Trump's SOTU touts juiced job market
President Trump wants you to know the U.S. jobs recovery is real dubbing it part of the “economic boom” in his 2019 State of the Union address. To his point, in January, a whopping 304,000 jobs were created, blowing past expectations.
Near record low unemployment and robust hiring in sectors that were long depressed, such as manufacturing, are now part of his economic track record and he detailed as much on Tuesday while noting, “We are just getting started”...
FOX Business highlights some excerpts of his address focusing on the job market.
Record Low Unemployment is Broad:
U.S. unemployment hit 3.7 percent in late 2018 before ticking up to 4 percent in January 2019. “Unemployment has reached the lowest rate in half a century” Trump noted. “More people are working now than at any time in our history”...
"African-American, Hispanic-American and Asian-American unemployment have all reached their lowest levels ever recorded. Unemployment for Americans with disabilities has also reached an all-time low" he said.
Female Power:
“No one has benefitted more from our thriving economy than women, who have filled 58 percent of the new jobs created in the last year” said Trump. He also noted in his remarks that more women than ever before are serving in the U.S. Congress. According to the Associated Press, the labor force participation rate is 57.5 percent, according to the Labor Department. The rate has ticked up recently, but it was higher in 2012 and peaked in 2000 at roughly 60 percent.
Jobs Created:
“We have created 5.3 million new jobs and importantly added 600,000 new manufacturing jobs -- something which almost everyone said was impossible to do” he said.
In FOX Business' fact checking, the numbers are slightly off, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows there have been about 4.9 million jobs created since January of 2017 of which 436,000 are manufacturing.
Rising Wages:
Wages are rising at the fastest pace in decades, and growing for blue collar workers. Trump’s top economic advisor Larry Kudlow has also highlighted the recovery for the blue collar workers as being significant. “The Trump administration'sOpens a New Window. economic incentive model has spurred blue-collar job growth at the fastest rate since the Reagan administration, he recently told FOX Business.
In December, wages grew 3.3 percent from the same period a year ago, the fastest in about a decade.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.