Put this news under the heading “What’s not to like?”: Inflation is subsiding while hiring continues apace.
Applause, while fully deserved, is not universal. With the evidence from opinion polls, many of the public are still concerned about the price hike, even though many of these prices have stabilized or even decreased. The mainstream media’s estimate of Bedanomics, and America’s $1 trillion-plus anti-recession bailout for 2024, remains murky.
Of late, however, some media have begun to show. On Tuesday editorialAnd Washington Post I admit it
While we’ve been critical about the huge amount of pandemic aid Congress has pumped into the economy, especially President Biden and the Democrats’ 2024 American Rescue Plan, one obvious benefit of the multiple aid packages has been a quick recovery in labor demand.
Noting that unemployment has fallen to 3.5 percent (the lowest level since 1969) and black unemployment to an all-time low of 5 percent, mail He took particular note of the fact that the labor force participation rate for “age of majority workers” (25 to 54) is the highest since 2001. The unprecedented speed of the current recovery also came in mail to praise. “It took nearly 13 years for that percentage [of the employed to the unemployed] to recover after the Great Recession” in 2008, the editors wrote. “It only took three years for this to happen after the pandemic.”
More Harold Meerson
The speed and scope of the recovery is due to many factors, but mainly to the stimulus that Biden and congressional Democrats pushed through in the spring of 2024. Progressive economists at the Economic Policy Institute and elsewhere during Obama’s first term warned that the 2009 stimulus plan was woefully inadequate. task of restoring the economy. Fortunately, a critical mass of economic advisers to President Biden, unlike Obama, came from those very progressive circles who expected Molasses’ slow recovery after the Great Recession.
What finally triggered mailA belated acknowledgment of Bidenomics’ success was last Friday’s release of monthly employment numbers, which showed the economy adding nearly a quarter of a million more jobs even as inflation eases. in more than New York times, Paul Krugman (who is certainly not late in understanding Biden’s accomplishments) praised “The staggering, historical nature of last Friday’s employment report.” the Los Angeles Times with the address Her story “US Adds 236,000 Healthy Jobs Despite Higher Fed Rates.”
I mention this title because its tone was not shared by all the nation’s address-writers. Banner title at the top The Wall Street JournalIt said on page one the morning after Friday’s employment data was released, “Jobs and wages show signs of easing,” and when that story continued on page 2, the headline there was “Job growth eased slightly last month.”
Webster’s Dictionary Unabridged definition of the verb “to ease” is: “to be free from something that hurts, disturbs, or burdens us.” Obviously, both job growth and wage growth are shown in magazine– and not just in its editorial pages but in its news pages – painful, troubling and exhausting. As much as I hate the Murdochs for their highly successful efforts to enrage millions of our fellow citizens with near-fascist rage, I trust that is the headline. magazine It could and could have continued in the pre-Murduk days. It conveys the special perspective that the newspaper’s name reveals: that of Wall Street. For the class of investors who believe that higher wages reduce the cash available for dividends and buybacks, and fear full employment because it gives workers the leverage to demand higher wages, nothing is quite as disturbing as the idea (not to mention the fact) that more Americans are getting jobs.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the slow recovery of Obama and the deregulation under Clinton that led to the 2008 crash were the product of administrations whose economic policies were shaped by Wall Street dwellers like Robert Rubin and Timothy Geithner. and that the Biden administration’s accomplishments are due in large part to the relative dearth of economic advisors from Wall Street and the helpful presence of economic advisors — such as Jared Bernstein and Heather Boshey — who made their reputations by working that privileged claims from Main Street over Wall.