Employment: The federal government keeps trying to fool all the people all the time with its jobs-market reports. The one just out is no different.
The March report showed some improvement on the hiring front.  Jobs were up by 215,000, the labor-force participation rate ticked up to a still miserable 63%, and wages saw a welcome bump up. But stop already with the cartwheels in Washington.  The jobs market is still remarkably weak for millions of Americans, and the biggest lie in Washington is that unemployment is just 5%.
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The chart shows how misleading the unemployment statistics are. If you include people who have given up looking for work, the unemployment rate is 6%. If you include people stuck in a part-time job for 20 or 25 hours a week, the real unemployment rate is a dreadful 9.8%. Why is Washington cheering?
We’ve been at or well above the 10% mark now for seven years.   Over that time period wages have been basically flat.  We’re some 5 million jobs short of where we would be if we had had a Reagan-style expansion, and at this pace of just over 200,000 jobs a month, it will take at least four more years to catch up.
Two of the industries with the biggest job gains were retail (48,000) and bars and restaurants (25,000).  Amazingly, liberals used to call the Reagan years the “burger-flipper economy.”
This is some recovery.
We’d like to think that Joe Biden’s long-ago promise of a “Summer of Recovery” was around the corner, but growth isn’t accelerating – it’s slowing.
We had 2% growth in the third quarter of 2015.  Then we had 1.4% growth in the 4th quarter of 2015. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta forecast on Friday that the first quarter GDP of this year is estimated at a microscopic 0.7%.
The big pullback is business capital spending. Firms aren’t building new plants and research facilities, and they’re not buying machinery and computers and forklifts at the pace they normally would. Why not? One answer is the global slowdown. But another is the assault against wealth and profits in Washington.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders say they want to raise capital-gains taxes to nearly 50%.  They are promising more regulations and red tape, higher minimum wages, more attacks on our domestic fossil-fuels industry, and adding trillions of dollars more to the $19 trillion national debt.
Anyone want to invest into those gale-force headwinds?
Americans aren’t fooled by these “good news” numbers that the Obama administration is celebrating. Just ask a Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders supporter how they think the economy is doing for the middle class.  They all know someone who is officially unemployed, or stuck in a part-time job that doesn’t come close to paying the bills.
So what are the prospects for a real growth stimulus to get out of this slow-growth ditch?  Is a Reagan-style tax reform or a regulatory vacation or a deficit reduction plan or a pro-America energy policy on the horizon?  Not with this president.  America needs a regime change.