past year. the key here is inflation. in some cases inflation is up bigger than wages. we ll get more inflation news this week. reports on consumer levels say it rose the fastest in 39 years. something we know you will be on top of. nfl playoff picture is set after a thrilling last weekend of the regular season.