The employment machine

Afact with which those who revile Donald Trump’s petulant presidency must contend: On Trump’s watch, the economy keeps generating new jobs at a healthy clip, extending a streak long past when most experts thought possible. June’s total of 224,000 new positions topped economists’ projections, and the slight jump in the unemployment rate, to a still-low 3.7%, is mostly due to a small uptick in workforce participation.

The not-so-great indicator, which matters mightily to most families, remains wages, which grew 3.1% over last year, weaker than anticipated and below the increase notched earlier in 2019. That number should be accelerating, not slowing.

What’s genuinely strange but indisputable is that Trump’s economy, after a massive tax cut primarily benefiting corporations and wealthier Americans, and despite repeated salvos in trade wars with Mexico, China and other critical partners, looks an awful lot like

Barack Obama’s. Almost every major trend line continues its trajectory from before January 2017.

The last 29 months under Obama, the economy produced 6.6 million new jobs. The first 29 months under Trump, the economy has produced 5.7 million.

Then and now, the sectors producing the lion’s share of jobs are health care and social services, and professional and business services — not manufacturing, which has lagged despite Trump’s obsession, and his efforts to punish companies that leave, to reward those that stay and to slap tariffs on imported goods.

Workforce participation, which dropped precipitously between 2009 and 2013, then stabilized, still hovers around a too-low 63%.

Democrats running to deny Trump a second term must convince voters they have focused strategies that will boost working- and middle-class wages without pulling so many levers with so much strength they risk ending the Obama-Trump era of job growth.