By Matt
Vespa | Townhall
The jobs numbers
are great. In fact, they’re tremendous. They’re the most luxurious May
numbers God has ever created. Okay—not really, but they’re solid; 223,000 jobs
in May and black unemployment hit
a record low. The overall unemployment rate is now at 3.8 percent, an
18-year low. In terms of white and black unemployment numbers, which are
usually miles apart, they’ve never been closer. You can’t polish a turd. You
can’t spin incontrovertibly good news. That’s what The New York
Times admitted
in their headline about these job numbers. They ran out of words
synonymous with good concerning this news:
The
real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether
there are enough synonyms for “good” in an online thesaurus to describe them
adequately.
So,
for example, “splendid” and “excellent” fit the bill. Those are the kinds of
terms that are appropriate when the United States economy adds 223,000 jobs in
a month, despite being nine years into an expansion, and when the unemployment
rate falls to 3.8 percent, a new 18-year low.
“Salubrious,”
“salutary” and “healthy” work as words to describe the 0.3 percent rise in
average hourly earnings, which are up 2.7 percent over the last year — a nice
improvement but also not the kind of sharp increase that might lead the Federal
Reserve to rethink its cautious path of interest rate increases.
And
a broader definition of unemployment, which includes people who have given up
looking for a job out of frustration, fell to 7.6 percent. The jobless rate for
African-Americans fell to 5.9 percent, the lowest on record, which we would
count as “great.”
If
anything, some of the thesaurus offerings don’t really do these numbers
justice. But some aspects of the report would be fairly described as “solid,”
“decent” or “benign,” such as the uptick in the ratio of the adult population
that is employed to 60.4 percent, which only matches its recent high of the
earlier in the year.
So, Trump is getting America back to work—and a lot of
this news could be traced back to his tax reform package. It’s created a better
job-creating and investing climate. Democrats thought this bill could be an albatross
around the neck of the GOP. I don’t think that’s going to be the case.
The
generic ballot advantage is now within single-digits, and it’s very possible
that the blue wave everyone was lusting for could very well vanish into thin
air.
Wages also increased by 2.7 percent. CNN and CNBC also touted the good
news. It’s good for the country. We can all thank the GOP and President Trump
for this.
If I were a Democrat, I would be very nervous. The good economic news
keeps coming and the Left just has a hatred for Trump and nothing else. That’s
not a platform for winning elections.
***
UPDATE: if this is how Pelosi and
the Democrats are
responding to the jobs reports, they’re going to be very disappointed
come November. Get a new playbook; this one doesn’t work anymore:
May’s
jobs report shows that strong employment numbers mean little to the families
hit with soaring new costs under the Republicans’ watch.
“Republicans’
cruel, cynical health care sabotage campaign is already spiking families’
premiums by double digits and pushing millions off their coverage, according to
the nonpartisan CBO. Big Pharma continues to hoard the benefits of the
GOP tax scam, using their handouts to further enrich executives and
shareholders instead of lowering prescription drug costs for seniors and sick
kids. At the same time, the President’s reckless policies are exploding
gas prices, wiping out the few meager gains that some families should have
received from the GOP tax scam, as wages remain stagnant.
“From
day one, the White House and Republicans in Congress have sold out working and
middle class families to further enrich the wealthy and big corporations
shipping jobs overseas.
Uh, the
people benefitting from this bill are middle and working class
families.
CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed that out and even self-described socialist
Bernie Sanders admitted
middle class taxes would be cut.
The next step is to make the Trump tax
cuts permanent.
