https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/13/blue-collar-jobs-trump-economy/
The Blue-Collar Jobs Boom Nobody Seems To Notice (Because It’s Happening Under Trump)
John Merline
Joe Biden, who is currently leading in the polls against the horde of other Democratic presidential hopefuls, believes he can win back the working-class voters who defected to Donald Trump last election and thereby win the presidency. So Biden is trying to convince them that Trump was making a lot of empty promises.
“The stock market is roaring. But you don’t feel it,” he said at a rally. “There are — $2 trillion tax cut last year. Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it? Of course not. Of course not.”
Actually, they did get something out of it. A lot, as it turns out.
Not that you’d know it from the way the economy has been covered — or, more appropriately, covered up — by the mainstream press during the Trump administration. They take their cues from Democrats like Biden or Bernie Sanders, who says Trump’s promise to the working class as “a fraud.”
So reporting on the subject tends to be along the lines of this Chicago Tribune headline declaring that: “Trump struggles to create blue-collar jobs in key parts of the U.S.”
But the official government jobs data show something entirely different.
We compared job growth by industry for the 27 months after Trump took office in January 2017 to President Obama’s last 27 months in office, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Overall, Obama beats Trump — 5.5 million to 5.2 million.
But break the numbers down and something interesting emerges.
Under Trump, jobs in goods-producing industries — manufacturing, construction, mining — have been increasing at a much faster clip than when Joe Biden was vice president. These are the jobs Democrats are constantly promising that their policies will create and project.
The data show that the economy created 1.2 million goods-producing jobs since Trump took office. That’s more than twice as many as were created in Obama’s last 27 months in office (455,000).
Look at manufacturing. In Obama’s last 27 months, the economy created 109,000 manufacturing jobs. It’s created 470,000 so far under Trump. Jobs in the durable goods manufacturing industry declined during this time under Obama. As did mining and logging jobs. They made solid gains under Trump.
Blue-collar workers are seeing stronger wage gains as well, with weekly wages for goods-producing jobs up $70 under Trump (a 7% increase), compared with $39 under Obama (a 4% bump).
It’s white-collar service jobs that have been climbing more slowly under Trump. They’re up 4 million, compared with 5 million under Obama. Retail trade jobs actually declined in Trump’s first 27 months, compared with a 521,000 gain in Obama’s last 27 months. Government jobs have been growing more slowly under Trump.
But even here, the more working-class transportation and warehousing industries saw faster job growth under Trump than Obama — 445,000 to 397,000.
And overall wage growth for service industry jobs has accelerated, with weekly wages up $46.66 under Trump (a 6.7% gain), compared with $35.64 (or 5.4%) under Obama
More signs of health for the working class: Earlier this month, the Labor Department reported that job openings had surged by 346,000 to a seasonally adjusted 7.5 million in March. Vacancies in the construction industry climbed by 73,000, there were 87,000 job openings in the transportation, warehousing and utilities sector.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the labor market is so tight that manufacturers are now “shift scheduling, investing in amenities for workers or offering more flex time, companies believe that treating blue-collar workers more like white-collar counterparts may convince them to sign on or stick around.”
We seem to recall that this is pretty much what Trump promised. In fact, just before the elections, Trump said that “If we lower our taxes, remove destructive regulations, unleash the vast treasure of American energy, and negotiate trade deals that put America First, then there is no limit to the number of jobs we can create and the amount of prosperity we can unleash.”
Of course, telling the public about the gains being made by the working class would mean giving Trump credit for something. And we can’t have that, now can we?
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For when you need the perfect Democrat example of projection.
Ocasio-Cortez realizes she said something stupid and reacts badly
By Thomas Lifson
FTA:
In a Tweet Sunday morning, she implausibly claimed that the 12 years ‘til doom prediction was “dry humor” and that the GOP is too stupid to grasp her wittiness:
This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and “fact check” it.
Like the “world ending in 12 years” thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal.
But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows. https://t.co/pmkwrdeAnq
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 12, 2019