Democrats want Americans to ignore the reality that they have more jobs, and higher wages than they ever did under the Obama administration. But, as Liz Peek writes at The Hill, the numbers don’t lie:
Here’s what Democrats don’t get about the jobs number: 250,000 jobs added in October is not just a statistic, it’s about real people.
It’s about people whose lives are getting better and who are more upbeat about their future. It reflects greater economic security, the possibility of planning for the future and the ability to dream about sending kids to college or about buying a home.
Democrats approaching the midterm elections have spent their time demonizing President Trump, lying about his policies and fear-mongering about how Republicans want to destroy our health-care system and take away Social Security. They know these charges are untrue, but they have nothing else to run on.
What they really do not want to talk about is how life is improving for average Americans. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement last Friday, referring to the jobs report, that “these numbers will mean little” to families.
My guess is that it means a lot to the 250,000 more Americans who found work last month and to those who saw their pay go up by the biggest amount in a decade.
It meant the world, as well, to all those discouraged workers who have been sitting on the sidelines and who finally came back into the jobs market, boosting the worker participation rate.
It was sweet news for the 32,000 folks who found jobs in the manufacturing sector; they join the swelling ranks of those production workers who earn above-average pay — a group that has increased by 296,000 over the past year.
The October employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a stunner, containing good news for so many Americans. Unemployment dropped from a year earlier for teenagers (13.4 percent to 11.9 percent), black Americans (7.5 percent to 6.2 percent), Hispanics (4.6 percent to 4.4 percent) and women (3.8 percent to 3.7 percent).
Again, those cold stats do not reveal the resurgence of hope among the hundreds of thousands who had sought work for years but had been turned away as the economy stuttered forward.
Read more here.