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U.S. Jobs, Pay Show Solid Gains in Trump's First Full Month (bloomberg.com)
Two anonymous reader share a Bloomberg report: U.S. employers added jobs at an above-average pace for a second month on outsized gains in construction and manufacturing while wage growth picked up, as the labor market continued its steady improvement in the new year. The 235,000 increase followed a 238,000 rise in January that was more than previously estimated, the best back-to-back rise since July, a Labor Department report showed Friday in Washington. The unemployment rate fell to 4.7 percent, and wages grew 2.8 percent from February 2016. While unseasonably warm weather may have boosted the payrolls count, the data represent President Donald Trump's first full month in office and coincide with a surge in economic optimism following his election victory.
I mean he hasn't actually implemented any policies but let's go ahead and give him credit....
Still, it's "Trump!" and that'll be good for several hundred posts... I guess that's the whole point, ennit?
What does this have to do with Tech again? Or are people serious thinking that, after one month in office, Trump has had some effect, instead of the more logical conclusion that this is the result of US policy continuation over the past 8 years.
A lot of the economic optimism comes from the "little Trump" theory, where he doesn't interfere much as Congress lowers taxes and makes things more business-friendly. If investors start to think it will be "big Trump" instead - massive deficits, unnecessary trade wars, unnecessary actual wars - then the stock market will not be so rosy.
The stock market you could maybe say has a little to do with Trump, with banks and oil companies expecting kid-gloves regulation in the future... but jobs and certainly pay have not a damn thing to do with the pariah-in-chief.
Not scaring the holy hell out of investors is a good thing. The previous admin operated with a one-two punch of literally a policy of being unconcerned with how much a regulation cost for the tiniest of gains, combined with unconstrined spending coupled with "They must pay their fair share" rhetoric showing the need (spending, borrowing) and willingness to increase taxes at some point.
If you are an investor, to hell with it. A few percent decline and there goes your growth.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
None of that has a single thing to do with Trump. Hell, there's things that Obama did in his first term that we'll just start seeing the effects of now. It's always been that way, the wheels turn slowly enough that it takes years for effects to become evident.
With the like of Walmart, Amazon and others working as hard a possible to eliminate Humans wherever possible, the quest for more US jobs looks like a folorn hope.
You voted him in. So prepare to reap what you sow.
"surge in economic optimism following his election victory."
Surely millions of people buying emergency supplies, additional firearms and ammunition, camping supplies and other items needed to survive the impending collapsing of society isn't really a sustainable "economic surge".
I mean, eventually we'll all be fully stocked and waiting for martial law to be declared.
People have a hard time accepting that one person can be both really good and really bad at the same time.
To those who don't like Trump, he is all-bad, and they won't accept any attribution of benefits to anything Trump does.
And vice-versa, of course.
I abhor Trump's attitude towards, say, Snowden. I think Trump is an exploiter who doesn't care about justice, but just about power. On the other hand, my investment portfolio has been doing very well since he won. So, I recognize the good with the bad.
So what exactly did the US Government do in that first month to create all those jobs? After all, if you can implement policy on day one and see that translate into an economic boost within a month, that is some good policy that governments would want to imitate all over the world.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Why Trump won...
The economy is a confidence game. Draw the appropriate conclusion.
Good thing we won't see the new inflation rate for a several more months, and pollution's latency has always been a classic.
Maybe this is good idea for a political platform: don't worry about conservative/liberal principles; just look for fast indicators that you can increase at the expense of slow ones. Right and left will become obsolete labels, and debates will be between short-termers and long-termers.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
But according to Trump all those figures are a bunch of lies. The people know that unemployment is more like 42% and wages must be shrink by some percentage. I can't wait for Trump to get out there and bash himself for his horrible unemployment numbers. Or perhaps he'll "feel" like it's 4.7% today just like he "feels" he's worth billions of dollars more or less day by day.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. What's the lag between deciding to hire someone or increase their pay and it actually happening? Someone who doesn't realise who much one needs to demonstrate a causal warrant.
Because had we voted for Hilary there would be fewer robots?
The Republicans will soon regret that Trump accidentally won the White House. The economy is long overdue for a recession after the Great Recession ended eight years ago this week, being the second longest expansion on record. Instead of a Hillary Recession, it will be a Trump Recession (TM).
Mythical reeducation for jobs that don't exist in the locations that were gutted by NAFTA. Complete with no help to relocate or adjust to fucking your kids lives up by transferring them across the country, nor help when dear old mum falls down the stairs and you're two thousand miles away working in your $8.50/hour job you weren't retrained for.
I love the dumb fucks who think people who have been screwed are voting against their best interests if they don't vote Democrat. Democrats aren't going to do shit for these people. This is why they've stopped fucking voting for Democrats.
I don't hold out much hope for things improving around here.
Just look at what the bigwig-until-the-next-sale-of-Slashdot whipslash wrote recently about a similarly useless political article:
Of course, long-time Slashdot readers will know that Slashdot used to, a long time ago, be a tech-oriented site. If a story did involve politics, it was because it also heavily involved technology in some important way.
The focus on technology is what brought so many of us here. We could find news specific to our interests, covered in much more depth than we could find at CNN, BBC, or the other major general news providers.
While a purely political submission like this is probably used to generate a lot of comments and activity, both will be utterly valueless. The comments will just be petty bickering, typically with extreme leftists attacking everyone else. The page views will probably be a profitless waste of data transfer, since most people here likely block or ignore the ads in one way or another.
Maybe the various owners can't see it for some reason, but the more Slashdot veers away from its original successful approach, the less successful it gets. A high number of useless politically-charged comments isn't a good measure of "success", financially or otherwise.
Change is only possible here if it comes from the top. So it's discouraging when we're told to just "scroll past" junk political stories by those up top. On the bright side, at least it's good practice for ignoring and scrolling past the similarly useless "Sponsored Content" faux submissions.
It seems to me like most businesses are pretty unhappy when things are uncertain. Now that the election's settled, and it doesn't look like he's going away for a while, businesses are just relaxing the controls a little bit. Most business owners are Republicans, so I assume they feel they're going to get more of what they want for at least the next 2 years.
I work a lot with small business owners who rail on and on about "regulations" and the big evil government impeding their ability to do business. I just don't see it -- any cost there may be for complying with regulations are deductible from your profits as business expenses. For the average business owner who isn't running a power plant, oil pipeline or transportation business, it seems to me like the cost of what they see as an insurmountable regulatory burden is actually pretty low. Filing paperwork and paying a few fees should be a drop in the bucket if you truly are a "rockstar entrepreneur." Add to that the fact that businesses essentially pay zero taxes, and I'd say business owners have it pretty good in the US.
A president can talk the economy up or down. Trump is talking the economy and exports up and he is talking illegal immigration and imports down. It is psychological. His speeches affect how business leaders think and it affects what consumers buy.
Years ago, Prez Reagan came back from Japan and said: 'Buy American'. The result was that Japan's economy tanked immediately and it took decades to recover. Trump is doing the same thing.
Now I haven't followed a damn thing he did but I don't recall hearing anything about specific job improvement strategies. Plus it's been ONE month. So is it safe to say this is just something that sort of happened?
Trump has nothing to do with...the prior year's trends continuing. It is foolish to think otherwise.
Just think of all the major job creation legislation that has passed! Oh. There is none yet.
Right. Because all financial processes attribute to the current administration so precisely (and immediately) that we need to write "full month" rather than just "month".
Among the numerate, the earliest possible report card on the new administration is the end of the first year, and we might by then be celebrating the accomplishments of President Pence, who might by then be one fat month into his presidency. Given these larger uncertainties, I'm not going to take any macro-economic wiggles as usefully reflective on Life Under New Management for a full two full years.
On the other hand, for those of you who buy into this ridiculous one-month report card, just imagine how fabulous life will be once the new administration manages to fully staff up. They accomplished this small, immediate miracle with half their chairs empty. That's quite something, and portends greatness, does it not?
Bill Looman, the owner of U.S. Cranes, LLC, told a local NBC affiliate, 11Alive, that he put up signs on his company trucks stating:
"New company policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone"
This link has a few photos of the signs.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
For the $50,000 I made in the stock market since your election. It sure is nice to have a capitalist in change instead of a race hustler.
So what exactly did the US Government do in that first month to create all those jobs?
It's not what they did, it's what they promised to do - which is primarily to lower the absurdly high U.S. corporate tax rate.
Mind you, large corporations are already paying much less than the top rate. But here's the secret - all of us small and medium sized businesses without a building full of accountants WERE paying that top rate, or close to it. So the promise to lower that rate helps improve hiring from the large majority of job creation, small to medium sized businesses.... the rate lowering won't make life much different for the very largest corps since they were not paying a very high rate anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... or quarter-to-quarter focus, or eating your seed corn!
Trump is against real pollution, just not CO2 so much. But the only downstream from that is improved crop yields and milder winters, so yet more prosperity is coming (unless the climate decides to flip back to Ice Age again as it is about due to).
The biggest improvement you could do as the government is to abolish the EPA, since it actually was the source of far more pollution than all of the regulations they passed ever prevented.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Trump has everything to do with "optimism".
I have actual code to worry about, and couldn't care less about the hysteria around the president. Those who participate on either side, on a site like slashdot, only shame themselves.
More like from the 1950s...
Except that whole "Operation Wetback" thing.
It didn't work then, apart from causing all the civil rights issues that it did, and it would work even less now.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"Our average effective tax rate is 27.1% compared with 27.7% for the other 30 OECD countries, according to CRS. Profitable corporations paid U.S. income taxes amounting to just 12.6% of worldwide income in 2010, according to the Government Accountability Office."
What was that again?
We've known Trump would be in office since November, and that's when the boom started. I own a tech recruiting business, and literally the day after the election things picked-up. I added two clients on that Wednesday. That's as many as I had added in the sixteen months before that. Since then, the number of open positions I'm trying to fill has nearly quadrupled. I work mainly for finding programmers for manufacturing businesses since I used to work with AP(accounts payable) software at Boeing so I got to know a lot of those companies.
I don't think the reason things are going so great now is because of Trump. I think it's relief that someone somewhat anti-business with a lot of friends that are very anti-business didn't win.
And the chocolate rations were increased to twenty grammes per week.
Because all the bad things that happen are the last presidents fault, and all the good things are because of the current president. It is how politics has worked for a while now.
Tldr: blame the old guy when things are bad, praise the new guy when things are good.
Add Jan + Feb and you will find that 2017 > all years except 2013. Make sure you only connect the things that support your argument?
When the guy you hate does something bad, it's his fault. When he does something right, it's thanks to the last guy.
So happy our country finally has some true leadership that focuses on America and American jobs, not this shady ass globalist push from Obama.
No doubt the trains will all soon be running on time, too...
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
North American is experiencing some of the coldest months on record. https://realclimatescience.com...
Thank you Obama: A record 75 consecutive months of job growth leading to a 4.7 percent unemployment rate, a stock market up 150 percent and still rising. Corporate profits at an all time high. And for the first time in almost forty years, middle-class incomes actually on the rise. A mess. The funny thing is, now that his name on on the mailbox, Trump has discovered that this “mess” is just beautiful.
The NASDAQ bottomed on March 9, 2009. Inertia much? Talk to me next year.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Whatever is happening right now is Bush's fault. At least, that's what CNN has been telling me for the last 28 years.
And yet he put in effort to save jobs at Carrier. Yep, made a couple of phone calls, a deal with the governor in the state and saved a number of local jobs. Something that had been in the news for months and Obama could have EASILY done at any point.
Difference?
Trump actually did something. Obama, president at the time, did nothing and said anyone could have done what Trump did, but he did not even bother to make a single phone call.
So yea, you have a president who will actually do something to help businesses and jobs instead of one saying "You didn't build that" crap. Its nice to have a president that wants to help you instead of one calling you racist every other day.
The current economic improvements are not a black and white difference between Obama and Trump. Trump has done NOTHING policy-wise yet; he is resting on the policy foundations of the past 8 years of the Obama administration. Nevertheless, his mostly ignorant-of-economics, self-confirmation-biased "true believers" will happily consume the hash of lies and distortions they are fed. Are their incomes going up? Is life easier? All they have to do is make a trip to the mailbox to find out that *nothing* has changed. What's going to surprise most of them is how once Clown Trump and his circus get going, how they are going to be left behind.
We have a *structural* disruption in worldwide benefits to labor; that structural disruption is ACCELERATING. Clown Trump and his base are going to find that out soon enough, as labor becomes ever more the commodity and automation continues to hallow out jobs. Wake up!
And that doesn't stand for "Bachelor of Science" in case you're wondering. The stock market rallied when Pence came out and said: We know Trump said he was going to do all these really popularist things like tariffs and healthcare for all but trust me, that ain't happening. Until then it was in free fall.
Obama's "You didn't Built it" was true and that stung like a motherfarker. There's a bumper sticker I saw the other day that made me laugh: "If you don't like socialism get off my public roads!". This is civilization. We work together to make things better. Remember the Dark Ages? A thousand years of no progress so a few kings and their retainers could claim everything themselves. Just keep telling yourself you're doing it for freedom, all the way back to monarchy and the divine right of kings. Good job.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Trump hasn't done anything yet that would have had a positive effect on the economy. And when he does something it will take time for it to take effect. Give him a year or two and then report back.
n/c
Improved crop yields, milder winters...
Correct
an influx of starving refugees from Mexico when their farmland turns into desert.
What part of "improved crop yields" did you fail to understand? Why would they be starving with an abundance of food??
Do jungles have more, or less plant growth? The increase in warmth corresponds to greater moisture in the atmosphere. Mexico will be even more of a garden than it is now.
Go into any greenhouse. Do you find inside a desert, or thriving plants?
That's what I really despise about you warming alarmists. You constantly claim utterly contradictory things. You have not even a second thought to real science behind how heat and water interact, much less the rest of the complex system that is the climate. You are all just DOOM DOOM DOOM idiots used by those above you ,parroting completely asinine points that you plainly do not understand.
hurricanes, storms, floods
Maybe a bit more flooding but global warming reduces extreme weather. So I guess you are for more hurricanes and people dying over a bit of extra flooding? You, sir are a monster, caring only about your own dry feat while thousands suffer or die.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
The chances that this had anything to do with trump are about the same as the connection between this article and "news for nerds, stuff that matters".
and just to dissuade the bias read, I ( reluctantly ) voted for the man.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Why do democrats vote against their best interest?
Democrats claim to want a living wage, but then they let in hordes of immigrants both legal and illegal, pushing down wages.
Democrats claim to support blacks, yet all the well-off ones hire hispanic housekeepers. What, are black Americans not suitable? Too scary to be in your home?
Democrats claim to support women and LGBT, but then they welcome immigrants with a real rape culture (not the fake US one) who like to toss LGBT off buildings and who kill their own daughters for spending time with boys or going uncovered.
Meanwhile yes, cutting anti-business regulation DOES help with jobs and a few well-chosen tariffs DOES provide opportunity to the many Americans with less-than-amazing skills.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First off, I support President Trump. But you have to understand macro economics. From the time any major changes are made to the economy, such as interest rate changes, taxes, etc. there is a lag period. This period of time depends on the size of the change and the nature of the change. To say that this is because of Trump is really not very accurate.
Mind you, the President would get blamed if things went south. Actually, the left-bent media would put him into a box and try to bury him. So, don't get too worked up either way about these early numbers. While the market rally is real as people are fed up with Obama's massive taxes and punitive economic plan we'll see more when Trump and Republicans implement even more tax cuts other than the Obama-mama care taxes.
The current economic improvements are not a black and white difference between Obama and Trump. Trump has done NOTHING policy-wise yet; he is resting on the policy foundations of the past 8 years of the Obama administration. Nevertheless, his mostly ignorant-of-economics, self-confirmation-biased "true believers" will happily consume the hash of lies and distortions they are fed. Are their incomes going up? Is life easier? All they have to do is make a trip to the mailbox to find out that *nothing* has changed.
Sadly, this is what happens damn near every time a new president has been elected from the opposing party. Obama got a Nobel for doing nothing FFS.
GWB got the blame for the Dot-com crash and 9-11. Both were in the works before he even won the primary.
Reagan got credit for the Iran hostages being released. Even though they would have been released as long as anyone other than Carter would have been president.
"absurdly high U.S. corporate tax rate."
Is that why most of the top earning companies pay zero taxes?
Gotcha.
From Bloomberg "Just 157,000 people were unable to work in February because of inclement weather, compared with an average of 311,000 for the month, according to the Labor Department. In January, 395,000 employees couldn’t work because of the weather." The raw monthly counts are fairly meaningless unless you see the phrase 'Seasonably Adjusted'. ( https://www.dallasfed.org/-/me... ) i.e. "... outsized gains in construction ...", etc. And the real economic effect is Positions X Wages, and also what regions the growth is occurring in.
Trump's power comes not from what he does but what he theatens to do. non-US businesses are among those who apparently are taking Trump's threats to enact new tariffs seriously which seems to be the only thing I can see from Trump to affect things, though there are probably private conversations I am not privy to as well.
One mental health company in my area grew to include general practitioners and merged with a pharmacy. My current health company includes a hospital among its facilities/complexes.
Competition and buyers and sellers are another way of looking at things. In this model you want to get good terms for you from people who in that other framework are friends who you might want to give some sort of "slack" to, and enemies who you wish some sort of harm to. In this other paradigm, people are expected to be more involved in making sure their side of the exchange is acceptable to them.
That businesses aren't hiring wasn't the only assertion. He further asserted that the reason that businesses weren't hiring was because they were punishing Obama and not for the more apparent to some that new regulations made it appear either less profitable or more risky to hire. That was the assertion he had a problem with.
What for implies something was given in exchange. Why is a more open ended question.
Thank you captain obvious.
Or, in other words, WOOOOOSH!
He so against "real pollution" (does it wear a kilt?) that he decided to let mines dump waste in the river. When has it ever been good to dump things that aren't water into a river? One business segment in particular, the coal industry, wants to dump coal ash. Google the Kingston Coal Ash Spill and see how non-polluting that was.
LOL.
The Unemployment rate was 4.6 in Nov.
And Obama's last month was 238K, though for the last 77 months, O has added ~200K jobs each month.
So, considering that unemployment rate increased to 4.7 from 4.6 and the retailers are having major issues, we shall have to see what will really happen over the next 6 months.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
probably supported Obama as he spent YEARS claiming "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" and "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan" etc. That very same Obama whose people (like Ben Rhodes and Jonathan Gruber repeatedly bragged that he secured victories in health care and foreign policy by lying to his own stupid supporters by way of the in-the-tank journalists at outlets like the New York Times.
yup... keep up the meme that Trump is a huckster while your preferred huckster's entire legacy dissolves from his own used car salesman and carbon offsets trader style marketing lies.
Trump should thank Obama for being given such a great economy. He won't because he's a bitch and his supporters are fags.
Most Trump supporters love man ass.
If you cared about data, you would know that seats != control.
If you cared about data AND if you weren't just guided by your irrational fears and hate - you'd know that two and two make four.
Thus... more seats == more control of legislative chambers.
But fuck kindergarten arithmetic!
Just looking at the graph shows that Republicans have been holding what they took under Obama.
But you'd have to use witchcraft to find that out. Like clicking on a link and reading what's there. Which is clearly witchcraft!
Creating text and images from thin air! BURN IT! BURN IT!
Granted... being not insane (paranoid and delusional) IS also necessary in order to actually understand what the squiggly line on the graph means.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Wait, at the end of last year there were 90 million people out of the workforce. Did they all get hired last month?! :)
...richie - It is a good day to code.