Michael Dwyer/AP Photo
Construction workers prepare a recently poured concrete foundation, March 17, 2023, in Boston. The rate of labor force participation for “prime age workers” is the highest it’s been since 2001.
File this news under “What’s not to like?”: Inflation is subsiding while hiring continues apace.
Applause, though absolutely merited, is not universal. By the evidence of the polls, much of the public is still wary about rising prices, even though many of those prices have stabilized or even declined. Mainstream media’s appreciation of Bidenomics, and its trillion-dollar-plus anti-recession American Rescue Plan of 2021, remains sketchy.
Belatedly, though, some of that media is coming around. In a Tuesday editorial, The Washington Post acknowledged that
While we have been critical about the hefty amount of pandemic aid Congress pumped into the economy, especially the American Rescue Plan that President Biden and Democrats enacted in 2021, one clear benefit of the multiple aid packages was a quick bounce back in labor demand.
Noting that unemployment has fallen to 3.5 percent (the lowest level since 1969) and Black unemployment to an all-time low of 5 percent, the Post took particular note of the fact that the rate of labor force participation for “prime age workers” (25 to 54) is the highest it’s been since 2001. The unprecedented speed of the current recovery also came in for Post praise. “It took nearly 13 years for this ratio [of the employed to the unemployed] to recover after the Great Recession” of 2008, the editorialists wrote. “It took only three years for this to occur after the pandemic.”
The speed and scope of the recovery is due to many factors, but chiefly to the stimulus Biden and Democrats in Congress pushed through in the spring of 2021. Progressive economists at the Economic Policy Institute and elsewhere had warned during Obama’s first term that the 2009 stimulus was woefully inadequate to the task of restoring the economy. Fortunately, a critical mass of President Biden’s economic advisers, unlike Obama’s, came from those very same progressive circles that had predicted the molasses-slow pace of the post–Great Recession recovery.
What finally triggered the Post’s belated acknowledgment of the success of Bidenomics was last Friday’s release of the monthly employment figures, which showed the economy adding another nearly quarter-million jobs even as inflation was subsiding. Over at The New York Times, Paul Krugman (who’s decidedly not a latecomer to understanding the Biden achievements) hailed “the awesomeness, the historic nature of last Friday’s employment report.” The Los Angeles Times headlined its story “U.S. Adds a Healthy 236,000 Jobs Despite Fed’s Rate Hikes.”
I mention that headline because its tone was not shared by all the nation’s headline writers. The banner headline atop The Wall Street Journal’s front page on the morning after Friday’s release of employment data read, “Jobs, Wages Show Signs of Easing,” and when that story continued on page 2, the headline there read “Job Growth Eased a Bit Last Month.”
Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary’s definition of the verb “ease” is: “to free from something that pains, disquiets, or burdens.” Evidently, both job growth and wage growth are viewed at the Journal—and not just in the editorial pages but atop its news pages—as painful, disquieting, and burdensome. And much as I loathe the Murdochs for their all-too-successful efforts to stoke millions of our compatriots with quasi-fascist rage, I’m confident that this is a headline the Journal could and would have run in its pre-Murdoch days. It conveys the particular perspective that the paper’s very name reveals: that of Wall Street. To the class of investor that believes that higher wages diminish the cash available for dividends and buybacks, and fears full employment because it gives workers the leverage to demand higher wages, nothing is so troubling as the thought (much less the fact) that more Americans are getting jobs.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the slowness of the Obama recovery and the Clinton-era deregulations that led to the 2008 crash were the products of administrations whose economic policies were shaped by such Wall Street denizens as Robert Rubin and Timothy Geithner. And that the achievements of the Biden administration are due in no small measure to the relative dearth of economic advisers from Wall Street and the salutary presence of economic advisers—such as Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey—who made their reputations with work that privileged the claims of Main Street over Wall.
