The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the May Jobs Report this morning, and, as is typical, the numbers have gone through the gauntlet of left-wing and right-wing media spin, so all that’s left is to get to the point. There’s only a few numbers that really matter, because only those numbers give us a clear perspective to the overall health of the labor situation in the US economy.

First, toss out the official unemployment number, its lack of credibility was exposed under the Obama Administration where numbers were regularly massaged to create the most favorable possible unemployment number, and it’s no more credible now under Trump, and let’s, instead, look at the labor force participation rate, which is now at 62.7%.

If you’re capable of paying any attention at all, the very first thing you’ll notice about the current “great” labor force participation rate now is that it’s exactly the same as it was in the “bad old days” on December 2016. While the labor force participation rate has been as high as 63% as recently as February 2017, when the BLS reported the strongest jobs number under Trump so far, the labor force participation rate has dropped back down to 62.7% in just 3 months.

This is why Trump’s supporters focus most on the U-3 “official unemployment” number of 3.8%, because it keeps most Americans from realizing that labor force participation rate remains critically weak, especially when we consider Millennials are set to outpace the Baby Boomers by share of the population and already dominate the work force, surpassing even Generation X now.

Trump’s comically gullible drones parrot the job numbers, because they both don’t know not to and, if nothing else, refuse to think anything that they haven’t been told to think. The focus on the preliminary job number of 223,000 which is better than economists were expecting (which shows that economists think the economy is a bit softer than the Republicans want us to believe) and isn’t itself that strong a job number (not even one standard deviation above Trump’s average), barely above Obama’s second term average.

Out of the seventeen months Trump has been in office (including January 2017), Trump’s job numbers beat Obama’s monthly averages seven times, and created 3,225,000 million jobs. In the same period of Obama’s second term, the economy created 3,481,000 jobs. In no way is Trump’s economy “greater” than Obama’s economy. It seems to me that it’s hard for Trump to be making America “great” again, if his economy is under-performing Obama’s economy.

But what do I know, I only have an MBA.

 

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Liberty is For The Win!