Post by Old Badger on Jul 7, 2023 23:19:22 GMT -5
The U.S. economy added 209,000 jobs in June, the smallest pickup in jobs since December 2020, signaling a slowing but still strong labor market...The unemployment rate fell slightly to 3.6 percent, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released Friday...Average hourly earnings accelerated last month, rising by 4.4 percent over the year, to $33.58 per hour... In June, the share of workers between 25 and 54 years old who were working or looking for a job reached its highest rate in more than two decades. That increase has been fueled by prime-age women who have rejoined the labor market at record-breaking levels for the past two months.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/07/may-jobs-unemployment/
www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/07/may-jobs-unemployment/
That's 30 consecutive months of 200,000 or more net jobs increase. The unemployment rate is at a near-record low. And wages now are rising faster than inflation. Oh, and labor force participation is up, especially among women. Not surprisingly, economists are less gloomy than they have been:
Bloomberg Economics, which last fall forecast a 100 percent chance of a recession by October, now says the country will “narrowly dodge” a downturn this year. Major banks including Goldman Sachs and Barclays are watering down recession predictions, in large part because of the job market’s resilience. “As long as the economy continues to produce more than 200,000 jobs a month, this economy is not going to slip into recession,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, wrote in a research note.
Yet, the public seems to be slow in catching on to this 2 1/2 years of good news. What gives? Well, let's turn to Jennifer Rubin for some insight:
We have seen far too little coverage of the economic transformation in little towns, rural areas and aging metro centers brought about by new investment in plants, infrastructure projects and green energy related to the Chips Act. It sure would be nice to know what’s happening in the heartland when a new chip manufacturing plant creates thousands of jobs or when a new bridge creates scores of construction jobs and then cuts commute times. So intent on hyping the politics of what the administration is doing, the mainstream media too frequently neglects coverage of what President Biden’s initiative are accomplishing. When the media consistently gets the big stories wrong or fails to cover major economic changes, one would hope they’d look back to explain why their coverage diverged from reality and do a better job of covering actual developments rather than GOP talking points, process stories (how Biden is “selling” his plan) and polling. Unfortunately, waiting for the mainstream media to engage in self-reflection (e.g., maybe it overdid the “But her emails” in 2016; maybe there was no red wave in 2022), let alone self-correction, might be a waste of time.
Rubin, who used to be a conservative voice in the WP's op-ed stable, until conservative came to mean Tea Party-Freedom Caucus-MAGA, makes several cogent points. The economic news most Americans get usually comes packaged with a pre-set air of gloom: throughout this 30-month period of record-breaking job expansion, rising wages, and GDP growth, every report goes directly from the good news to "expert" opinion on why it's actually bad. The WP's own report on good news about jobs quickly shifts to bad news for the economy:
June’s job gains fell short of economists’ predictions, indicating that the labor market is cooling down from its peak last year...The growth in jobs and wages is expected to prompt the Federal Reserve to resume interest rate hikes this month. The central bank has raised borrowing costs 10 times since last year, but held them steady in June. Financial markets bristled at the prospect of higher interest rates, even though the job gains were smaller than anticipated...Still, there are some new signs of gloom. The number of people who worked part time because their hours were cut, or for other economic reasons beyond their control, rose by 452,000 in June, the biggest jump in more than three years. The Black unemployment rate, which had reached a record low in April at 4.7 percent, rose in May and again in June, to 6 percent. A wide body of research shows that Black workers are the first to lose their jobs in economic downturns. Other industries have continued their gradual slowdown.
Here's the thing: all of the negative predictions have turned out to be wrong. Of course, eventually we will have a recession because the economy slows down from time to time for myriad reasons. But that may not come in the near term because the federal government has adopted four pieces of legislation that kick-started the economic recovery and will be fueling it for several more years:
The American Recovery Act of 2021 - A $1.9 trillion package that included $1,400 checks per adult, an expanded child tax credit for a year with $250-300 monthly checks per child, extended unemployment benefits, and expanded eligibility for healthcare benefits, among others.
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 - Authorized infrastructure investment of $1 trillion total over a decade for roads, bridges, airports, seaports, rail, broadband, water, and public transit, among others.
CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 - Provides roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic scientific research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States.
Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 - Includes provisions to reduce carbon emissions through incentives, improve health care insurance coverage and affordability, lower health care costs, enhance tax law enforcement, increase corporate income taxes, with a net decrease in deficits by $100-300 billion over a decade, depending on implementation.
Bidenomics, or building the economy from the middle out instead of the top down, so far seems to be working.
