The president is measuring success differently
Jan 31, 2018, 5:50 AM | Updated: 8:15 am
The jobs are back, and the president made that clear by quoting some pretty good numbers during his first State of the Union address.
Reaction to Trump’s State of the Union speech
For example, there have been 2.4 million new jobs since the election, and the lowest unemployment rates ever recorded for Hispanic Americans and African Americans.
Fact checking pretty much backed him up.
The 2.4 million new jobs actually include the last two months of the Obama Administration, but jobs are jobs.
And unemployment is around its historic lows at 4.1 percent.
But it appears the president is measuring success a little differently than he did during the campaign. He now appears to accept the official unemployment figures.
Back during the campaign when the unemployment fell to 5 percent, he said this:
“The five percent figure is one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics.”
Instead, he said, you should look at the number of people participating in the workforce.
“One in five American households do not have a single member in the labor force.”
That was the important number. Not the unemployment rate.
Well, one in five American households still don’t have a single member in the labor force because a lot of people have retired.
What seems to have changed here is that somewhere along the way, the unemployment rate turned out not to be a hoax after all.
That may be why Nancy Pelosi looked like she had a toothache.
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