This Labor Day, celebrate the fact that 96.1 percent of job-seekers in the U.S. succeed in finding employment in any given month. It is a cause of celebration that wages are finally rising, that energy exports are surging, that American companies are seeing their values increase on the stock market, and that the economy is growing faster than it has in many years.
This is what prosperity looks like, and it helps all workers. The American dream is that anyone can build a prosperous life for himself and his family with hard work and perseverance. The idea remains unfashionable in leftist academic circles, but it is making a comeback in 2018.
President Trump deserves some credit for all this, but he in turn should thank former President Barack Obama for leaving him so much low-hanging fruit to pick. Getting the economy going again was a matter of doing the obvious, though saying that does not imply that that’s easy to do — most presidents fail and many don’t even try.
Remove costly regulations that were weighing down the economy. Issue permits for constructing pipelines. Encourage more energy exploration. Stop needlessly kicking the coal industry when it’s already down. Most importantly, cut America’s uncompetitive highest-in-the-world corporate tax rate. Easy to see, and easy to say. But not so easy to do.
And boom — within a year, the economy is already growing faster than 4 percent, with many signs pointing to good times ahead.
Labor Day is also the traditional start of the election campaign season, and that serves as a reminder. Voters have to decide soon whether they like things this way or not. This fall, they will have to choose between today’s rapidly growing economy, and the glacial growth of the Obama years. Democrats in Congress would love to seize a majority and turn the clock back to when economic policy prioritized union power and politically correct ideology rather than growth and prosperity.
During Obama’s presidency, his appointees upset many long-term precedents in a naked effort to reward political cronies. They tried hard especially to force more workers to pay part of their wages to union bosses, which would in turn end up in Democratic campaign coffers.
Early on, they changed 70-year-old rules for union elections at airlines and railroad companies just to throw one particular election to a union. (The scheme failed.) Later, they upended decades of settled labor law to establish what is known as the “joint employer” rule. That rule, which threatens to destroy the franchise business model that employs millions, was created specifically to make it easier for unions to seize control of larger workplaces with less effort and less support from workers.
Obama himself even tried to stack the National Labor Relations Board in favor of unions by making illegal recess appointments in an attempted expansion of executive power. This move was reversed when all nine Supreme Court justices ruled against him.
With everything from Obamacare to its now-abandoned overtime and internship rules, the Obama administration worked all day, every day, for eight years to make traditional employment more expensive. Democrats, punished in three of the four subsequent elections, were left to wonder why it took so long to recover 2007 levels of employment, despite a constantly growing population. They might also wonder why employment is only now finally recovering 2007 levels among career-aged individuals 25 to 54.
Today, no one needs to wonder why things didn’t work for so long. But this November, they can prevent it from happening again.
