At his news conference Friday night, President Trump rightfully hailed the July jobs report released earlier in the day by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that the strong economic recovery from coronavirus shutdowns is continuing.
And to keep the recovery going, the president announced that, if his administration can’t reach an agreement with congressional Democrats, he will sign executive orders deferring the payroll tax and continuing enhanced unemployment benefits (at an unspecified amount) until the end of the year, deferring payments on student loans, and extending a national moratorium on evictions.
Thanks in large part to the president’s determination to put Americans back to work, hiring in July was stronger than the 1.5 million jobs economists expected, with the economy adding more than 1.8 million jobs. That means more than 9 million Americans have returned to work since the coronavirus lockdowns bottomed things out in April.
The unemployment rate dropped significantly again as well last month, falling to 10.2 percent — almost a full percentage point lower than June. Double-digit unemployment will soon be a thing of the past and the Trump economy will resume the strong performance it registered before the coronavirus arrived in the U.S. and nations around the world from China.
In total, the U.S. economy has regained about 9.3 million jobs over the past three months — the fastest rate of job creation in American history. That enormous record-breaking accomplishment far surpasses the much-touted economic recovery coming out of the Great Recession under the administration of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
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The Great Recession ended in June of 2009. The following month, there were about 130.5 million jobs in the U.S. It took until September of 2014 — five years and two months — for the Obama-Biden economy to add 9 million jobs (there were 139.5 million jobs in September of 2014).
US EMPLOYERS HIRE 1.8M DESPITE NEW COVID-19 SHUTDOWNS
You read that correctly. It took 62 months for the Obama-Biden economic recovery to produce roughly the same number of jobs the Trump economic recovery added in just three months.
To accomplish this remarkable feat, President Trump presided over the three highest job-creation months since the government began reporting the data (May at 2.7 million jobs, June at 4.8 million, and July at 1.8 million).
If the Obama-Biden administration had achieved of job creation at this level for three months, the left-wing media would be praising Obama and Biden as economic miracle workers. But the anti-Trump media now greet the good economic news about our recovery with only unjustified skepticism.
In reality, the picture is clear. Things are getting better — and far faster than any of the experts predicted — even though COVID-19 is still with us. July witnessed California, Texas and Florida pulling back on their attempts to reopen their economies, and New York continuing its shutdown.
The fact that we still had the third-highest job creation month on record shows that the pro-growth policies of the Trump administration are facilitating economic recovery on an absolutely unprecedented scale and against absolutely unprecedented headwinds.
Faithful viewers of CNN, however, might well have been taken by surprise when they saw this encouraging news.
Just two weeks ago, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow went on CNN to discuss the recovery, only to encounter deep incredulity from anchor Jake Tapper.
To watch Tapper grill Kudlow, you’d think the cable news anchor was a doctor, an economist, and an epidemiologist all at once. According to Tapper, the country “reopened too quickly, wiping away the progress made prolonging harm to the economy.”
Nothing Kudlow said about the myriad of reliable economic indicators that all strongly suggested a robust, self-sustaining economic recovery could convince Tapper that his partisan narrative was wrong.
Instead, Tapper wanted to talk about what is now an obviously inaccurate U.S. Census Bureau survey that supposedly showed America had lost 7 million jobs in the first four weeks of July.
Tapper even put an ugly red line-graph on the screen showing American employment going “kerplop.” As they say, hope springs eternal. Kudlow was clearly confused as to what the heck Tapper was talking about, considering that the month of July wasn’t even over yet.
On Friday morning, Yahoo News’ Myles Udland was still aggressively promoting the “reopening broke the economy” narrative shortly before the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the July jobs data.
Udland cited various data sources to back up his claim that “the labor market at best cooled off in July. And perhaps did worse than that.”
I guess the third-best job creation month on record, which substantially beat economists’ expectations, is a cooling off when it follows the two best months on record. But who could have known what was coming?
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Well, despite what you hear about high “initial claims” numbers for people going on unemployment insurance in July, the total number of people receiving state unemployment benefits actually declined by more than 1 million between the week ending July 4 and the week ending July 25 — an impressive 7 percent drop.
This good news happened because more people went off state unemployment insurance than were added to the rolls for the month. It was a number publicly available before the government released the July jobs numbers on Friday.
Now that the July jobs report is out, we can see that the anti-Trump media pessimism was totally unwarranted and was likely based on politically motivated wishful thinking rather than an honest assessment of the facts.
In truth, the jobs report is strong — really strong. The recovery continues. The narrative that the “reopening tanked the economy” is fake.
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The issue is not simply that people like Tapper were wrong; it’s that their pessimism was obviously rooted in partisan bias, not economic reality. As Kudlow and others have tried to tell them, the real economic indicators have remained consistently encouraging.
President Trump’s detractors clearly thought the coronavirus pandemic handed them a golden opportunity to attack his economic leadership after three years of historic growth and job creation. But the ongoing Trump recovery is foiling those plans, making life harder for liberal journalists and Democratic candidates on the ballot in November — but easier for everyone else.