According to data released Friday by The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), President Donald Trump’s low-regulation, lower-tax policies appear to be bringing renewed hope America’s working class. As the Washington Examiner reports, there’s a growing prosperity in the air for lower-income families that hasn’t been experienced in two decades.
Although opponents of the Trump tax cuts and other non-regulatory policies consistently say that only the very wealthy are benefiting economically from the current Republican administration, the reality is far different. According to the BLS data, unemployment at the federal level during December 2017 was at 4.1 percent, down from the 4.7 percent of one year before. When Trump won the the 2016 election, that rate was stuck at 4.9 percent.
But that tells only part of the story. Unemployment for Americans who didn’t finish high school stood at 7.6 percent in December 2016 it shrunk to 6.3 percent only a year later. The year 2000 holds a similar unemployment rate for this sector of the work force, when it was recorded at 6.5 percent.
What about workers who finished high school but didn’t go to earn a college diploma? Unemployment for this sector also fell from 5.1 percent in December 2016 to 4.2 percent one year later.
The jobs these workers have found are not insignificant either. The BLS reveals that fewer Americans are being forced to accept part-time work and are landing full-time jobs: part-time jobs fell by approximately 600,000 during the same December to December timeframe.
When more people are working full-time, fewer citizens are receiving some form of government assistance. Food stamps are just one example, with the number of Americans receiving this form of welfare dropping by 3.3 percent from September 2016 to September 2017. The BLS also shows that the number of Americans on Medicaid has dropped by 500,000 since the twilight months of the Obama administration.