By Floyd Norris “We should spend less time talking about race and more time talking about how to get people to work.”  Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, reacting to Donald Trump’s statements on Kamala Harris’s heritage. The Democrats think jobs should be their issue this year.  The flood of new jobs created during the Biden administration […]

By Floyd Norris  The aging of America continues, and it seems likely that this year there will be more people over 60 than people under 20 in this country, the first time that has ever happened. As recently as 1980, there were twice as many people under 20 – most of whom were yet to […]

Job growth in the United States was distinctly uneven for decades before the Pandemic hit, a fact that was emphasized this week when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a list of when each county in the United States reached its highest employment, based on data from 1975 to 2020. It showed that only 27% […]

The Pandemic recession lasted two months, the National Bureau of Economic Research decided this week—more than a year after the supposed end of the recession in April 2020.  That is the shortest recession ever, according to the NBER, which has a list of 34 recessions going back to 1857. But this recession made up for […]

Americans are more enthusiastic about the job market than they have been at any time in the past half century. And yet the official unemployment rate is well above what it was during comparable times in the past. The Conference Board, as part of its Consumer Confidence study, each month asks people what they think […]

How bad a year was 2020? During the year, the United States economy lost a net 9.4 million jobs — 6.2% of the jobs it had at the end of 2019. That is by far the largest annual decline since 1950. The years that included the financial crisis more than a decade ago had seen the largest losses of jobs, with a 3.7% decline in 2009 following a 2.6% fall in 2008. The year just ended was a little worse than the two of them combined.