This past weekend, The Wall Street Journal published a series of stories titled “Inside the Hottest Job Market in Half a Century.” As far as I’m concerned, this jobs record is the story of the year. The Journal’s articles transformed a year of economic data into the new daily reality of getting paid to work in America. ... It requires a remarkable degree of obtuseness to stare at the policy success of the past two years and pretend it hasn’t happened. Democrats are doing exactly that. Conservatives should pocket the Trump presidency’s Reaganesque policies for massively matching job producers with job seekers.
There's nothing obtuse about the facts, which show that the current job recovery is nothing out of the ordinary and simply continues the recovery which began despite Obama. The fact is that since the election of Trump in 2016 there's actually been a slow down in the rate of job growth compared with the immediately preceding, more robust period from 2013-2016.
Reaganesque policy under Trump hasn't produced a better outcome for job growth compared with that period, which was the immediate result of the John Boehner-Barack Obama deal to make the Bush tax cuts permanent starting in 2013.
For all the bluster by Trump-aligned organs in the media, especially at The Wall Street Journal, Fox and on talk radio, Trump's results so far also haven't come close to matching the pre-2000 era of job creation.
The economy shrank after the end of the 20th century, and we're still trying to recover to the former glory, nineteen years later.
So far, no one has a solution. Short of a giant spending cut and an actual structural commitment to onshoring instead of offshoring, there will not be one.
