Dems blast booming jobs report, Trump worker agenda, ‘reckless’
Democrats saw nothing positive in the new June jobs report that highlighted 213,000 new jobs added.
Instead, the Democratic Party issued a statement criticizing President Trump’s jobs agenda as “reckless.”
The jobs 'conundrum' continues: 'How are we not getting higher wages?' Because the formerly "unemployables" are seeking jobs in the booming job market and keeping wages down.
The June jobs report brought with it almost universally good news, unless you're a worker looking for a substantially fatter paycheck.
Wage gains remain positive but muted, growing at 2.7 percent annually, or pretty much the same level as the previous three months and below Wall Street expectations. That's despite the supposed benefits of a tightening labor market, and a tax cut that was supposed to push average hourly earnings over the 3 percent barrier.
Job gains —213,000 in all for nonfarm payrolls — were spread across the board but the positions are paying only a bit more due to a variety of factors that are keeping gains just above inflation.
"You're creating jobs in good areas where you're creating careers — manufacturing, business services, health care construction, those are places you want to see the jobs created. But the conundrum of wages continues," said JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade. "How are we not getting higher wages? A lot of that has to do with the fact that at lower end of the scale you're seeing people being replaced by machines. There are jobs, but there's a lot of lateral movement."
Indeed, there were 6.7 million job openings as of the most recent count and 6.6 million people who the Bureau of Labor Statistics considers unemployed. That should be creating more substantial wage pressures. Yet the jobs market keeps showing each month that there's more slack than economists are figuring and thus more room for employers to keep pay increases modest.
In June specifically, the entrance of 601,000 workers either back into the labor force or entering for the first time helped overall job gains while keeping wages lower. The growth of the labor force participation rate accounted for an increase in the unemployment rate to 4 percent from 3.8 percent, a statistical change that actually showed more vibrant conditions.
Hispanic-Latino Unemployment Rate Hits Lowest Level on Record in June
The national seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate for Hispanics and Latinos in the U.S. labor force fell to the lowest level on record in June of 2018, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data released Friday show.
In June, the unemployment rate for Hispanics and Latinos, aged 16 and up, was 4.6%, down from its May level of 4.9%. Before June’s record, the lowest monthly Hispanic-Latino unemployment rate since BLS began tracking the statistic in 1973 was 4.8%.
. . .
In contrast, the national Hispanic-Latino unemployment rate averaged 9.4% during President Barack Obama’s eight years (96 months) in office, impacted by the 2008 recession, which officially ended in June of 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Not coincidentally,
Trump's Approval Rating Rises Among Hispanics
In a new Harvard/Harris poll released this week exclusively to The Hill, President Trump’s overall approval rating rose to 47 percent, just two points shy of the highest level of his presidency, per that survey. The main driver of his growing popularity now: a stunning 10 percent rise in Trump approval among Hispanics.
That growing support among Latinos would surely surprise many Trump critics in Washington and the legacy media, who remain fixated on border issues. So intense is their hysteria regarding border enforcement that people like former CIA Director Michael Hayden compared our detention policies to the Auschwitz concentration camp in a tweet and MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch proclaimed on “Morning Joe” that ALL Trump voters are essentially Nazis.
Amid that media madness, Main Street America focuses not so much on concocted controversies but on bread-and-butter kitchen table issues like rising wages and soaring confidence among small businesses and consumers.
Hispanics, by definition, are primarily a working-class demographic, as we on average own only a tenth of the household wealth of white families. Thankfully, President Trump’s policies of tax cuts and regulatory relief point to a brighter economic future for all wage earners, including Hispanics. For example, an incredible 2 million Americans have dropped off food stamps since Trump was elected. In the most recent government jobs report, wages for non-managerial workers rose at a 2.7 percent annual clip, the highest in a decade. The jobless rate for non-college graduates just hit the lowest level since 2001. These gains are highly beneficial to hard-working Hispanics, as Trump’s policies continue to lift the economic underdogs.
Moreover, in contrast to the assumptions of the leftist identity-politics hucksters, Hispanics are far from uniform on immigration issues, and actually take a very moderate and pragmatic approach to the border and enforcement. In fact, per Zogby Analytics exit polling from 2016, twice as many Hispanics believe immigration enforcement is too lax versus too stringent. Regarding the recent border issues, an Economist/YouGov poll found that only 20 percent of Hispanics support the previous policies of “catch and release” where families entering the country illegally are not detained but summoned to report back for a later hearing – at which many never show up. Instead, 64 percent of Hispanics support either detaining the whole family together, or detaining parents and children separately. This will disappoint the Democrats, to be sure, but legal Hispanics hardly support open borders.
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