INTERVIEW – HENRY OLSEN – Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
- If the economy keeps its momentum, 2020 will be Trump’s to lose. (Washington Post/By Henry Olsen) — Friday’s job numbers are marvelous for President Trump. The headline unemployment rate is now the lowest since 1969, and the aggregate 263,000 job gain was nearly 50 percent higher than economists had forecast. And most importantly for Trump, the biggest winners are the same people whose cause he championed: Americans without four-year college degrees. Observers have long noted Trump’s support among the less-educated, especially among whites. At the outset of his presidency, the big question was whether they would vote for him again if he did not deliver what he had promised: better economic times for them. The data clearly show that he has. Unemployment, for example, has declined most over the past year among high school graduates, a key pro-Trump group. It stood at 4.1 percent in April 2018 but declined to 3.1 percent in Friday’s release. This occurred at the same time that more high school-educated workers re-entered the labor force. The employment-to-population ratio for workers 25 and older, which simply counts how many people have a job as a share of that group’s total population, rose from 54.7 percent to 55.9 percent in the past year alone. People with disabilities are also reaping the benefits of this economy. Unemployment among this population dropped from 8 percent last April to 6.3 percent now, showing that in a hot job market, employers seem willing to make accommodations and offer higher wages to bring these people back to work. The Social Security Administration, which pays disability insurance to most previously employed people who develop a disability, corroborates these data. The number of people receiving federal disability insurance through Social Security has risen for years in good times and bad, but the rate of growth slowed in President Barack Obama’s second term. That trend accelerated under Trump, and today nearly 300,000 fewer people receive disability checks than at the start of Trump’s term. Wages are also going up above the rate of inflation for the first time in years. Indeed, in the past year, wages have been rising fastest for the lowest-paid workers. Similar trends are playing out among workers with less education. During the Clinton, Bush and Obama years, wages rose faster for workers with four-year college degrees than for those with only a high school education. But that gap was gone by April of last year. Since then, wages have risen at roughly the same rate regardless of education. Again, the Trump economy is increasingly delivering for exactly the people he said it would.
