RUSH: A record 158 million Americans working. The women’s labor force participation rate is at an all-time high. African-American unemployment rate is at an all-time low. There simply isn’t any legitimate way for the left to spin these economic numbers. It’s actually 157 and change, but it’s close, we rounded it up, 158 million Americans working.
Over 6.3 million jobs created since Trump was elected. Over half of them have gone to women. That’s right, my friends. The women’s workforce participation just hit the highest level in 20 years — two decades for those of you in Rio Linda. And black unemployment, African-American unemployment, minority unemployment at its lowest recorded level ever, five and a half percent. The Democrats hardest hit.
You would think everybody would be thrilled. The Democrats should be thrilled at this, right? The African-Americans, their number one constituency. You’d think that they would be happy things are so rosy. But no, my friends, the Democrats are not thrilled. The Democrats said that tax cuts would crash the economy. They said that tax cuts would only help the uber rich. But here we are.
And look at this. The amount of money the average worker — I hate that word “worker”. We’re not Soviets. Well, not yet. The average American employee earns — the amount rose 11 cents $28.11 an hour last month, keeping the increase over the past year at a healthy 3.2%. That’s wages going up. There isn’t a bad thing in this report.
All the left can say, “Well, it’s fewer jobs this month than the experts predicted.” It still puts what was happening in the Obama administration to absolute shame. They were telling us that the days of this kind of economic growth were over, folks.
They were telling us that there was a new decline and that they were the ones to manage it. That our best economic days are behind us, and we didn’t really deserve those because we had lied and cheated and stolen from other nations. We were a bunch of reprobates. We were an undeserving nation. And it was time we joined this global movement toward mediocrity to pay penance for all the damage we had caused around the world. That was the Obama Administration thinking. That’s what they were telling people.
And here comes Donald Trump in less than three years, actually a little over three years, but the reversal here is just stunning. The contrast could not be greater. Eight years of Obama destroying jobs, waving bye-bye to manufacturing jobs, claiming they’re never coming back.
And yet look what is rising where Democrats run things: homeless, tent cities, piles of poop on public sidewalks. That’s what’s rising. That’s what’s increasing in places where Democrats run the show. Every day the Democrats are not in power is a good day. Enjoy each and every one of them. One more thing, Larry Kudlow talked about something called a “Household Survey” today. This is the data that is buried or not covered so much in the jobs report. Grab sound bites four and five. He was on Varney & Co. today on the Fox Business Channel. And here’s the question from Varney: “I think it’s very, very modest job growth and a slowing economy, which is being slowed by uncertainty over China trade. Tell me I’m wrong. It looks like everything’s slowing down here, Larry, tell me I’m wrong.”
KUDLOW: It’s a solid number, it’s not a spectacular number. By the way, seasonally the August print usually comes in low and then is revised higher. But here is the story: 590,000 new jobs in the Household Survey. That is virtually unprecedented. Average hourly earnings, 12 month change is 3.2%. An explosion in new labor force entrants, the wage rate for the last three months at annual rate is 4.2%. So I’m just going to say this. America’s working, America is getting paid well, America is spending, and saving and producing. So I think this is a dynamite report.
RUSH: It is, and you would expect him to say so. He’s part of the economic advisory team for the president. But Varney set him up pretty well there. “Hey, everybody says there’s not as many jobs this month. I don’t know, looks like things are slowing down out there. Tell me I’m wrong, Lar.” And here comes Kudlow with this Household Survey number, 590,000 new jobs in the Household Survey. That differs from the monthly report, what is it, 150,000 jobs. They call that nonfarm payrolls. And that goes back to when — we still haven’t changed the category — that goes back to when we were predominantly an agricultural economy. And the elements of the economy were measured in agriculture and outside.
Here’s one more bite. This is Varney’s question: “Are we going to go back to 3% growth, Kudlow? The New York Times is saying this morning a period of sluggish growth looks more likely to be –” what else would the New York Times say, Stuart?
Do you think the New York Times is going to sit here and do hand dances on this? Okay. So quote the New York Times to Kudlow, “Well, the New York Times says very sluggish growth, more likely to be very, very bad here. Are you predicting a bounce back to 3% economic growth?”
KUDLOW: I think underneath the hood these job numbers are very powerful. Consumer confidence, absolute blowout. We’ve seen a little softness in production, durable goods and cap spending. That happens. Along a cycle, you know you go up and down. As a rule of thumb, back of the envelope real GDP equals productivity plus employment growth, that gets you to over 3% right now. So if we removed some of the monetary obstacles and we continue our incentives with low tax rates and rollback of regulations and cheap and plentiful energy, I’m going to play this on the bullish side.
RUSH: Let me translate. These economists, they start talking this dribble — yes, we can get back to 3% if the Fed shapes up. That’s what he meant when he said if we can get rid of some of these monetary obstacles. He’s talking about the Federal Reserve and pretending that we’ve got runaway inflation and try to deal with it by slowing down the economy. And that’s what has Trump ticked off. Why would you want to slow down the economy? And I’ve never understood this either.
Throughout my whole life, folks, as long as I’ve been paying attention, great economic news has been greeted with panic on Wall Street. “Oh, my God, oh my God, wages are going to go up, oh my God, cost of doing business is going to go up. Oh my God.” So they try to roll back the economy to prevent inflation. And there is inflation, even though they say there isn’t, there’s always inflation, just compare prices a year ago to today in even some basic things and you’ll find there’s always inflation.
But the Fed is pretending it’s way, way out of control. We’ve got to really dial this back and in the process they try to cool down the economy. It’s never made sense to me. And this is what Trump and Kudlow are saying. So if we could remove these monetary obstacles — he’s being diplomatic — if the Fed would shape up and we keep incentivizing people to earn money by taxing them less and if we continue to incentivize investment by regulating people less, and if we continue with fracking and all of the things that are resulting in mass production of fossil fuels at market prices or below, then, yeah, we can exceed 3% economic growth. That is what Kudlow was saying.
Now, the politics of this. This jobs report today, despite the best efforts of the Drive-Bys to portray it as a yawner, this is still going to be very hard for the Democrats to spin. Pelosi tried. She said (imitating Pelosi), “This sluggish economy is slowing America down. It’s precisely due to Donald Trump.” It fell flat because there wasn’t even a grain of truth or abject reality in her analysis.
RUSH: So it’s just a perfunctory statement from the Democrats. The fact is it’s going to be really hard for them to spin this as a negative. They can’t win on the economy. They simply are not going to be able to win the White House by claiming the economy is the in the tank and they can do better because they don’t believe it can do better. They think you’re not punished enough. You’ve got to get punished and punished even more, climate change and all that other rigmarole.
And because they can’t win on the economy that’s why they have pivoted here to climate change. And you know what else? Do you know that CNN is going to do another seven-hour marathon on LGBTQ issues? I’m beginning to wonder, do we have a plant inside CNN? Did Trump secure a spy, like the FBI tried to spy on him, does Trump have a spy in CNN and is directing — because their numbers, their ratings are in the tank for this climate change thing. And what do you think it’s going to be, seven hours of LGBT — how many pictures of Mayor Pete kissing his husband can you show people before they say, “Okay, okay, we get it. He likes to kiss his husband on TV. How many times can we see this?”
And then fashion magazine covers of Megan Rapinoe and her girlfriend looking like clowns in the outfits that they’re wearing now. How long can this go on? Nobody watched the climate change thing and nobody is going to watch the LGBTQ thing. The Democrats can’t win here on the economy, so they’re pivoting to all these other things.
And you know about this climate change thing, I failed to mention this, the DNC rejected it. The Democrat National Committee told the candidates, “Ain’t no way you’re doing seven hours on climate change.” And CNN came in and said, “Oh, yes, they are.” Remember, the media is running the Democrat Party. The Democrat National Committee told the presidential candidates, “Are you kidding, seven hours on climate change? Do you have a death wish?”
CNN came in, saved the day, and offered the opportunity and the Democrat candidate showed up and did it. What do you make of that? The DNC didn’t want any part of it. Here comes CNN saving the day. The DNC also would not sanction a debate on LGBTQ, but here comes CNN to, quote, save the day.
Now, both of these issues, particularly LGBTQ, these are not issues that even cause a blip on the radar screen of what most voters are concerned about. They’re marginal. They’re out there on the fringe, and it’s a real luxury for people to even have time to worry about this meaningless stuff. It’s a sign of how affluent we actually are. We’re so free. We’re so safe. We’re so secure that the Democrat Party doesn’t have to grow up.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We start in Highland Beach, Florida, with Lisa. Great to have you and I’m glad you called. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. I’d like to further opine on Mr. Kudlow’s comment as to removing obstacles. Speaking as a retired bank president, I can attest to the economic regulation strangulation we suffered through the Obama administration. So the increase — exponential increase — in compliance costs had an impact on our hiring. Banks became cash flush, and obviously it had an overall impact on the multiplier impact on our economy. So I’m sure other industries felt some of that as well.
RUSH: Well, explain what you mean that it had an impact on your hiring. I know that has an impact on the job numbers.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: But you were relating it to regulation. So what is your point?
CALLER: So Obama came out with additional regulations and implementing such as the CFPD and more of the Dodd-Frank promises —
RUSH: This is all true.
CALLER: — and so all of that made banks spend money on compliance costs —
RUSH: Oh, yeah.
CALLER: — to conform to these things. So they were afraid. They never knew what was going to happen next.
RUSH: Folks, this is exactly right. I have to tell you. Here is what happens in any free-market economy — and I know I’m playing loose with free market. We have a lot of controls and we have a lot of regulations. But compared to where the Democrats want to take us, we’re a burgeoning free-market economy. And in a free-market economy you’re gonna have cycles. You’re going to have ups and downs — and when we have downs, economic slowdowns, perhaps a recession here or there — it is just natural for people to want somebody to, “Do something!”
And here comes the American left ready to take up the challenge. “You want us to do it? We’ll be happy to do that!” The problem with that is when you have somebody like Obama in the presidency, they don’t trust freedom. They don’t trust you with freedom. That is the hallmark of your modern-day Democrat and lifetime leftist. They do not trust you to spend your money “wisely,” meaning the way they want you to. They don’t trust you to save it. They don’t trust you to spend it on the right stuff. You might eat a hamburger instead of tofu, this kind of stuff.
So they eagerly grab control of the economy and they start punishing people they think are either doing too well or are responsible. So you can have one example of a bank taking advantage of customers, which will lead to a nationwide reformatting of bank regulations on the premise that they’re all rotten and that they’re all thieves and that they’re all cheats — and they end up trying to micromanage the economy.
They end up punishing people who haven’t done anything wrong. They add a bunch of obstacles in the way of the free market, all because they think they know better. And yet none of them have ever done any of this! What the hell does Barack Obama know about health care? Not a damn thing other than where the hospital is. That’s the extent of it. He’s never run a hospital. He’s never run a health insurance company. He’s never been in charge of an emergency room or EMS or any of that.
And yet these people, they get elected and they presume that they are experts in everything — experts in banks, experts in private sector businesses, experts in health care and experts in what have you — and they don’t know diddly squat. But what makes it worse, they don’t trust freedom. They don’t trust the free market. Every inequity, every inequality they claim is systematic and rooted in freedom. And so they use that to try to tell people, “You are getting screwed. You’re getting shafted.
They’re doing it with Big Box stores like Walmart retailers. They’re doing it with take your pick. The Democrat Party enemy’s list is successful businesses. But they have no idea what they’re doing themselves. And yet they set themselves up as the central planners who know more and care more. They operate on the premise that everybody is a cheat, that everybody is guilty, that everybody’s a fraud. And what they end up doing is slowing down the economy, putting all kinds of obstacles and regulations in the way.
They prolong economic stagnation.
The proof of it is take the eight years of Obama and that economy with micromanaging for the purposes of “making life better for people.” What did they tell everybody? “The days of economic expansion are essentially over. There’s a new era now. There’s new decline. The United States never really deserved all this greatness in the past.” In three years of Donald Trump, what’s happened? A total, 1,000% reversal simply by getting rid of some of the asinine things that the Obama administration put in our way.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Grab audio sound bite number 6. This is a guy named Jason Furman. He was on CNBC Squawk Box today. And this ends up being a random act journalism, because this is a former Obama economist, who for some reason told the truth about the economic numbers today. The info babe Becky Quick said to Jason Furman, “Austan Goolsbee just tweeted ‘oof,’ in response to the August jobs numbers; is that an overreaction to this? Are you concerned about this as well?”
FURMAN: Let’s average this over three months, 156,000 jobs a month. That’s more than we need to keep the unemployment rate steady, to keep the labor market improving. Where I would look to judge the job market is, number one, wages. That was very good news on the wage front, 0.4 for the month, 3.2 % year over year. And another statistic here is the labor force participation rate. That was up two tenths to 63.2. If you look over the last year, labor force participation is up half a point. That’s half a point even as people are getting older, people are retiring, and that’s because we’re continuing to create jobs above the replacement level.
RUSH: Now, that’s flat out amazing to me. That’s an Obama economist telling the truth about the economy. Now the labor force participation rate is a key number, and it was plummeting, it was one of the numbers we constantly focused on during the Obama Administration. That’s the number of people capable of working who are and aren’t. And it was plummeting during the Obama years as more people were on welfare and food stamps. There weren’t any jobs. There was no economic growth during the Obama years. So labor force participation plummeted.
It’s back. And female labor force participation rate is at a 20-year high. The African-American unemployment rate, a record low at 5.5%. And again I ask where is the Drive-By Media celebrating this great news for African-Americans? Where is the Democrat Party celebrating? Well, obviously the question answers itself. It’s not a bad month. They’ve been trying to talk you and everybody else into a recession for at least intensely the past two weeks. And again, the Federal Reserve chairman on CNBC said it’s looking great for the American consumer out there; there’s no recession in sight.
Just cutting them off at the knees and the Democrats think that Jerome Powell is one of their buddies. The Democrats in the media think Jerome Powell is there to cut Trump off. And it didn’t happen.
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