Friday’s June jobs report, with its expectations-shattering gain of 224,000 net jobs (including 17,000 manufacturing jobs) and its 4% unemployment rate (effectively full employment), reinforces what was already popularly understood about the Trump-era economy. Unemployment is historically low. Job creation is historically strong. Wages continue rising under Trump after a long period of stagnation under predecessors of both parties.
You have to give the man credit — or so you’d think. Dozens of Democrats running for president beg to differ, but they also lack adequate excuses for how all this prosperity came about if President Trump’s presidency is really the disaster they claim it is.
Even if Trump is the idiot they say he is, ordinary Americans could be forgiven for wondering whether, with his combination of tax reform and deregulation, he hasn’t proven himself to be just the right idiot for the job, and certainly better than any of the idiots they might nominate to run against him.
On Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried feebly on social media to back up her party’s presidential aspirants by asserting that the economy is “being hollowed out to enrich big corporations & the wealthiest 1 percent.” This assertion has no data or factual basis behind it — in fact, the link Pelosi provided went to a generic list of House Democratic press releases that came out before the July 4 holiday.
Pelosi was right to complain about the current trade uncertainty, for which Trump is mostly to blame, but the real marvel is that the economy keeps thriving in spite of this. One can only imagine how much better things will get if that uncertainty is resolved and how much more at a loss Democrats will be to explain the coming boom times.
Pelosi had the luxury of just going through the motions in talking down the U.S. economy, but the presidential candidates did not. The nation had a front-row seat to their humiliation last month as they spent part of their two-night debate time trying to frame the current, fantastic economic situation as something horrible, straight out of a Dickens novel.
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