Chalk up yet another winning month for Trumponomics: The US economy added 263,000 jobs in April, far above the expected 190,000. Unemployment fell to 3.6% — the lowest since December 1969, the year of the Miracle Mets and Joe Namath’s triumph in Super Bowl III.
Plus: Median wages continued to rise markedly faster than inflation, with hourly earnings up for the ninth straight month. That means the gains reach across all income levels.
And the good news is primed to continue: On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that nonfarm productivity rose 3.6% in the first quarter, the fastest increase in more than four years. That’s a key sign that wage growth should continue — without risk of triggering inflation.
That’s important: Fears of inflation were behind the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hike late last year, a hike that panicked the stock market and also seems to have slowed hiring for a couple of months.
With the Fed back in neutral and jobs booming again, the expansion is set to become the longest in US history in a few months, with the nation poised to add at least 2 million jobs for the ninth straight year.
The gains cut across not just all incomes, but all ethnic lines: Hispanic and black unemployment keep setting new lows, while the rate for women is down to just 3.1%.
Even the Trump-hating New York Times is reporting that wage increases are “going to those who need it most” and that wage growth has “at last found a higher gear.”
A gear it utterly failed to find under the last president and likely wouldn’t have seen under a President Hillary Clinton.
The great jobs news makes it tougher for the Democrats hoping to take President Trump’s job next year: He’s delivering on by far his most fundamental campaign promise — “Jobs, jobs, jobs.”
Joe Biden, in particular, entered the race charging that Trump has failed the working class, that his tax cuts and other policies only favored “the rich.”
Much of the media may buy such claims, but most Americans are going to believe the evidence before their own eyes.
Story cited here.
