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Story of the Year
MARCH 06, 2019
An apprentice on a construction project in Coburg, Ore., Feb. 16, 2018.Photo: Brian Davies/Associated Press
The great political challenge of our time is sorting out what matters from what’s just chatter. The din of distracting statistical noise is overwhelming. A Democratic governor named Inslee announces he’s going to run for the U.S. presidency on one issue—climate change. Days later, the real president delivers a speech of immeasurable length to a conference of conservatives about pretty much everything rattling around in his head. The new week dawns with a Democratic House committee chairman named Nadler demanding that 81 of the president’s “associates” provide him with a document dump.
Serious people would like to believe something real in politics is going on. The good news is . . . something is.
This past weekend, The Wall Street Journal published a series of stories titled “Inside the Hottest Job Market in Half a Century.” As far as I’m concerned, this jobs record is the story of the year. The Journal’s articles transformed a year of economic data into the new daily reality of getting paid to work in America.
“All sorts of people who have previously had trouble landing a job are now finding work,” the Journal reported. “Racial minorities, those with less education and people working in the lowest-paying jobs are getting bigger pay raises and, in many cases, experiencing the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for their groups. They are joining manufacturing workers, women in their prime working years, Americans with disabilities and those with criminal records, among others, in finding improved job prospects after years of disappointment.”
Example: A 23-year-old woman, Cassandra Eaton, a high-school graduate and single mother who was working for about $8 an hour at a day-care center in Biloxi, Miss., is doing now what previously would have been unimaginable. She’s an apprentice welder making $20 an hour at a shipyard in Pascagoula.
The unemployment rate for high-school dropouts, a status many depressing books and studies show puts one close to the bottom of the barrel for getting ahead in America, is 5%. Their median wages the past year rose 6%.
An ex-con named James O. Wilson, who got a job in 2017 with FedEx in Indianapolis, is today making more than $16 an hour, has a house and a wife, and says, “I want FedEx to say, ‘Do you have any more people like him?’ ”
Let’s cut to the chase. From left to right, socialist or conservative, most of a nation’s political debates are ultimately about one thing: making life better for people. Whatever else that may mean, it first requires giving people something to do with their daily lives—work, a job. Which is to say, aspiration and opportunity.
If what has happened inside the U.S. labor market the past two years doesn’t qualify as the point of all this effort, those of us in and around politics might as well pack it in.
A great value of the Journal’s articles on the historic top-to-bottom jobs market is that for most people this establishes a baseline of observable, undeniable reality.
“Most people,” however, does not include large swaths of the professional political class. Because the jobs story overlaps almost precisely with the policies of a U.S. presidency occupied by you-know-who, the reality outside their windows must be denied.
Start with the Democrats, whose response to the new jobs market borders on the comical: Create a new top personal tax rate of 70%, a higher corporate tax rate, a circa-1933 jobs program doing things for the environment and free health care. If none of that works, impeach the president.
It’s no surprise that Mike Bloomberg, a Democratic capitalist, chose not to compete with the crew running for the party’s presidential nomination, while former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, one of the great job creators of his generation, shuns the Democrats to run as an independent.
More interesting is the internal debate among conservatives and Republicans.
In recent years, a group know as Reformicons has argued that the Reagan-era policy mix of tax cuts, deregulation and economic growth is no longer relevant to the needs and anxieties of the U.S. middle class. Instead, their policy alternatives include targeted government interventions, such as wage subsidies, to supplement middle-class incomes. These ideas are often associated with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
One notices that most of the Reformicon arguments emerged from 2014 to 2016—before the Reagan-era, supply-side policies of the Trump presidency were passed into law or implemented. In 2019, the idea that tax reductions, public-sector deregulation and growth are no longer relevant to the needs of the middle class is provably and demonstrably false.
It requires a remarkable degree of obtuseness to stare at the policy success of the past two years and pretend it hasn’t happened. Democrats are doing exactly that. Conservatives should pocket the Trump presidency’s Reaganesque policies for massively matching job producers with job seekers. There is plenty left for them to do without trying to reinvent the wheel.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
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