Trump Economy Soaring: Department of Labor Celebrates Lowest Unemployment Rate in Nearly 50 Years
For Labor Day, the Department of Labor decided to remind America just how good the Trump economy really is.
This year’s Labor Day was the 125th anniversary of the holiday, typically seen as the traditional end of summer as well as a celebration of the American worker. This year, there are a lot more people actually working, what with the low unemployment rate.
In a video posted to YouTube and its website, the Department of Labor noted that its mission “is to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the U.S.”
They’re certainly doing a good job of it.
“On this Labor Day, more than 157 million Americans are working — the highest number of Americans working ever recorded. 5.7 million jobs have been created since January 2017,” the Department of Labor’s website read.
“Unemployment is at 3.7%, near a 50-year low, and has been at or below 4% for 17 months in a row. This is the lowest unemployment going into a Labor Day since 1969.
“Year-over-year earnings growth has been at or above 3% for a year straight and is currently 3.2%. There are 7.3 million open jobs and there have been more open jobs than job seekers for 16 straight months,” it continued.
In fact, the economy is doing well enough that there are now “worker deserts” — areas where there simply aren’t enough people to hire for the positions that are available.
“The ‘good news’ story of the strong labor market has a big downside that is playing out in places like Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida, where companies say they can’t keep up with business demand — hampering growth — unless they find more workers,” Axios reported last week.
“Across the country, there are more than 1 million more jobs available than there are people to fill them,” it reported.
“In Iowa, for instance, the unemployment rate was 2.5% in July, just 1 percentage point above the lowest level on record.”
That’s creating a problem where Iowan companies are having to resort to unusual measures.
“Vermeer, an industrial equipment manufacturer, has asked employees to work Saturdays — on a voluntary basis — to keep up with customer demand. But that has its limits, Vermeer’s board chair Mary Andringa tells Axios, since a weekend shift isn’t ‘as agreeable to team members as it was 30 to 40 years ago.'”
“We disappoint customers if we can’t get a product to them,” Andringa said. “We’ve got some things now that if people order, they can’t get it for 6 months. We don’t like that.”
They might not, but this certainly isn’t a bad problem for the country at large to have — and it certainly doesn’t sound like the economy is on the brink of a recession.
Yet, here we are, incessantly chattering about when — not if — the Trump economy is going to come crashing down.
Yet unemployment is historically low, growth is high and there aren’t enough workers to go around. Going into next year’s election, that’s going to be a huge positive for him.
If these are the economic numbers on the 126th Labor Day, Democrats are still going to have a lot of explaining to do.
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