Unemployment Down, Wages Up

The census report ten days ago revealed workers’ earnings increasing at 3.4 percent annually, a rate not seen since the best of the Reagan years, and the poverty rate has declined to 11.8 percent, the best figure that has been recorded since the end of the Clinton administration and still resolutely proceeding in the right direction.

Unemployment is at its lowest percentage since the Lyndon Johnson administration more than 50 years ago (and the numbers then were helped by having 545,000 conscripts in Vietnam). Minority groups are the principal beneficiaries of the Trump economy; this isn’t trickle-down, it’s surge-up. Average income for female-led single-parent households jumped 7.6 percent last year, well ahead of gains in higher income groups.

Democrats claim wages have stagnated. Data show otherwise.

The poverty rate among female-led households fell 2.7 percent for African Americans, and 4 percent for Hispanics. Industries largely populated by women (and, historically, exploited women), especially hospitality and, to a lesser extent, health care, showed strong earnings gains, even as unemployment rates for African-American and Hispanic women fell to under 4.5 percent.

Another partisan Democratic falsehood that is exposed by the census is the myth that the middle class is shrinking. The percentage of total families at the lowest economic levels has fallen by over 1 whole percent and the brackets from $50,000 to $150,000 and above $200,000 have both increased by almost 1 whole percent (several million people in each case). There were sharp increases in the incomes of younger families (up to age 34).

The unemployment rates for blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have all hit all-time record lows under the Trump administration and more than 6.2 million Americans have been lifted off of food stamps.

“The surge of minority women getting jobs has helped push the U.S. workforce across a historic threshold. For the first time, most new hires of prime working age (25 to 54) are people of color, according to a Washington Post analysis of data the Labor Department began collecting in the 1970s,”

The Washington Post reported. “Minority hires overtook white hires last year. Women are predominantly driving this trend, which is so powerful that even many women who weren’t thinking about working — because they were in school, caring for kids or at home for other reasons — are being lured into employment, according to The Post’s analysis.”