After celebrating our Declaration of Independence from the British oppressor, we will return to work Monday having consumed 155 million hot dogs and, for some 41 million of us, bucked traffic jams, long security lines at airports, or storm-induced flight delays in order to visit family or whatever place attracts us in this huge country of ours.

The weekend began on a high note after a modestly strong jobs report on Thursday. Non-farm payroll employment, the “jobs” in the “jobs report,” rose by 288,000 in June, and the figures for April and May were revised upward by 29,000 jobs. The unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent—the lowest since September 2008—from 6.3 percent in May, and the number of long-term unemployed (more than 27 weeks) fell by almost 300,000, bringing the decline for the past year to 1.2 million, attributable in part to the increase in the incentive to job-hunt created by the expiration of the extension of unemployment benefits at the end of last year. June completed the first five-month run of better-than-200,000 job creation since the boom years of the late 1990s.