The post examines the high employment rate, low inflation rate, fast wage growth, and productivity growth. The essay also examines common, false MAGA claims regarding revisions, native-born American employment, and government job share.
Edit: I’ll add the rebuttals to MAGA falsehoods for easy access:
>**“Won’t these jobs numbers just get revised down?”**
>Well, we don’t know if the September jobs numbers will get revised downward when the final data come in. But we *do* know that the July and August numbers got revised *upward*. So there’s a chance the September numbers will be revised up as well.
>Marco Rubio [did falsely claim](https://x.com/marcorubio/status/1842246712225603776) that 16 of the last 17 monthly jobs numbers were revised downward. There was a string of mostly negative revisions in 2023 and early 2024 — though as you can see on the chart above, which includes those revisions, the final numbers were still really good. But that string [has ended lately](https://x.com/besttrousers/status/1842249190476300455) — July and August 2024 got revised upward, as did March 2024. (There were also upward revisions in July 2023 and December 2023, which just makes Rubio’s factoid even more wrong.)
>**“Isn’t it just foreigners getting jobs, not native-born Americans?”**
>Nope. The Baby Boomers are retiring, so the total number of native-born American workers is going down. But the *employment rate* of native-born workers is especially high right now — higher than in 2019. In fact, the gap between the native-born and the foreign-born has even widened a little bit:
>[graph]
>**“Aren’t these just government jobs?”**
>Nope. Government jobs are a smaller percentage of overall U.S. employment than they were in 2019, continuing a decades-long downward trend:
1 Comment
The post examines the high employment rate, low inflation rate, fast wage growth, and productivity growth. The essay also examines common, false MAGA claims regarding revisions, native-born American employment, and government job share.
Edit: I’ll add the rebuttals to MAGA falsehoods for easy access:
>**“Won’t these jobs numbers just get revised down?”**
>Well, we don’t know if the September jobs numbers will get revised downward when the final data come in. But we *do* know that the July and August numbers got revised *upward*. So there’s a chance the September numbers will be revised up as well.
>Marco Rubio [did falsely claim](https://x.com/marcorubio/status/1842246712225603776) that 16 of the last 17 monthly jobs numbers were revised downward. There was a string of mostly negative revisions in 2023 and early 2024 — though as you can see on the chart above, which includes those revisions, the final numbers were still really good. But that string [has ended lately](https://x.com/besttrousers/status/1842249190476300455) — July and August 2024 got revised upward, as did March 2024. (There were also upward revisions in July 2023 and December 2023, which just makes Rubio’s factoid even more wrong.)
>**“Isn’t it just foreigners getting jobs, not native-born Americans?”**
>Nope. The Baby Boomers are retiring, so the total number of native-born American workers is going down. But the *employment rate* of native-born workers is especially high right now — higher than in 2019. In fact, the gap between the native-born and the foreign-born has even widened a little bit:
>[graph]
>**“Aren’t these just government jobs?”**
>Nope. Government jobs are a smaller percentage of overall U.S. employment than they were in 2019, continuing a decades-long downward trend:
>[graph]