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Expectations heading into this morning showed projections of about 250,000 new jobs added in the United States in June. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the preliminary tally suggests the domestic job market did quite a bit better than that. CNBC reported this morning:
Nonfarm payrolls increased 372,000 in the month, better than the 250,000 Dow Jones estimate and continuing what has been a strong year for job growth, according to data Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate was 3.6%, unchanged from May and in line with estimates.
The nation’s 3.6 percent unemployment rate is the lowest since President Joe Biden took office, and it’s nearly as low as the 3.5 percent rate from before the start of the economic crisis created by the Covid pandemic. All told, the U.S. economy has now gained back roughly 98 percent of its pandemic job losses — 100 percent of the private sector jobs — and it’s happened faster than hardly anyone thought possible a year ago.
The news wasn’t all great: The revisions on job totals from April and May were revised down a bit. What’s more, some cooling in the job market would probably make the Federal Reserve feel better about inflation.
That said, the overall picture is absolutely worth celebrating: So far in 2022, the economy has created 2.63 million jobs, and that’s after just six months. By any fair measure, that’s an extraordinary total, more in line with what we’d expect to see in a full year.
We’ve all heard plenty of talk about a possible recession, but at least for now, there’s no evidence of it in the surprisingly resilient U.S. job market.
As for the politics, let’s circle back to previous coverage to put the data in perspective. Over the course of the first three years of Donald Trump’s term — when the then-Republican president said the United States’ economy was the greatest in the history of the planet — the economy created roughly 6.4 million jobs. This included all of 2017, 2018, and 2019.
According to the latest tally, since January 2021, the U.S. economy created 9.37 million jobs — far in excess of the combined total of Trump’s first three years. In fact, this year’s total to date exceeds any individual year of the former president’s term.
In recent months, Republicans have responded to developments like these by pretending not to notice them. I have a hunch GOP officials will keep the trend going today.