Jobs report sparks debate over Biden’s policies
What happened
Republicans and Democrats sparred over how to spark hiring and boost the economy this week, in the wake of a jobs report that fell drastically short of expectations. Federal data showed the U.S. added 266,000 jobs in April, a steep drop from recent gains and a fraction of the 1 million jobs economists had anticipated. Republicans said the report showed the failure of President Biden’s policies, in particular the $300 weekly unemployment supplements included in the last Covid stimulus bill. Critics said the payments were deterring Americans from returning to work, leaving businesses desperate to fill vacancies. Labor Department figures showed a record 8.1 million job openings in March, despite a 6.1 percent unemployment rate, and a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business showed 44 percent of small businesses couldn’t fill openings. Republican governors in Arkansas, South Carolina, and Montana moved to cut off the payments in their states. They’ve “turned into a dangerous federal entitlement, incentivizing and paying workers to stay at home,” said South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster.
Biden and fellow Democrats dismissed the charge that the benefits have significantly dented hiring. They said a host of factors was keeping workers at home, including continuing fears of Covid and child care problems caused by partially opened schools and daycare centers. Biden argued that the job numbers underscored the need to pass his American Jobs and American Families plans, which would create infrastructure and other jobs and expand child care access. He touted the 1.5 million jobs added since January and said the effects of the $1.9 trillion aid bill passed in March have yet to be fully felt. “Our efforts are starting to work,” he said. “But the climb is steep, and we’ve got a long way to go.”
What the editorials said
“Welcome to the supply-side jobs slowdown,” said The Wall Street Journal. The Keynesians on Biden’s team have followed the standard demand-side strategy: “Bathe the country in government cash, keep interest rates at zero, and the resulting rise in consumer demand will drive everything.” But employers have been saying for months they can’t fill jobs, thanks to federal checks “for not working.” As a result of Biden’s largesse, “most lower-income workers can make more sitting on the couch.”
The jobless benefits might have been defensible when we were “in the belly of a once-in-a-century pandemic,” said NationalReview.com. “But we are in a much different place today,” with case numbers plummeting, lockdowns lifted, and businesses clamoring for workers. It’s time to cut off those $300 checks.
What the columnists said
The problem isn’t unemployment payments, said Jacob Silverman in NewRepublic.com, it’s lousy jobs that pay rotten wages. The equation is simple: If employers want people to risk their lives by flipping burgers, waiting tables, filling shelves, or dealing with maskless customers amid “the greatest public health crisis in America’s history, then they should pay them more.” We can’t let the Republican canard that workers “should be grateful for whatever crummy, sub-subsistence job they manage to get” become “the prevailing economic wisdom once again.”
Republicans see this one-month jobs report as “an opportunity,” said Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. They’re very worried that Biden’s Covid assistance plan has been so popular and his infrastructure proposal polls so well, and the job numbers give them an opening to “discredit government spending by characterizing its recipients as contemptible layabouts.” The same lawmakers are “committed to making work as miserable and unremunerative as possible.” They fight family leave, workplace safety regulations, collective bargaining, and a minimum-wage boost, then puzzle over why workers aren’t “rushing back to take any job they can find.”
The jobs report fueled partisans “across the ideological spectrum to declare that their policy ideas were vindicated,” said Ben White and Rebecca Rainey in Politico.com. But here’s another possibility: It “could mean nothing much at all.” Monthly numbers “can be highly volatile,” and it’ll take several more of them before we know if April’s was a blip or a sign of something deeper and lasting. “People can bang the table and say they know exactly what happened,” said economist Ian Shepherdson, “but they don’t, and we won’t know for a while.”