The March JOLTS report dropped Tuesday morning and the Associated Press immediately informed the nation that the labor market “remained sluggish.” That’s a strange way to describe a report showing hiring surged by 655,000 to 5.6 million, job openings held steady at 6.9 million, and the quits rate ticked up — all consistent with the March payrolls report that showed 178,000 new jobs and unemployment falling to 4.3 percent.
So, why does it look “sluggish” to the Associated Press? It’s tempting to write this off as pure Trump Derangement Syndrome. There’s an overwhelming urge in the legacy media to describe anything happening in America as “troubled” or unhealthy so long as President Donald Trump is in the White House. The same outfits that downplayed the surge in inflation under Biden cannot stop talking about an “affordability crisis” now that Trump is in office.
But there’s something deeper going on here, something that even some supporters of President Trump have missed. The deeper error comes from measuring today’s labor market against the pandemic-era hiring bubble of 2021-2022, when job openings hit 12.3 million and hires routinely topped 6.5 million a month. That was an anomaly driven by unprecedented monetary accommodation, fiscal stimulus, pent-up demand, and massive labor reallocation. Nobody at the time thought those levels were sustainable or healthy. Using them as the baseline for what “normal” looks like is like calling a runner slow because he’s no longer sprinting after the starting gun.
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