George Will Revives Tired Canard That Reagan Created One Million Jobs In One Month

George Will repeated a debunked myth claiming President Reagan added one million jobs in a single month, ignoring that the so-called one million jobs were buoyed by nearly 675,000 striking telecommunication workers returning to their jobs.

On the April 5 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, Fox News contributor George Will slammed the March jobs report, the first time in a year there haven't been at least 200,000 new jobs created during a month, by claiming that Ronald Reagan added over one million jobs during one month. While commenting on the newest jobs report, Will claimed, “during the Reagan recovery ... Reagan had a month of job creation of one million. And this was at a time when there were 75 million fewer Americans”:

But Will's claim about Reagan's job creation record is disingenuous. As Business Insider pointed out, Reagan's so-called million job month in September 1983 was simply an outlier inflated due to nearly 675,000 striking communication workers returning to work, noting:  

So, sadly for the Reagan zealots, President Reagan, his economy, his tax cuts, his supply-side economics, etc., etc., never produced one million jobs in one month, or anything close to it. It was a simple matter of striking communications workers dinging the payroll numbers one month and, upon their return, goosing them the next. Nothing more, nothing less. Could not be more straightforward. 

In fact, according to The Wall Street Journal's Market Watch blog, the average monthly job growth during the Reagan administration was 168,000