The Patriot Post® · Trump Effect: Job Market Improves

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest jobs numbers today, and the news is good. The U.S. economy added 235,000 jobs in February, while the headline unemployment rate decreased slightly to 4.7%. The Labor Department also revised jobs numbers for December and January, increasing those numbers by 9,000 jobs.

Average monthly job growth under Barack Obama was just 109,000. And even if you begin counting where he always did — after job losses stopped — it’s still less than 200,000 monthly. Trump’s off to a good start, and it appears the economy is coming out of the stagnation levels it maintained over the past eight years.

It’s important to note, however, what may sound counter intuitive: As the economy strengthens, expect to see the headline unemployment rate actually increase due to more people entering the workforce after years of sitting on the sidelines. People leaving the job market under Obama helped drive down that incomplete unemployment measurement.

It’s not merely the increasing jobs numbers boosting hope in America’s economic outlook. Small business optimism has surged to record levels not seen since the summer of 1980. And consumer confidence has reached a 10-year high. Much of this economic optimism can be credited to Donald Trump and his pro-business promises of deregulation and lowering the cooperate tax rate. On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office released a study showing the real U.S. corporate tax rate to be 39.1%, the highest of any G20 nation. Lowering it would go a long way to realizing all this optimism, which is currently based on what Trump promises to do.

America is getting back to work, and is clearly excited for what the economic future holds. And one can be assured that Trump will continue to do all in his power to stoke that American economic engine.