Now hiring. And hiring and hiring and hiring.
That, put plainly, describes America early in 2021. And while it’s absolutely worth celebrating, it would be unwise in the extreme to believe that we can now rest on our laurels and let the natural business cycle work its magic since all is clearly just fine and dandy. Because there’s still a very long way to go to get back to where we were pre-pandemic.
Friday’s jobs report from the Labor Department was a stunner, by any measure. The headline number -- the nation added 916,000 jobs in March -- bested even the rosiest of forecasts made by economic prognosticators. At the same time, the overall unemployment rate, obtained from a separate survey, dropped to 6%. We are headed in the right direction, with the economy cooking once again. To a point, at least.
Because the fact is, there are still fully 8.4 million fewer jobs than there were in February 2020, before the lockdowns and business closures that began with the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
In other words, if we added a half-million jobs each month for the next year -- no simple accomplishment, to be sure -- we’d still be more than 2 million jobs shy of where we were pre-COVID.
Which goes a long way toward explaining why President Joe Biden’s next major project, A $2 trillion infrastructure package, has been dubbed the American Jobs Plan. We can’t build roads and bridges and tunnels and improve our nation’s crumbling airports without putting lots of folks to work.
And it’s not just the White House that’s looking to infrastructure as a big driver of jobs. In her press conference last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, used the word “jobs” 21 times.
Democrats believe that their plan to pay for this part of the infrastructure bill by raising taxes on corporations will play well with a broad swath of the citizenry -- no matter their political leanings. Someone who has long been traveling along pothole-scarred roads on her daily commute doesn’t like hearing that there are giant corporations that don’t pay a dime in taxes. Blown tires and bent wheels aren’t a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. They are a problem caused by a situation that needs addressing, and the American Jobs Plan is a solid effort toward that end.
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Building back of economy, jobs show we are working in the correct direction (Editorial) - masslive.com
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