But unemployment rate ticks up to 5.9 percent in June

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report is actually two distinct surveys — one of employers (the establishment survey) and one of people (the household survey). It is not uncommon for these two surveys to significantly diverge in their findings. 

In June, the establishment survey found that payroll employment rose by 850,000 in June, a huge number normally, but not surprising as many large states effectively reopened their economies much more fully last month. This increase reflects that belated decision.

The household survey, however, tells the story of what people are doing, with 18,000 fewer Americans saying they have jobs. The unemployment rate did not go down as one would have anticipated — instead, increasing to 5.9 percent. The percentage of people in the workforce actively employed or looking for a job remains disappointing. And while some try to explain this away due to the aging of America’s workforce, that factor can only explain a portion of the people who have not returned to the workforce post-COVID.

The phenomenon of people voluntarily leaving their previous job to begin looking for new employment accelerated by about 17 percent to 942,000 in June with the number of people on temporary layoff ‘essentially unchanged’ at 1.8 million since May.

What does all this mean? 

First, the economic crisis from state and federal-government reactions to the effects of the [coronavirus] has been over for about six months, and it is time to end all the special programs designed to provide special assistance. We know this because almost 1 million people who voluntarily left their employment to find better jobs tells us that a significant number of people are risking their livelihoods with the expectation that their next opportunity is right around the corner. This practical optimism is the natural outgrowth of the positive policies implemented by Donald Trump [in 2020], which saved many small businesses, successfully created the environment for the vaccines to be brought to market months — if not years — earlier than what would be normally expected, and discarded job-killing regulations to encourage recovery.

However, the massive spending that was put in place to negate the economically disastrous impacts of the virus in 2020, now threaten the recovery through creating a vicious wage/price inflationary cycle. It is time for the federal government to declare victory and end the war on fiscal sanity now by allowing the labor markets to naturally finish the job of returning to the 2019 Trump economy, the greatest in our nation’s history, by simply getting out of the way.      

Rick Manning is president of Americans for Limited Government (ALG). The organization says it is a “non-partisan, nationwide network committed to advancing free-market reforms, private property rights, and core American liberties.” This op-ed is drawn from a news release the ALG issued on July 2.

If you look at the polls of how Americans feel about the job Congress is doing, they’ve been remarkably consistent for the last few decades. The institution’s favorability rating, as measured by Gallup’s monthly surveys, hasn’t been above 50 percent since 2003. These days the favorability rating of Congress is in the low 30s — though that’s certainly better than the teens and low 20s it saw last year.

But this raises a question: How do we assess Congress? For many of us, I suspect the answer is simple: If it passes a bill we like, we think Congress is doing a good job; if it passes a bill we don’t like, we think it’s doing a poor job. In other words, we tend to judge Congress by how it’s performing on issues of concern to us. In a country as polarized as ours, it would be a minor miracle if Congress did enjoy majority support.

But there’s more that goes into how members of Congress are doing at their jobs than big-ticket legislation. Think, for instance, about so-called pork-barrel spending, which sends money to a project in a particular district or state. A lot of Americans don’t like it, since it smacks of insider horse-trading, but — and this is important — they tend to be just fine with it if the money is coming to a highway-repaving project or infrastructure improvement nearby. The truth is, legislators must be diligent in representing their districts and seeking projects for their districts and states. This is true for direct spending, as well as for bills that allocate money according to some formula; you’ll find intense battles within Congress over tweaking allocation formulas.

A lot of Americans also don’t much like that Congress is responsive to organized special interests such as business and industry, labor, professional organizations, farm groups, and veterans’ groups — you can come up with a long list. Watching members of Congress cater to particular special interests can be disconcerting, but in many ways, it makes the political world go ‘round — many Americans are members of one group or another with a presence on Capitol Hill. In a pluralist society like ours, with so many cross-cutting causes, it’s how the voices of both ordinary people and well-heeled groups get represented.

Over the years, I have also found that for many Americans, how Congress approaches the size and role of government plays a big part in how they judge it. I’ve had the experience on plenty of occasions of sitting down with a group of people and asking how they felt about the government. Almost invariably, they’d say that it was getting too large and needed to be cut. But when I went on to ask them what to do about it, I was struck by two things: they never volunteered cutting programs or spending that were helpful to them, and they always suggested solutions that required more government action to address. In effect, they wanted to reduce government by strengthening it.

It’s also fair to look not just at what Congress produces (or fails to produce), but also at how it goes about it. Congress has become too partisan, and there’s no denying that it has some bad habits, such as its reliance in recent decades on so-called omnibus bills. Power on Capitol Hill used to be more dispersed, with the various committees that dealt with specific appropriations bills offering multiple ways for legislators and interest groups to affect the outcome. These days, pretty much everything gets thrown into huge omnibus bills with hundreds of provisions, which tends to concentrate power in the hands of leadership and make it difficult for ordinary members to have an impact.

It’s issues like these that leave me disappointed that often, neither members of Congress nor most Americans pay much attention to institutional reform — to improving the workings of Congress so that they’re fairer and more transparent, are less partisan, respect the rights of both the minority and the majority, and represent the multiple voices of the American people. A Congress that can do that is worthy of respect — even if it doesn’t always produce legislation we like.      

Lee Hamilton, 90, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south central Indiana.