The White House is celebrating the most recent jobs numbers.
“The economy added 280,000 jobs in May—the strongest month of the year so far—as wages continued to rise and the participation rate ticked upward. We have now added 5.6 million jobs over the past two years, the best two-year job growth since 2000. Although the job market has made considerable progress throughout this recovery, challenges remain for our economy and there is more work to do. The President is committed to building on the positive trends through a comprehensive agenda to boost employment and wages for the middle class, including urging Congress to take important action such as opening new markets for U.S. goods and services through expanded trade, increasing investments in infrastructure, providing relief from the sequester, and raising the minimum wage,” White House economist Jason Furman writes in a blog post.
Furman points to have “key points” to make his case:
2. Manufacturing employment is up strongly as compared with the previous business cycle, while construction employment still has not recovered. …
3. More highly educated Americans participate more in the labor force at all ages, and, compared with less educated workers, their participation does not drop off until much older ages. …
4. The distribution of job growth across industries in May was highly consistent with the pattern observed over the past year. …
5. The majority of industries experienced stronger job growth in May than they have on average over the past year.
