It’s hard to overstate just how good recent economic numbers have been.
On Friday, we learned that job growth is still solid while unemployment remains historically low. I think it’s safe to say that Donald Trump’s 2020 prediction that a Joe Biden presidency would mean a “depression” — a claim he’s now repeating by predicting a “great depression” if Kamala Harris wins — didn’t come true.
A week earlier we learned that inflation has continued to decline and is now more or less at the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. This success has defied the view, held by many economists just a couple of years ago, that disinflation would require years of high unemployment.
So does this good news vindicate Bidenomics? I would say yes — but not quite the way you might imagine.
Before I get there, a word on the inevitable attempts by Trump and those around him to deny the reality of the good news. Some, like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, are simply claiming that the numbers are “fake.” Aside from slandering some of the hard-working staff members at federal statistics agencies, such assertions ignore the fact that independent, private estimates also show strong job growth and low inflation.
The main response from MAGA world, however, seems to involve insisting, as Trump did in a recent interview on the Fox Business channel, that “the illegal migrants coming into the country are getting the jobs.”
Claims like this get some surface plausibility from the fact that employment among native-born Americans has in fact been flat or declining in recent years. But this isn’t happening because the Americans born here can’t find jobs; the native-born unemployment rate is only 3.8 percent. It’s happening because baby boomers are getting older, and more and more of them are reaching retirement age and leaving the labor force. This is, by the way, something many economists, myself included, have been writing about for a long time.
