RUSH: Let’s talk about this unbelievable United States economy, which Donald Trump said he was going to make happen. Well, no president can make it happen. What a president does is get the government out of the way. What a president does is get regulations out of the way. What a president does is get taxes out of the way. And that unleashes the natural yearning and competitive spirit, the innovation, the creativity of the American people, and it is paying off because the American people are the U.S. economy engaging in commerce.
The United States is now the envy of the world. And make no mistake about it, for all the Ilhan Omars and all of the Rashida Tlaibs and all of the Democrats who are trying to make hay out of what a problem in the world the United States is and how the United States is to blame for Venezuela, the United States is to blame for whatever, the United States is the envy of the world.
Unemployment is the lowest it has been since 1969 — that is 49 years — at 3.6%. This report is so good that the Drive-Bys can’t spin it. It was funny. CNN tried in a couple of ways earlier today to spin it, but their hearts were not in it. Not even they could pull this off. A number of other Drive-By Media operations have been trying to.
Let me tell you how good this is. And in a way, this is going to be a bit of a messaging challenge. The last time the unemployment rate was this low, most Americans had not been born. Do you remember the story we had earlier this week — it might have been late last week — from a Millennial complaining that they had never known and do not know prosperity?
While they’re living in the midst of it, they do not know it, they think. “We don’t know what prosperity is. We keep hearing about these great roaring economies of the past, but we weren’t even born.”
And they’re living in it! They are smack dab in the middle of it but that’s not what they think because they’re being lied to by Ilhan Omar and the rest of the Democrat Party, the Democrat National Committee presidential nominees and the Drive-By Media. But this is inescapable now. This is a hell of a stat.
The last time the unemployment rate was this low, most Americans were not even born: 3.6%. That’s as low as it has been since December 1969. Mr. Snerdley, what was December 1969? (interruption) Well, no, no… (interruption) Well, yeah, Nixon came into office, but it no, that … (interruption) No, December 1969… (interruption) “Oh, What a Night.” No. December 1969 is shortly after LBJ’s Great Society picked up, and all of this expansion of government. Note the last time it was this low, was right before the government’s massive welfare state was created.
I was 18 years old in December 1960 on the verge of turning 19. What this means is that anybody born younger than 49 years and four months ago has not been alive long enough to see an unemployment rate this low. But that doesn’t even get anywhere near describing this, and what an unemployment rate of 3.6% means. Do you know what the hourly wage has hit? It’s $27.77, is the average hourly wage in the U.S. economy.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are running around demanding a minimum wage of $15, and yet in the private sector where there aren’t any Democrat (to speak of) massive wage controls, the wage per hour is also at an all-time high. The stock market is going crazy, as you might expect. We have 263,000 new jobs in America and… Folks, this is remarkable. You know, every day we get some snippet of economic news that blows the doors off all previous records.
But it’s just a little snippet, and the snippets do not have individually a lot of penetrating power, talking about the American mind. This 3.6% unemployment essentially means that everybody seeking a job has one, and they’re getting record high wages. Everything the Democrat Party says was not possible, is happening. Everything they said after the Trump tax cuts, as part of their campaign in the midterms back last October and November — everything they were warning about — has turned out to be a giant dud.
So all you leftists out there screaming and demanding for government-mandated $15-per-hour wages? The free market is almost doubling it! Every single Democrat presidential candidate has trashed this economy and has offered policies that will turn all of these numbers around and negative. They have nowhere to go on the economy. It is so good, they can’t even say they have ways to make it better, which is what JFK did in 1960 coming out of the economic boom of the Eisenhower years.
JFK was talking about (summarized), “It’s time to pass the torch to a new generation. It’s going great; we think we can do even better.” This is so good that there isn’t a Democrat alive who wants it to be this good! That’s the bottom line, if you really want to drill down and get to the truth. They are not happy, and they’re gonna be doing their best to scrub this news away from the Drive-By Media. The Drive-Bys are gonna report it today, but they are not gonna make the issue of it that they would if it were happening under, say, an Obama or a Clinton.
They’re gonna bury it.
And it won’t be long before Barr and his supposed contempt of Congress… By the way, do you know that William Barr cannot be held in contempt of Congress? He can’t be… (interruption) What do you mean, you don’t know that? (interruption) Well, you know, why? He wasn’t subpoenaed. He volunteered to appear! He volunteered. He said, “Yeah, I’ll show up here for the Senate and the House,” two weeks ago, after the report. “I’ll show up.”
They didn’t subpoena him. They can’t hold him in contempt. He volunteered to show up and said, “After that show I saw in the House on Tuesday, there’s no way that I’m going to the Senate. Screw you guys,” or vice versa, the show he saw in the Senate. I’m getting ahead of myself. They can’t cite him for contempt — and Pelosi calling him a liar? This stuff… Get ready for all of this to finally start boomeranging.
But how did this economy happen, folks? How did it happen? It happened because Donald Trump was elected president, and there aren’t any two ways about this. The events, the policies, changes, the innovations, whatever you want to call them that have taken place here to create the atmosphere, the circumstances for this economy to explode are the direct result of the presidential election in 2016. Had Hillary Clinton been elected, we wouldn’t be talking about this economy this way.
We would still be talking about an economic decline and how the Democrats are the people to manage that, and you’d be told to lower your expectations. “Yeah, 1% economic growth? That’s about right, because that’s about fair, because the rest of the world isn’t the growing, and it’s not fair that we grow so much faster. So this is fair, this is equitable, this is equal,” we would be hearing, and you would be told and you’d be giving counsel how to adjust to the new era where the United States economy is no longer going to be the envy of the world.
“It’s not going to be the leading economy of the world, because those days are over and we never should have experienced them in the first place.” That’s what you would be hearing right now if Hillary Clinton had won. (chuckles) You’d be so depressed that the economic news would long ago have ceased to be (sigh) a thing you pay attention to. Donald Trump pushed a bunch of recalcitrant Republicans to pass his tax reform bill, and you remember all of the apocalyptic predictions that emanated from that.
And not a single one of those predictions, including what happened to the blue states and all that who were supposedly targeted, came true. Economists are admitting that those predictions fell flat. This has been an ongoing, massive cutting of regulations that has not been getting a lot of news, but these are regulations that stifle innovation, stifle entrepreneurism and stifle creativity. And they have slowly and surely been swept away, erased, and gotten rid of. Trump is also winning the war on the trade deficit.
The trade deals that Trump has made are starting to redound to our benefit. So that age-old political question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” You are; everyone everywhere is. There are no two ways about it. It’s simply stunning, and it is validating. It’s validating to all of us who know that if a little conservatism is applied to the United States economy and our culture and society — and a bunch of leftist impulses are kept at bay — that this economy can continue to grow and knows no bound.
We conservatives instinctively know this because of our instinctive trust in and belief in the American people, the people who make this country work — the people the Democrat Party thinks are incompetent and incapable of living on their own and of going through life making the correct decisions with their own money and how they live their lives in general. The Democrats do not trust them. The real truth is, the Democrat Party knows full well this is what happens when you combine market economics with freedom and limited government and getting it out of the way.
They know this is what happens, which is why they universally, consistently oppose policies that lead to days and circumstances like this. Larry Kudlow, one of Trump’s economic advisers, was on Stuart Varney today, the Fox Business Channel. He drilled down into some of the really high points of the jobs report today. The largest percent of growth in jobs is in blue-collar, hard-hat, middle-class jobs. And that’s, he said, where most of the wage growth is, the $27.77-an-hour wage now in America. This is an average number, of course.
These are the people that the Democrat Party decided to politically throw overboard back in December 2011 and, instead, make a party comprised of every minority group they can find or create or make and then combine all those people into one gigantic party of victims in need. It was November 2011; Thomas B. Edsall writes a piece detailing the Obama administration campaign theory, and that is to jettison “white, working-class voters,” which included unionized blue-collar and hard-hat middle-class workers. They have experienced a majority of the job growth. In that regard, let’s the grab into the number 3.
I want to just remind you of a little history. June 1st, 2016, PBS. A special: “Questions for Obama,” a town hall event in Elkhart, Indiana. During the Q&A with the members of the public who were there, a Carrier air-conditioning employee stood up and said (paraphrased), “O blessed Obama, I’m representing the steelworkers union, Local 1999. I’m trying to find out: What do we have left? All of our jobs are leaving Indianapolis. I see that you’re doing a lot of things, but in Indianapolis, there’s nothing there for us. I mean, what’s next? What can we looked forward to in the future as far as jobs, employment, whatever? Because all of our jobs have left or are in the process of leaving, sir.”
OBAMA: Some of those jobs of the past are just not gonna come back, and when somebody says — like the person you just mentioned who I’m not gonna advertise for — that he’s gonna bring all these jobs back? Well, how exactly are you gonna do that? What are you gonna do? There’s no answer to it. He just says, “Well, I’m gonna negotiate a better deal.” (sputtering) Well, what, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.
RUSH: The estimable Barack Hussein O demonstrating his complete, utter ignorance in matters of free-market economics, and his total willing ability to tell a guy who wants know, “When are our jobs coming back?” “Never. Your jobs are never coming back.” You wonder why Donald Trump got elected? People remember this. The president of the United States comes to where they live and work; they’re losing their jobs. They ask, “Mr. President, when are our jobs coming back? What can you do?”
“Nothing! And the guy telling you that you’re gonna get jobs back is lying. (impression) What’s he gonna do, wave a magic wand? Who’s he gonna negotiate with, huh? How does he make this happen?” The evidence is abundant. Barack Hussein O: Clueless. Barack Hussein O: No respect for what really makes the U.S. economy work, and that is the American people. He thinks a bunch of tinkering elites with levers and knobs and policies — unelected people in the deep bureaucracies of Washington — are the people that make the country. No. They’re the people that also have no idea what they’re doing, and they have just been told to stand aside for the last 2-1/2 years.
And you see what happens when Washington is pushed out of the way.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me give you a little bit more of the economic news. Women: Lowest unemployment rate since 1953. Women have filled 50% of all the new jobs created in the Trump economy. Now, I know you could call it equality, equanimity, whatever you want, but you cannot say that Trump is anti-woman. The lowest female unemployment rate since 1953. The Hispanic unemployment rate has also set a new record low, 4.2%. The economy created 263,000 new jobs, crushing expectations. Unemployment is at 3.6%, and Hispanic unemployment is at 4.2%. That’s not right, 4.2% of what? That That’s not right. I’ve gotta typo in here. “Hispanic unemployment breaks record low in April…”
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