Yellen: Biden’s stimulus plan could bring US back to full employment next year

“I would expect that if this package is passed that we would get back to full employment next year,” Yellen told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

“The Congressional Budget Office issued an analysis recently and it showed that if we don’t provide additional support, the unemployment rate is going to stay elevated for years to come,” she added. “It would take (until) 2025 in order to get the unemployment rate down to 4% again.”

Yellen’s assessment comes as the White House is pushing the President’s package through Congress, where it faces resistance from Republicans opposed to its price tag as well as some of its key elements. Lawmakers are under pressure to pass a relief package as Americans continue to suffer financially amid the pandemic’s economic fallout.

Full employment does not mean the unemployment rate is at zero, but, instead, generally that employers have hired as many qualified professionals as they need.

The January jobs report showed that even though 49,000 jobs were added last month, the nation is still down nearly 10 million jobs since before the crisis. The report also detailed that the unemployment rate fell to 6.3%, beating economists’ expectations, marking the first decrease in two months.

The CBO said in a report issued last week that the number of employed Americans won’t return to its pre-pandemic level until 2024, showing just how long the job market still has to go to heal after suffering the steepest loss on record in April, when 20.5 million jobs were lost and the unemployment rate shot up to 14.7% in a single month as the coronavirus ravaged the country.

Biden’s plan, which the secretary said is “big enough to address (the) full range of needs” facing the country’s economy, includes a wide range of immediate assistance for struggling families, such as $1,400 stimulus checks and extended unemployment, nutrition and eviction aid, and longer-term changes, such as a $15 hourly minimum wage.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

CNN’s Tami Luhby, Katie Lobosco, Chris Isidore and Anneken Tappe contributed to this report.