Trump campaign uses jobs report to target Clinton

Donald Trump’s campaign used Friday’s jobs report to argue that Hillary Clinton’s policies would further stunt the nation’s economic expansion.

The Trump camp on Friday blasted the October employment data, calling the addition of 161,000 jobs and a 4.9 percent unemployment rate “disastrous” and an example of how the Obama economy hasn’t delivered good jobs or higher wages for American workers.

“Hillary Clinton’s policies would slow the already slow growth that made Barack Obama the only president in modern history to preside over an economy that did not have a single year that reached 3 percent economic growth,” the GOP presidential nominee’s campaign said in a statement on Friday.

{mosads}“She will raise taxes massively, increase regulations, impose the Trans-Pacific Partnership and open our borders,” the campaign said.

“Her policies will not improve economic conditions.”

Trump hammered the Obama administration’s policies, noting that more Americans are using food stamps and claiming that fewer people of prime working age — 25 to 54 — have jobs and that their wages are lower than “they were in 1973 because there are not enough jobs so wages are not rising.”

When Obama took office in January 2009, almost 32 million people received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, and that rose to a post-crisis peak of 47.6 million in 2013.

But that figure has gradually dropped, falling by about 2 million from April 2015 to April of this year, PolitiFact reported in July.

Trump also argued that the economy has produced too few jobs to keep up with population growth.

“At a minimum, the increase in the number of people employed should keep pace with the employable population. But it clearly has not under current policies. Instead, people become discouraged and leave the labor force,” the Trump campaign wrote in a statement.

Trump has vowed to create 25 million jobs and grow the economy at around a 5 percent rate, levels most economists say are nearly impossible.

Job growth only needs to average about 80,000 a month to absorb population expansion and lower the jobless rate, according to Jason Furman, head of the Council of Economic Advisers.

The most recent three-month average was 176,000.

Trump frequently says that about 94 million Americans are unemployed. But according to the latest Labor Department figures released on Friday, only 5.9 million of those people say they want a job.

Labor force participation, which has hit 30-year lows in recent years, is expected to continue a downward trend as the population ages and more people retire.

A strong economy will allow those workers to leave the labor market, which will lower the participation rate, economists say.

So there could be little that either Trump or Clinton could do to stem the tide of people leaving the workforce.

As baby boomers retire, the number of people who aren’t working could grow to about 101 million in 2020 and rise to 115 million by 2030, according to the Labor Department.

Trump also argued that since 2009, millions of workers in their prime earning years have left the labor force.

But the latest Labor Department figures show that participation of that age group hit 78.2 in October, eclipsing a key threshold, and hitting the highest level since October 2008, as the financial crisis was taking hold.

Job growth has slowed down this year as the labor market moves toward full employment. And with that tightening has come higher wages.  

The New York businessman said in his latest statement that “real hourly and weekly earnings are lower today than they were in 1973 because there are not enough jobs so wages are not rising.”

The latest report showed that hourly earnings over the past year rose at a 2.8 percent pace, the fastest rate since June 2009, when the recession ended.

In fact, wages are rising at the fastest pace in nearly 50 years as the labor market tightens.

“Real wages have grown faster over the current business cycle than in any since the early 1970s,” Furman said.

Real median income increased 5.2 percent in 2015 for middle-class Americans, which was the largest in percentage terms since the Census Bureau began tracking income in the 1960s.

In addition, the poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points, the biggest drop since 1968. Last year, there were 43.1 million Americans in poverty on the year, 3.5 million fewer than in 2014.