The late Obama-era economy produces statistics that most people probably find puzzling.
The headline unemployment rate, now at 4.7 percent, might suggest we were back in the dot-com boom of 1999. But no one feels the energy or optimism of that era.
The stock market doesn't look the same either; it's a bit down from where it was 18 months ago. And growth has been dismal — an annualized 0.8 percent in the first quarter, following 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter before that.
Job creation numbers have been mostly respectable, usually approaching or exceeding 200,000 a month. So Friday's report, of only 38,000 new jobs in May, was a gut punch.
That number would leave an average major league baseball stadium with many seats to spare on game day. It was the worst jobs report since the labor market bottomed out in 2010 after the Great Recession.
Just to rub it in, estimates for job creation in March and April were revised down by a combined 59,000. If George W. Bush were president, you'd be hearing about an economic slowdown.
As we've noted here before, the headline unemployment figure is misleading because historically high numbers of people are still dropping out of the workforce even now, eight years after the financial crisis began. This isn't due to the baby-boom generation retiring; people aged 25-54 are also employed at much lower rates than they were before the recession — lower in fact than at any point between January 1987 and the financial crisis.
The number of people working part-time for economic reasons increased by nearly half a million last month. Part-time work remains stuck at the historically high level it hit when the recession started.
What's going on? Politicians don't control the economy, much as many seem to think they can. But policies have a big impact, and when a president has been in office eight years, citizens justifiably pin credit or blame on him. One reason why Donald Trump has proved such a strong candidate for the White House is that vast numbers of people have been made economically precarious by the Obama policies that are throttling job creation.
Obama has made traditional employment more and more expensive and, therefore, less and less sustainable. He's a job killer. This includes his push for higher minimum wages, the employer mandate in Obamacare, and various regulatory rulings intended to tilt the playing field in favor of dying labor unions. It includes his avalanche of green regulations (which have hurt jobs without helping the environment) that businesses have warned would increase costs and stanch growth. It also includes a recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board to make it harder for businesses to survive strikes.
These and other Obama policies ensured that the recovery never really happened, or was so mild that no one noticed. The great roar of dissatisfaction you're hearing this election year is an expression of his ideologically driven and abject failure.
After eight years of dabbling in side projects with harmful effects, the nation needs economic leadership that puts employment first and helps bring people of working age back into the workforce.
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