ANOTHER GOOD JOBS REPORT

News about the economy continues in positive vein

YOU know things are passing strange when The New York Times hails the latest good news on the economy. Released last week, nine years after the end of the most recent recession, the monthly jobs report was so positive that even President Trump’s harshest critics had trouble finding the dark side.

“New jobless claims are dragging along at historically low levels,” the Times reported. Growth projections for the second quarter, which ended June 30, are “bouncing above” 4 percent. The jobs report is the icing on a cake of “encouraging” economic reports.

We can thank Trump and the Republicans for this game changer because they pushed through tax cuts. Not a single Senate Democrat, including a few who may yet support Trump’s latest Supreme Court nomination, voted for the bill.

With the release of every “encouraging” economic report, we wonder if any of them will abandon their class envy strategy and admit the value of reducing joblessness and the number of Americans who had simply given up on finding work during the Obama era.

On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department said the economy added 213,000 jobs in June, a number higher than was forecast. Average hourly earnings increased by 0.2 percent in June. Compared with June 2017, earnings were up 2.7 percent.

We’re under no illusion that Democrats will change their stripes. They’ll seize any economic report that isn’t so rosy and use it against Republicans. Americans were wary of the tax cut bill, with understandable skepticism that it would help average citizens. Voters may yet ignore the “encouraging” economic reports and put the Democrats back in control of Congress.

One caveat, of course, is the effect of Trump’s trade policy and tariff-setting. Wall Street has reacted negatively to the policy, and the effects of tariffs may convince consumers that the president gives with one hand and takes with another.

But no one should take seriously the Democrats’ claim that tax cuts helped the rich at the expense of the middle class. In truth, upper-income earners got a lower share of the tax cuts. According to the Manhattan Institute's Brian Riedl, the bottom 80 percent of families previously paid 33 percent of all combined federal taxes. Yet they got 35 percent of the tax cuts. The top 1 percent, who had previously paid 27 percent of federal taxes, got 21 percent of the tax cuts.

For the class warfare claim to hold water, the above numbers would be reversed. Democrats at the state level are scrambling to offset effects of federal tax deduction changes on state income tax returns. This of course would benefit the wealthiest taxpayers disproportionately.

It’s “brazen, bizarre and dishonest,” Riedl notes, to call the tax cut bill a giveaway to rich while simultaneously proposing a huge tax cut for the rich. But liberals often operate in the realm of the bizarre and the dishonest. If given a majority, they will likely move to repeal the 2017 tax cut bill. Of course Trump will veto it.

Meantime, the encouraging economic news should keep coming and even The New York Times won’t be able to fit this into its anti-Trump interpretation.