|
Yesterday this column noted the solid job market reported by the latest NFIB survey of small businesses. Today brings more good news as job creation across the U.S. economy beats expectations in the latest report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Especially propitious for future U.S. prosperity is that private payrolls are rising while another category of labor continues to fall, as BLS notes: Federal government employment continued to decline in April (-9,000). Since reaching a peak in October 2024, federal government employment is down by 348,000, or 11.5 percent. Federal payrolls are now the lowest they’ve been since 1966. Perhaps not surprisingly, this significant reduction in the government workforce has coincided with robust productivity growth in the U.S. economy. Don Luskin at Trend Macrolytics points out that the combination of fewer federal workers and President Donald Trump’s enforcement of immigration law means that the total number of hours worked in the U.S. has
actually been declining lately. Mr. Luskin writes in a note to clients today: Immigration explained something like two thirds of the job gains from mid-2022 through early 2025, and now it has stopped, indeed it has been running to some extent in reverse. Over the last twelve months, it’s probably been responsible for something like 100,000 outright job losses through deportation that went unreplaced by new immigrants, and had to be made up by absorbing new native-born entrants into employment – only about 65,000 per month, given the age demographics. Yet as Mr. Luskin explains, people who are still working in the U.S. are getting a lot done lately:
|
