THE ECONOMY’S ‘SURPRISING’ NEWS
Sooner or later, pundits and so-called experts will have to stop using terms like “surprising” or “unexpected” when it comes to the economy under President Donald Trump.
On the other hand, when they do use such terms, it makes the economic renaissance look even better.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday that a record 155,215,000 Americans were employed in February. It was the eighth month since Trump took office that a record has been set. In addition, the economy added 313,000 new jobs, far more than expected.
“Economists surveyed by Reuters had been expecting nonfarm payroll growth of 200,000 and the unemployment rate to decline one-tenth of a percent to 4 percent,” CNBC reported.
The unemployment rate, instead, remained steady at 4.1 percent for the fifth straight month due to hundreds of thousands more people looking for work.
“I love it,” the chief economist at Morgan Stanley told The New York Times. “We were able to create enough jobs to accommodate new workers and keep the unemployment rate steady.”
That’s what didn’t happen under Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. Although the economy did improve slowly from the end of the recession in June 2009, the unemployment numbers fell, in part, because people stopped looking for work.
Since jobless workers are only counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work, the so-named “missing workers” are not reflected in the unemployment rate.
The 95,012,000 not in the labor force — unemployed, not looking for work or retired — is still too high. In fact, it’s 61.2 percent as many as those employed. If it starts dropping significantly, it will be another mark of a humming economy.
Record high employment numbers also were reached last month for women ages 16 and older (72,530,000 workers) and blacks (19,087,000).
Further, the new jobs were evenly distributed across low-, middle- and high-income trades and professions, analysts said.
“JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!” the tweeter-in-chief crowed — in capital letters.
Hourly earnings for all employees on private, nonfarm payrolls also grew four cents an hour to $26.75. The four-cent jump in February wasn’t as high as the seven-cent climb in January, but it did bring the yearly average hourly growth to 68 cents, or 2.6 percent.
The good news — assuming it keeps up, and most economists say it will — provides Republicans an issue to run on in the fall midterm elections. A new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll puts a little flesh on that issue.
In the 10 states that voted for Trump in 2016 but have a Democratic senator, more than half of voters say the economy is better off now than it was a year ago. In nine of those states, the unemployment rate declined over the year between 0.3 percent and 1.2 percent. It increased 0.1 percent in the 10th state.
In addition, in nine of those states, a majority of voters approve of the tax law Republicans passed in December that is giving a large majority of people who pay tax a tax cut. In the 10th state, the same numbers of voters disapprove as approve the tax law.
And it appears the fact no Democrat senator voted for the tax bill may have consequences.
If the election were held today, according to a separate Axios/Survey Monkey poll released last Thursday, five Democratic senators seeking re-election (Jon Tester of Montana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota) would lose. In those states, Trump’s approval rating hovered anywhere from 53 to 65 percent.
The economy was just one facet of a good week for the president. He lined up a nuclear summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and managed to tamp down at least some of the wailing and gnashing of teeth about a possible trade war after he imposed tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum.
While “surprising” and “unexpected” might be the proper terms for the Kim summit — and they certainly would apply if it’s a major success — they’re no longer correct for the economy.
The only Americans who should be shocked at the economy these days are the analysts, politicians and left-wing voters who bought into Obama’s suggested new normal of tepid managed growth.
Many Republicans and business owners, though, knew the economy only needed to be unleashed, freed of some of the burdens of Obamacare and various regulations to take off. The tax cuts in December gave it an extra boost.
The economic expansion is now the third longest since World War II. Maybe if it becomes the longest, which would occur in June 2019, it will no longer be a surprise.