The good news is that the trendline shows "only" about 12% inflation right now. Inflation is just sky high no matter how you look at it.Īs usual with monthly data, though, September could be a fluke. If you look instead at the monthly data, inflation for the Euro area hit a stunning 15.8%:Ī lot of this increase is due to huge jumps in energy costs, but even core inflation is at 11.9% for September. For September, Eurostat reported annual inflation of 10%, which is bad enough, but that's year-over-year and doesn't capture their recent big increase. The Europeans are always ahead of us with their inflation data because they're willing to release "flash" estimates before the month is even over. And yet it seems like all of them are complaining. With the exception of hotels, there are no industries that are really hurting right now. The only real exceptions are restaurants and hotels, which are 300-400,000 short of their pre-pandemic numbers, and government, which is 500,000 short.Īnd there's only one (1) industry that's substantially below its pre-pandemic employment in both percentage and absolute terms: hotels. Total employment is half a million higher than it was before the pandemic, and this recovery includes virtually every individual industry. We're now recovering from another recession and there's no special reason to think employment should already be higher than it was at the very end of the last recovery.īut it is.
Keep in mind that January 2020 was the peak of a 10-year expansion cycle and represented full employment virtually everywhere. This got me curious: which industries are back to their old employment level and which are still struggling to restaff? Here's the answer: Many employers say they continue to struggle with large staffing shortages that built up during the pandemic and are reluctant to cut head count. Monthly payrolls have grown an average of 438,000 from January through August, nearly three times their 2019 prepandemic pace. Why is it that even though economic growth is flat, companies are still trying to hire more workers?Ī persistent economic puzzle is why labor is still so tight amid slowing growth. The Wall Street Journal, like all of us, is puzzled by the economy. There are no jackbooted thugs on our doorsteps. If the Supreme Court eventually rules against DACA, the Biden administration will obey the court and cancel it. So let's cut out the dictator talk unless you have serious grounds for it. They'll either approve DACA strike it down strike it down partially or send it back to a lower court. He'll probably lose that appeal and then move on to the Supreme Court. Conservatives kept on going, though, and now that Joe Biden is president he responded in the usual way: he appealed. The law then meandered through the court system, going up and down to the Supreme Court a couple of times but staying partially alive. Tyranny! But nothing stopped conservatives from suing-which they did-and they found a friendly district judge in (of course) Texas to rule in their favor and block an expanded version of DACA. The court then rules one way or another.Ĭonservatives screamed for years about DACA, the Obama executive order that gave dreamers (kids who were brought across the border to the US at a young age) an across-the-board approval to work, go to school, and avoid deportation. The Department of Justice backs them up with legal opinions. Presidents push the boundaries of their authority. And if it is, the Supreme Court will say so and the program will be revoked. Is the student loan program unconstitutional? I doubt it, but it's possible. This is the same schtick conservatives pulled on President Obama and it's equally ridiculous this time around. Nothing we have seen from the Biden admin in the last two months related to this executive order would’ve been different in a dictatorship. This is why we don’t have a dictatorship. “To go back to first principles,” he says, “this is why we have a Congress. These vast, sweeping changes are deeply out of line with our Founding documents. But he went ahead and willfully did it anyway.” His broader party know that he’s not allowed to. “I think that from start to finish, we are witnessing a president test the established legal order of the United States. “I consider this to be a constitutional crisis,” he said. Charlie Cooke really really doesn't like President Biden's student loan forgiveness program: