On Friday, New Jersey senator Cory Booker became the umpteenth Democrat to announce he is running for president in 2020, but with the way the economy is going, neither he nor anyone else in the DNC’s clown car primary is going to have much of a chance against President Donald Trump.
Only hours after Booker made his announcement, the new job numbers were reported by the U.S. government, and they do not bode well for anyone hoping the Democrats will take over the White House in a couple of years.
According to the report, the economy added 304,000 jobs in the month of January, exceeding even the most optimistic predictions.
From the AP:
The healthy gain the government reported Friday illustrated the job market’s durability nearly a decade into the economic expansion. The U.S. has now added jobs for 100 straight months, the longest such period on record.
The unemployment rate did rise in January to 4 percent from 3.9 percent, but mostly for a technical reason: Roughly 175,000 federal workers were counted as temporarily unemployed last month because of the shutdown.
[…]
The ongoing demand for workers is leading some businesses to offer higher pay to attract and keep staff. Average hourly wages rose 3.2 percent in January from a year earlier. That’s just below the annual gain of 3.3 percent in December, which matched October and November for the fastest increase since April 2009.
The strong job market is also encouraging more people who weren’t working to begin looking. The proportion of Americans who either have a job or are seeking one — which had been unusually low since the recession ended a decade ago — reached 63.2 percent in January, the highest level in more than five years.
It is remarkable to recall all of the doomsday predictions the liberal media was making about how the “Trump shutdown” was going to crush American economic growth and then compare it to these figures. In a stark, numbers-driven context, the shutdown didn’t do squat to stop this freight train.
And with federal workers guaranteed their back pay from the weeks they were sitting home and/or reporting to work without a paycheck, what harm actually came from it at all? Okay, we are to apparently understand that some idiots damaged a handful of trees in Joshua Tree National Park. So far, that’s about all we’ve got. Talk about a bunch of Chicken Littles.
Trump was elected for a number of reasons, but his perceived strength on the economy was surely one of the greatest selling points. And on this score, he has exceeded even the wildest expectations. At this rate, Trump may overtake Reagan and become the new gold standard by which American economic success is defined.
If this isn’t making America great again, we don’t know what is.
