The December jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn’t exceed expectations, but it didn’t have to. The unemployment rate is still at a half-century low, real wages are up, and markets are still showing optimism about the economic situation.
None of this will help work up an appetite for a clash of classes warring for economic revolution.
If the economy hits the recession we’ve been long overdue for, then maybe the cri de coeur of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will resonate with the swing staters who delivered President Trump the White House. But the longest bull market in history has persisted. The Dow continues to hit record highs. The tight labor market continues to pull people back into the workforce. And most importantly for Trump, the gains are not just going to the much-reviled 1%.
For the first time in over a decade, real wages are rising — not just across every demographic but especially for those who need it the most. Wages for the bottom third of workers have increased by 4.1% over the past two years. For the middle and top thirds, they’ve increased by 3.3% and 3.6% respectively. The Left may love to thank minimum wage for this growth, but minimum wage is responsible for a mere 20% of the wage increase for the bottom fifth of earners and just 10% of the increase overall.
Not only are we earning more, but thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, we get to keep more of our paychecks. Two-thirds of workers, including one-third of those earning less than $30,000, got a tax cut under the 2017 law. The people who saw their tax bills go up were overwhelmingly rich people hit by the SALT deduction cap.
Anti-capitalists on the Left and Right will also deny reality by claiming that our unemployment rate conceals vast swaths of disaffected young men not represented in the figure because they’re not looking for jobs. This might have been the case once, but not any more. In reality, just 3% of prime-age men have exited the labor force because they’re discouraged by a lack of employer demand. Instead, formerly disaffected workers are the ones fueling our job creation. With a 3.5% unemployment rate, employers have been forced to pluck three-quarters of the newly employed from outside the labor force — that is, from among people who weren’t necessarily looking for a job in the first place.
So more people have jobs where they’re earning more money and socking it away in a market that’s only growing. That’s hardly reminiscent of Czarist Russia, Imperial China, or any other hellscape where revolutionary fervor runs rampant.
Bernie and Warren can promise to eat the rich and fundamentally destroy the system. But when the system is working this well for everyone, a revolution sounds like more effort than it’s worth.
