The Patriot Post® · America Is Moving in the Right Direction Under Trump

Whether you think the way the FBI handled the Hillary Clinton email issue was correct or not, or whether the anti-Trump email correspondence between FBI employee lovers was problematic, honest Americans will have to agree that when a congressional committee with oversight authority of the Department of Justice and the FBI issues proper requests or demands for documents from the DOJ or FBI, and after many months the requests or demands have yet to be fulfilled, something wreaks in the swamp.

And where a simple request should have caused the fairly quick production of the desired documents, following months of stubborn and illegal refusals to respond, it took the threat of subpoenas and even the threat of impeaching the director and deputy director of the FBI to get them to do their jobs.

Why do federal employees believe they can ignore legal requests? And why did the committees wait so long to initiate the action that finally provided the impetus for the production of desired documents?

Elsewhere, while much of the country entertains and amazes itself with minutiae about Donald Trump, such as whether or not he had an encounter with a prostitute more than a decade ago or whether he’s going to fire the special counsel or the deputy director of the FBI or whether he’s going to resign the presidency, things are actually going along pretty well in the country.

Not everything is going perfectly, of course, such as the creatures in the swamp that haven’t yet been drained away and are busying themselves creating constitutional crises and misbehaving as if there are no rules for how federal employees are supposed to do things. They justify their temper tantrums that result in their abandoning professional ethics and common sense by blaming it all on none other than the president of the United States.

But hidden away from the view of most of the public by an agenda-driven national news media, other things are going pretty well compared with the not-so-distant past.

After a painfully slow recovery from the recession spawned by the financial crisis of 2007, the U-3 unemployment rate finally returned to respectable territory toward the end of 2015. When President Trump took office in January of 2017, the U-3 rate stood at 4.8 percent and began a steady decline to the current level of 4.1 percent last October. The last time the rate was that low was all the way back in 2000.

Unemployment rates for African-Americans and Hispanics have also fallen over the last year, meaning that the jobs picture has improved across the board. Black unemployment fell to 6.8 percent in December, the lowest ever recorded since the U.S. Labor Department began tracking that rate in 1972.

The U-6 rate, which also reflects those who became discouraged and dropped out of the labor force, has returned from the 17 percent levels of early 2010 to the 8.0 percent level of before the recession.

There are other relevant employment factors, such as the number of Americans on unemployment benefits plunged to the lowest levels since 1974 recently, underscoring the healthy U.S. economy.

And according to new statistics released by the federal government, just 1.85 million Americans received unemployment assistance in March — levels not seen throughout the country in approximately 44 years.

The Wall Street Journal reported, “Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs across the U.S., decreased by 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 233,000 in the week ended April 7, the Labor Department said Thursday. This means claims have now held below 300,000 for 162 consecutive weeks, cementing the longest streak for weekly records dating back to 1967.”

The tax cuts that took effect in February produced not only lower taxes for most American workers but also produced a secondary benefit for many workers whose employers provided cash bonuses and/or wage increases. One good example is Walmart, whose pay scales have been criticized by the Left for years. The massive company is now raising its minimum wage by $2 an hour.

And doing away with job-killing and economically harmful regulations has spawned new job production, putting thousands of previously unemployed Americans back on the job. The more positive business climate has caused companies like Sprint, Walmart, Locheed-Martin, Hyundai Motor Company, General Motors, and Carrier to begin bringing jobs back to America after moving them out of the country a few years ago.

These improvements are expected to make 3.0 percent GDP growth much more common than it’s been for years.

The U.S. energy picture is also improving. Earlier this month bicmagazine.com reported that the “U.S. has been a net energy importer since 1953, but the AEO2018 [Annual Energy Outlook 2018] reference case projects the U.S. will become a net energy exporter by 2022.” Under slightly different Energy Information Administration scenarios supporting larger growth in oil and natural gas production, this transition occurs even sooner.

While the anti-Trumpers delight in the distractions aimed at damaging the president, some good things have occurred while he has been in office. And more than a little of the good is the result of the plain positive differences between Trump and his socialist predecessor.