This jobs report would be great news for Kamala Harris, if only Americans were paying attention to reality and facts.
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US employers for now put to rest any concerns that the labor market is cooling. Instead, they hired at a much higher rate than anticipated and added 254,000 jobs in September, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced Friday. In addition, the unemployment rate ticked lower to 4.1 percent.
This penultimate pre-election jobs report would be great news for Kamala Harris, if only Americans were paying attention to reality and facts instead of believing the lies Donald Trump and Fox News tell them every day.
That being said, a slew of positive economic news has narrowed the gap between the two on who is better equipped to handle that issue.
While Trump enjoyed a solid lead on this question, Harris has been making gains with voters as year-to-year inflation has eased to 2.2 percent and the gross domestic product grew by 3 percent in the second quarter of this year.
The jobs report is more welcome news for her, especially amid worries that hiring has slowed. For example, the jobs report for July lagged far behind expectations.
September hiring reversed that trend. Nonfarm payrolls were up more than a quarter-million last month, which exceeded expert predictions by more than 100,000.
Most of the gains were realized in the food services and drinking places sector, in health care, government employment, and construction.
Other key sectors like manufacturing, oil and gas extraction, mining, and retail trade remained largely unchanged.
DOL also reported that the average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls have now increased 4.0 percent over the past years to $35.36. In other words, that increase is now greater than inflation.
Now, the main question that remains is whether Americans will realize that the economy keeps improving, or whether they continue to believe the alternate reality Trump, the GOP, and Fox News are creating.
While it would seem like a simple thing for voters to educate themselves, many Americans remain stunningly ignorant on this topic.
For example, half of them believe the economy is shrinking and in a recession, which is not even close to being true. And, even though the stock market reaches new record highs all the time, about half of all voters think it is down under President Joe Biden.
Finally, although more jobs were created in the last three years than ever before in a comparable time span (which was aided by the fact that many people lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic and found new employment when the economy got going again), half of all Americans incorrectly believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high.
In other words, in spite of the favorable numbers, Harris has her work cut out to convince voters that they don’t live in the dystopian fantasy world Trump has created.
And, even though the former president tried the same propaganda in 2020, and his predictions of an epic economic crash did not come to pass, Harris’s task seems to be more difficult than it should be.
That being said, this jobs report should help.
