State of the Union in 2019: A Success Story Not Even Trump’s Harshest Critics Can Deny

With the shutdown over (at least for now), the State of the Union address is back “on.” When President Donald Trump takes the House podium on Feb. 5, you can count on him to take the opportunity to celebrate one of his greatest achievements: the economy.

It is booming by nearly every meaningful measure, and the president has every right to take a large measure of credit for it.

In November, unemployment dropped to its lowest rate in a half-century. African-Americans, Latinos, and women are thriving. Black unemployment was at 5.9 percent in May, the lowest ever recorded. Women’s unemployment recently reached its lowest rate in 65 years.

And, no, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it is not because people are working two jobs and a zillion hours a week. Employment statistics don’t work that way. It’s because more people have jobs. And more people are encouraged about their prospects of finding a job.

Labor force participation continues to rise because strong wage growth is causing Americans who were once too hopeless to even look for work to pour back into the job market. In fact, unemployment ticked up slightly to 3.9 percent (still historically very low) in December despite adding 312,000 jobs because nearly 100,000 formerly “discouraged workers” decided to start looking for jobs.

For good reason. America has created more than 5 million jobs since Trump entered office. And for the first time there are more job openings in America than there are unemployed people.

Industries that some said were dead and never coming back—like manufacturing—are booming. Manufacturing added 284,000 jobs in 2018, the most in a year for more than a decade.

A large part of these successes can be traced to the Trump-backed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In addition to sparking business investment and expansion by reducing corporate taxes, it also included a big tax cut for middle-class American families.

The average individual saw a tax cut of $1,400 while the average family with two children saw their taxes reduced by $2,917. In fact, Americans in every congressional district got a tax cut.

While mega-millionaire House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed a couple thousand extra dollars as mere “crumbs,” those tax cut tidbits have been a big deal for the average working American and the economy overall.

President Barack Obama—who presided over an average gross domestic product growth of 1.65 percent—proved himself no economic Nostradamus when he said:

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