Quote of the Day:
It requires a remarkable degree of obtuseness to stare at the policy success of the past two years and pretend it hasn’t happened.
–Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal
What's the big story today?
In a must-read column in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger argues that it's not that the House Democrats are demanding documents from 81 Trump "associates," or that people are running for president on a climate control platform.
It's jobs.
Henninger writes:
"All sorts of people who have previously had trouble landing a job are now finding work,” the Journal reported. “Racial minorities, those with less education and people working in the lowest-paying jobs are getting bigger pay raises and, in many cases, experiencing the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for their groups. They are joining manufacturing workers, women in their prime working years, Americans with disabilities and those with criminal records, among others, in finding improved job prospects after years of disappointment.”
Example: A 23-year-old woman, Cassandra Eaton, a high-school graduate and single mother who was working for about $8 an hour at a day-care center in Biloxi, Miss., is doing now what previously would have been unimaginable. She’s an apprentice welder making $20 an hour at a shipyard in Pascagoula.
The unemployment rate for high-school dropouts, a status many depressing books and studies show puts one close to the bottom of the barrel for getting ahead in America, is 5%. Their median wages the past year rose 6%.
An ex-con named James O. Wilson, who got a job in 2017 with FedEx in Indianapolis, is today making more than $16 an hour, has a house and a wife, and says, “I want FedEx to say, ‘Do you have any more people like him?’ ”
In the face of this thriving jobs market, some Republicans are contending that the classic formula of low taxes and deregulation (the formula that gave us this job market) is just not au courant. We need wage subsidies and other programs to "help" the middle class, these Republicans are saying.
The Democrats, meanwhile, want to increase taxes and start jobs programs.
You know what the only job program that actually works is? A job.
And right now Americans are getting jobs in record numbers.
You have to be willfully blind not to notice.