Blog | With ‘extraordinary’ report showing 257,000 new jobs, time for Tom Rice to stop complaining about ‘King Obama’
This morning we found out the economy produced another 257,000 jobs in January - this after creating 3.1 million in 2014, the best year of job growth since 1999.
That means we’ve gone a year with at least 200,000 monthly jobs created - the best since the Clinton boom.
We’ve extended the uninterrupted streak of monthly jobs gains to 59 months - the longest in U.S. history.
Even more, the final months of 2014 were much better than we were first told, with 329,000 jobs in December (we thought it was “only” 252,000) and an incredible 423,000 in November (we thought it was “only” 353,000).
There was also a spike in wages in January.
And don’t forget this all has been going on as the deficit has been falling, and falling fast, and our mid-term debt outlook has been improving as health care costs have been curtailed a bit.
Economist Justin Wolfers tweeted: “Just an extraordinary rate of jobs growth. The recovery we’ve waited all these years for is finally here.”
There is still a ways to go to get over the scars from the Great Recession. The unemployment rate ticked up to 5.7 percent from 5.6 percent as more people re-entered the workforce, the wage spike in January was welcome but still not enough, and we still need to push to a 5 percent jobless rate to feel really, really good.
But right now, the economy is moving in the right direction, meaning we all should cheer.
Read more about today’s report here.
In related news, earlier this week, Rep. Tom Rice held court to complain about President Obama’s budget proposal, with mostly boilerplate complaints and disagreements.
One part of it stood out to me.
He claimed that Obama’s budget and policies won’t do anything for the middle class and poor in the Seventh Congressional District and that Obama added $7.5 trillion to the nation’s debt.
Here’s what he said:
President Obama’s proposed 2016 budget expands government programs too much, which will only increase the area’s reliance on those programs and not help the nearly 58 percent of Horry County resident who are low income or lower middle-class, said U.S. Rep. Tom Rice.
Rice, R-S.C. whose district includes Horry County, is a member of the House Budget Committee. He said in a news conference by phone Monday that the president’s proposal — pegged as “Middle Class Economics” — doesn’t properly address the nearly 30 percent of Horry County residents who are considered lower middle class nor the 28 percent considered low income, according to statistics provided by the American Community Survey.
“I think the only way to get those people out of poverty, or the lower end of the income scale, is to expand our economy,” Rice said. “The president’s plan is to tax more and to add more government programs. That’s what he does time after time after time.
“He has never stopped campaigning. What he does is he offers more programs to more people and the problem is we can’t deliver on the promises we’ve already made. Social Security will be broke in 2030, Medicare is going broke, Social Security Trust Fund goes broke next year.”
Here is the context he left out:
Obama’s budget helps the poor more than the middle class
Considering that the Myrtle Beach area has the nation’s lowest average annual wages, Rice should welcome that kind of news, and probably would if he wasn’t so reflexively opposed to Obama.
Has Obama been on a spending spree?
And if Rice really wants to know about where our debt came, he would take a look at these facts:
How our national debt was created
The whole “Obama is an evil, big spending liberal” meme has been old for a long time, and with the economy producing jobs at this rate, it is even tired.
Hopefully Rice will stop complaining about what Obama isn’t doing for our area and tell us what he is.
This story was originally published February 6, 2015 at 9:02 AM with the headline "Blog | With ‘extraordinary’ report showing 257,000 new jobs, time for Tom Rice to stop complaining about ‘King Obama’."