Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Tales From Two Cities

Fact: On 5/4/18 the Labor Department announced that the jobless rate fell to 3.9% from 4.1% a month earlier, hitting the lowest level since December 2000.

On 5/5, this was the lead story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal out of Washington, D.C. with the headline “Jobless Rate At 17-Year Low.” This article was very objective detailing a multitude of grafts and statistics. It was positive referring to this record low unemployment as being “the result of a historically long jobs expansion that shows little evidence of slowing.” It detailed that employment rose in industries including manufacturing, health care, and accounting. There continues to be a plethora of positivity in this article, including that the “report suggested that there are more workers available for full time jobs than the main unemployment rate suggests.”

Now let’s shift gears to our local paper which typically finds it difficult, more like impossible, to say anything positive about Mr. Trump. First of all this story was in section C of the newspaper, albeit on the first page of section C., and it read more like a misplaced subjective opinion piece masquerading as news. The headline to the story was factual, “U.S. Jobless Rate Slides Below 4%,” but with a subtitle of “Usually good news, the reason is the labor force shrank for 2nd month.” It’s difficult to put a negative spin on such good economic news, but Jim Puzzanghera, the author who writes for California News Group (? Los  Angeles ) hammered away how this record unemployment rate was really not good news at all, and of course no credit was given to President Trump’s policies. Even though this downer of an article did mention that the unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos were at the lowest level since the Labor Department began tracking these figures in the early 1970s, there was no praise and no congrats for this accomplishment.
To me the contrast of these two articles, both supposedly reporting on the same data is astounding! It’s very hard, if not impossible, to conclude that this decline in the jobless rate is not a direct result of President Trump’s policies and the recent tax cuts. Kudos to the President and the Republicans, and a thumbs down to the obvious slant of Mr. Puzzanghera who does his best to try to convince his readers that this good news is really “bad!”

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