As the economy continues to recover from COVID and all the aftereffects, the jobless claims report has been one of the last things to rebound. In the latest numbers from the week ending February 26th, the US is now down to 215,000. While that sounds like a significant number, that still represents an 18,000 drop from the week before.
Meanwhile, the four-week average is only down by 6,000 to 230,500. People jobless aid is a far larger number at 1,476,000 as of Feb 12th. This was a 2,000 increase from the week before. Surprisingly that is the lowest it has been since March 14, 1970. The pending figures are estimating that the American workforce added 400,000 jobs in the month of February.
On the surface, everything looks great with numbers like these. People are getting back to work and that’s a good thing, right? Not quite. People fall off these figures for multiple reasons. Some reach the end of their eligibility and no longer have benefits that they can take advantage of. Others find ‘work’ but it’s not enough for them to make a leg up. More often than not, it’s just enough to keep treading water.
Given the fact that inflation is up 7.5% year over year – a 40-year high, the job market is just not in a good place. The American people need more growth to maintain the lifestyle they had last year, but employers aren’t increasing wages, and people are not getting the jobs they need to survive at this point. Swings like this are not able to last for long either.
In response, Biden has been pushing his Build Back Better (BBB) bill. This horrific plan does nothing but passes the buck along another 5-10 years for programs that just develop government reliance. This socialism in caring government clothing push needs to stop. While the hardcore progressives are following it like it’s the answer to all their problems it doesn’t address anything head-on. It just moves it on down the line.
Americans are tired of just passing the buck. We want to see our country be great again. We want to see Americans thriving in jobs that pay them a solid wage for a solid day’s work. No, minimum wage jobs are not designed to make a grand life. They are meant to instill the minimum levels of skills to maintain a job.
If you want more than minimum wages, you need to develop more than minimum skills. This is a concept that many associated with the progressive left don’t grasp. They also don’t grasp the idea that people need to have growth in their skillsets to grow their job title and their wages if they weren’t born into a big-name family. In those situations, odds are they aren’t starting at the bottom and earning their way up, and they aren’t appearing in these figures.
As a response to these figures, the Fed is looking at resolving some of the inflation problems by increasing rates, which makes homeownership a bit more difficult for many Americans. Especially those who would be a part of these figures. They are also kicking around the idea of releasing some of the strategic reserves, which would in turn drop gas prices by a small amount, but it’s not fixing the larger issue at hand. More than this, Biden needs to lift the limits on oil drilling. Let the American people get American oil for us to have American gasoline!!
