America's Talking - Episode 18: Job creation for September falls far short of expectations

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the monthly jobs report Friday showing the economy created far fewer jobs in the month of September than experts expected. Total nonfarm employment increased 194,000 in September, well below the Dow Jones estimated 500,000 jobs for the month. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to America in Focus, powered by thecentersquare.com. I'm John Spittaro, and this is the 39th week of 2021. Coming up, we'll take a quick look at one of the top stories from thecentersquare.com and later, executive editor of the center square, Dan McAulb, and DC reporter Casey Harper, will take a deeper dive into some of the top stories of the week, including Republican governors say they've been ignored by President Biden, reaction to the news that the FBI will be targeting outspoken parents at school board meetings, and a new poll suggests Americans are not happy with President Biden's massive spending plan.

Coming up right after this on America and Focus, powered by thecentersquare.com. Hi, this is Chris Krug, publisher of the Center Square. Our team produces the nationally read and recognized news stories at thecentersquare.com, the country's fastest growing, nonprofit, nonpartisan, state-focused, news and information site. We deliver essential information with a taxpayer sensibility through reporting that's easy to understand and easy to share with your friends and family. We know that you need information that allows you to understand what the governor and your local legislators are doing. Get the news that you need to know at thecentersquare.com. That's thecenter square.com,

the center square.com. Welcome back. Here are the top stories of the past week on the Center Square.com. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released a disappointing monthly jobs report for September on Friday. According to the report, only 194,000 non-farm jobs were added in September, well below the Dow Jones estimate of 500,000 jobs. The economy missed the mark in August as well, creating only 366,000 jobs when experts predicted 720,000. Despite disappointing reports in back-to-back months, President Biden claimed his administration was making progress. In total, the job creation in the first eight months of my administration is nearly five million jobs. Jobs up, wages up, unemployment down. That's progress. The national unemployment rate

did fall by 0.4 percentage points to 4.8. However, they remain above the pre-pandemic level of 3.5%. To read more about these stories and many others, visit the Center Square com. Now for a closer look, over to Dan McAulb and Casey Harper. Thank you much, John, and welcome back to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAleb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me today, as he does every week, is Casey Harper, the Center Square's Washington, D.C. D.C. We're recording this on Thursday, October 7th. We usually record America and focus on Fridays, but guess what? I'm taking Friday off this week.

What do you think about that, Casey? Well, I usually take off Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, so this week you're only taking off Friday. That's a good change. Oh, that's a nice one. Yeah. Well, as usual, lots to talk about this week. One of the biggest stories of the week occurred in Texas, not in Washington, D.C., when 10 U.S. governors congregated together on Wednesday to bring call attention to the

border crisis, and what they said is the Biden's administration's lack of action to alleviate the massive inflow of illegal immigrants at the southern border. Casey, what more can you tell us about this? Sure, you said, you know, one of the biggest stories of the week. I think this is really one of the biggest stories of the year. This has been a recurring thorn in the side of the Biden administration, and, of course, the people of Texas, Arizona, border states. You know, if you look at the data, even I think in August we had 200,000 illegal immigrants coming across the border that were encountered by border control every month, in the month of August, which is more than double than just a few months ago.

So this is been growing worse. It's gotten worse since Biden took office. The data shows that he hasn't really done much to address it. And the governors, especially in border states, but even now other. Republican governors like Ron DeSantis and others, and you mentioned some that were even at the border, they have taken upon themselves to make this an issue. A lot of Americans see this is a top issue. They see it as a national security concern, let alone the impact on entitlement programs and benefits that non-citizens receive. So I don't think Biden is going to get away from this anytime soon,

and these governors are rubbing into his face in a way. The gathering of the governors was hosted by, of course, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey. But the other governors who were there, not from border states, Nebraska was represented, Oklahoma was represented, Wyoming, Iowa, other states. These governors also said that it's just not a border state issue anymore. that because of the massive increases in illegal immigration and the lack of the federal government to close the borders, that their states have seen massive increases in things such as drug trafficking. Oklahoma's governor mentioned that fentanyl, in particular, that they've seen massive increases in the smuggling of fentanyl and drug overdoses from fentanyl in his and other states. So what they wanted to do, I think, was raise the alarm, raised national attention to the fact that this just is not just a border state issue, that this is a U.S. issue.

These governors and in total 26 governors wrote a letter to President Biden asking for action on the border and closing the border. And they said that the Biden administration has ignored them. they've also put together a 10-point plan that they said would help reduce the inflow of illegal immigration in the country. And they want Biden to take action on it, but he's not. Why would the president ignore these, what they say are very real concerns? Yeah, I mean, this is a very personal problem for a lot of people, but I think the answer is kind of political. And it's just that the vast majority of the president's party has no interest in striking any kind of deal with Republicans on this issue of really, you know, building a wall or doing anything significant to stop the flow of illegal immigration. Many, you know, in the president's party see it as a good thing.

They're welcoming people. Say we should have more people coming over and we should be doing more to take care of them to make it easier for them to come. I mean, you know, you have Democratic members of Congress welcoming people. Now, that's not necessarily been the official stance from the White House. Vice President Colin Harris is, you know, famously or infamously this year said don't come to certain illegal immigrants. But that's really not the sentiment across his party. And I think in his mind, you know, he's fighting tooth and nail right now to get $4.5 trillion in federal tax and spend legislation passed. But all the while, the southern part of the nation is forcing him to divert resources.

and attention to what is a very real problem, but it's just a problem he hasn't solved and it's only gotten worse since he took office. And I think he's really a lose-lose for him. He's not going to be able to do much substantively to address it without angering most of his base. So he just wants to focus on other issues. So the vice president saying don't come

and actually taking some action, preventing them from coming, are obviously too completely different things. Among the items in the Republican Governor's Ten Point Plan includes a reinstatement of the remain-in-Mexico policy that essentially requires immigrants who file for amnesty to try and enter the country legally to return their homes while these amnesty hearings are ongoing. It also includes finishing the southern border wall with Mexico, something that's that, of course, was a primary focus of President Donald Trump's campaign.

And the third is a reinstatement of Title IV2 health restrictions. Of course, under the Biden administration, we've talked about this in many blue states in particular. There are still restrictions in place to slow the spread of COVID-19. But in many of these cases, one, many of these migrants who are crossing the country illegally aren't being tested. And in the case of those that are being tested, more than 20% of them are testing positive for COVID-19. So that's causing public health concerns under Title 42. If a migrant comes to this country and tests positive for COVID-19. They're supposed to be immediately deported back to their home countries.

That's not happening under the Biden administration. So many solutions that previously were in place that these governors are asking for are no longer actions that are being taken under the Biden administration. And then, of course, you have the drug smuggling and the human trafficking issue. So, you know, you can agree to disagree on whether we should be a welcoming country for these migrants. But there are other very real concerns here that are impacting communities across our. country. Yeah, that's right. And then one more thing to add to that would just be that ICE, which is responsible for capturing and, you know, deporting illegal immigrants in the country, the arrests from ICE have dropped precipitously this year because President Biden basically changed some of the rules and

regulations around what is required to make an arrest. And so not only is it what's who's allowed in, it's what happens once they get here. But I really think this is just a fundamental ideological split. I mean, it's like trying to reach a compromise between on climate change or something when one side doesn't believe in climate change and the other does. You know, how are you going to reach a compromise? You know, how are you going to reach a compromise when one side thinks we should have more people coming in and one side thinks that we should probably limit the number of people coming in? I think that's really, it's really ideological. And all these other policies are just downstream of that dysfunction. And even though we've had this massive influx,

of illegal immigration, which has caused these other problems, other criminal acts. Even though that's happening, the director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security last week issued a memorandum saying just entering the country illegal is not an arrestable act. So they are not arresting immigrants just for entering the country illegally. As you mentioned, there's been hundreds of thousands of cases by month, more than well over a million cases where border security agents have detained illegal immigrants, only to release them into American communities. And that doesn't count the ones we're getting across that aren't being confronted by border control. So certainly a story that we're going to continue to follow.

But let's move on to our next story. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Tuesday that he's directed the end. FBI to look into parents who have been post-testing at local school board meetings across the country, saying they've been intimidating school officials over issues such as COVID-related restrictions over critical race theory being taught in schools. What do you make of this? And what's the pushback been from Republicans? Right. Yeah.

I mean, sometimes things sound good to bureaucrats in a boardroom. But once it comes out to the public, it doesn't come across so well. And Americans get pretty upset. I think this is one of those moments, you know. You've probably followed or at least seen some of the pretty raucous protests at local school board meetings. These have been over things like critical race theory. There's been debates over transgender pronouns. And, of course, you know, COVID masking and those kinds of policies.

school boards have become a real battleground where a lot of these national topics that are just ethereal actually get put into place. So you may have a lot of thoughts and feelings on COVID, but a lot of times it's not going to impact your life until it impacts your kids' school. I mean, critical race theory, you might oppose it or support it, but really not impacting your day-to-day life until your kids are either being taught about it or not being taught about it. So the school boards have become a battleground for a lot of the national political anger and different things. There's been, I think, one injury that I know of. It was in Virginia. You know, and of course that's serious. We don't want anyone to get hurt.

But I think the fact there's no, you know, it's not like there's been mass shootings or, you know, real, significant, you know. Any kind of violence, really. Or threats or that kind of thing. There's just been threats. I guess, you know, the FBI says there's been, Merrick Arland says there's been threats against schools. officials, but to roll out the FBI in such a significant way and say they're going to be tracking, monitoring, targeting, this, I mean, of all the things for the FBI to be involved in, I think this really took people back. And lawmakers and all kinds of officials are really pushing back

on this and raising the alarm. Yeah, there's certainly First Amendment questions that are raised over this. Parents have a right to attend these school boards or public bodies, taxpayers pay for school districts, pay for teachers and administrators and others' costs of schools. They have a right to know what's going on in their school. And particularly during the COVID era, when schools aren't today what they were like in just early 2019, early 2020, with many schools requiring students wear masks, things like that. Critical Race theory, of course, is a controversy. topic. So parents do have a right to know what's going on. Now, they don't have a right to threaten school board members or school administrators or school teachers, but they have a right

to express their displeasure with these new policies. And the FBI, boy, that just seems like government overreach. Now, if there have been threats, if there have been things that rise to that nature, that law enforcement should be involved, but does it rise to federal law enforcement getting involved? That just seems like it's a local police matter to me. Yeah, and I think the thing that always concerns people is when it seems like federal law enforcement is being politicized. It's mostly one side that's protesting at these school board meetings. It's mostly conservative, it's mostly right-leaning folks who are getting upset, who are, I mean, I'm not. I'm watched the videos of these things and they're pretty, they can be pretty loud to be very aggressive,

but it's a lot of shouting, it's a lot of yelling, you know, it's not a lot of punching or, you know, throwing things. I mean, it's, it's just really loud and people are upset and they're shouting. But, so there's kind of a level of aggression to it, but it's coming from conservatives. And so, you know, what it seems to many to be a very thinly veiled attempt to silence, the words you're hearing from Republican lawmakers or this is an attempt to intimidate. And that's a big word to intimidate, to silence, really to scare people into complicity, to silence, to submission. And people don't like the idea that the FBI might be getting politicized. There's, you know, you could, I don't love to do what aboutism, but you could imagine.

And you do remember when President Trump talked about and had federal officials at, you know, Black Lives Matter rallies. Or if you could imagine if President Trump had. announced the FBI will be closely, you know, tracking, monitoring all these BLM rallies and going there, you know, there'd be a lot of outrage to say people would say it's politicized and that this is an attempt to shut down BLM, right? It'd be the same thing. And so it's not really surprised that this is the reaction that Biden is getting. And these school board meetings generally don't attend, don't attract large gatherings of parents or local constituents. prior to what prior, in particular prior to this year and prior to COVID-19 restrictions,

just like local elections like these don't generally attract large percentages of voters turning out to them. What might be a good thing from this is, well, you know, presidential elections, often you'll see turnout of 60, 70, 80 plus percent. Whereas in these local elections, particularly school board elections, and if you get 10 percent voter turnout, that's an increase from the last election. So there's new advocacy, this new trend of people showing up to school board meetings, you know, what would be a good thing if it shows up in local elections, school board elections, and people show out and actually cast votes at these

things? So we'll be monitoring this story, see if that actually does happen, if this new increase and interest in school board meetings, it turns out, turns into new interest in school board elections, but we'll have to wait and see for that. Let's move on. Casey, new poll released this week. Americans say they oppose tax hikes and increasing the national debt and congressional spending plans. What more can you tell us about this? Actually, today, when we're recording this Thursday, It's just been announced that McConnell and Schumer and Senator Schumer have reached a deal to raise the debt ceiling. So that's going to give a little bit of, take a little bit of pressure off the Democrats. It's a temporary, really an olive branch from Senator McConnell to give the Democrats a little bit more time to figure out how they're going to raise the debt ceiling on their own, which he's insistent that they do and which is honestly normal for the minority party.

But, you know, this poll is really interesting. And as you said, it found that Americans opposed tax hikes and raising the national debt when it comes to these congressional spending plans. Of course, Biden has proposed $4.5 trillion in spending across two bills. Neither have been enacted into law. And both have been in a very dramatic debate and votes or near votes in recent days. What's interesting is while Americans are more split and actually sometimes in favor of individual elements of Biden's plan, they overall oppose any new taxes or going into debt to pay for it. And so I used to put it in another way.

They are okay with free stuff as long as it's actually free. And really, unfortunately, it's not. So, you know, something like universal pre-K, if you could actually have universal pre-K without raising taxes and without raising the national debt, then they support it. Now, the only way to do that is to cut spending elsewhere. Then, you know, if you pull people on cutting Medicare, you know, that's not, the polling's not. not going to be favorable. So it's kind of a question of where that money's going to come from. But where it really hones in is the determination of how much this bill actually costs. Of course, the tax increases are important. But President Biden has already laid the groundwork in this by trying

to make the argument that the bill costs $0 and that it's offset by tax increases. And honestly, the experts and analysis on this have really just shown that's not the case. There could be changes made to the bill to make that the case. But as of now, it's not upset by the taxes and it doesn't cost zero dollars. So I guess I'll give you the numbers. I found 71.5% of Americans say they're less likely to support Biden's proposed $3.5 trillion budget bill if they know it increases taxes and gross the national debt. And independence are really strong on this. And actually, even half of Democrats don't want to raise the debt or any of this. So you can also see why nobody wants to be the one to raise at that ceiling, which has been a big issue the last few days.

Some of the tax increases we've talked about on this American Focus podcast in the past, but some of the tax increases, whereas President Biden says he would not raise taxes on anyone who earns below $400,000 a year, but some of these proposed tax increase would have big impacts on middle income people and lower income people. We've talked about the proposed taxes on tobacco. We've talked about how inflation itself is a backdoor tax increase on Americans. The $3.5 trillion dollar, quote-unquote, human infrastructure bill would also lead to more increased inflation because part of the Biden's plan includes

including more money on individuals and includes increasing the corporate tax, which leads to consumer price increases. So it makes sense that Americans do oppose these

increases. Right. I mean, I like to say that taxes have consequences, right? And, you know, they make goods more expensive. They can lead to less hiring, and they can, you know, lead to less growth of companies, less investment. It has, you know, effects across the economy. I can raise energy costs. You know, you tax an energy company, as we've talked about this podcast,

you can expect the energy prices to go up. So it's going to be a tough sell for Biden. And it's been really interesting. He's really running out of time because presidents have a unique, we've talked about this too, but presidents have a unique window in their first year of office where they can really get a lot of things done, get things passed with the inertia and the momentum. from their election. But the longer it takes to get those things passed, the less momentum you have and the less you can say, I have a mandate from the American people to do this and this. So he got his $1.9 trillion COVID bill passed pretty early on in March.

But getting anything more substantive passed legislatively has been really difficult. And even his infrastructure bill, which had bipartisan support, is now being held hostage by some of the progressives in Congress. And, you know, I would say it's probably more likely than not that that passes, but it's really not a slam dunk by any means. And where are we with both the infrastructure package and the $3.5 trillion human infrastructure bill, as Democrats like to call it? Any updates this week? Any progress on either of those bills? The big update has been the debt ceiling getting raised because that has been, that has taken priority over. over both bills because if the debt ceiling wasn't raised, there's a real chance that the federal

government could default on its debt payments, which would be an economic catastrophe, it raised interest rates. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said we would go into a recession if we defaulted. We're, you know, a couple weeks out from doing that. And if you remember just in recent days, we also had to keep the government from shutting down, which is separate from the debt ceiling. Keeping the government from shutting down, it's keeping the government from shutting down is allocating funds to keep certain federal agencies running. Raising the debt ceiling is necessary to make sure that we have enough money to actually pay our, quote-a-quote credit card payments and pay our credit card bills so our credit score doesn't go down

because if our, you know, I'm using kind of colloquially language here, but if our credit score goes down, it's really bad for the economy as a whole. So they've knocked those two things out. Now they do face a deadline pretty soon to have to raise the debt ceiling again, but they bought themselves some time. Infrastructure hasn't changed much. You essentially have Senate Democrats like Kirsten Cinema and Joe Machen, who have said, we're not voting for a bill that costs $3.5 trillion.

That's outrageous. It's too expensive. But we will support a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The more progressive members, Democrats, are saying, we only voted for this infrastructure bill because we had the understanding that it would be passed alongside this larger three. $3.5 trillion bill. So what's probably going to happen is they're going to have to whittle down the $3.5 trillion bill,

but whether they can reach a number that pleases the moderates and progressives, it remains to be seen. Let's move on. Casey, time for just one more story. We seem to talk a lot about bad news, but there's actually a little bit of good news this week. Oh, no. I know. I know.

I can believe it. The U.S. Department of Labor, as it does, Thursday released new unemployment data this week. And it showed for the first time in several weeks that new unemployment claims actually dropping. Tell us more. Yeah, this is good news. And it's also really interesting in the larger kind of scheme of the state of the American economy. So the Department of Labor released weekly unemployment data. They released this every week. And this week, it showed that people who filed for the unemployment for the first time, it dropped down to 326,000 for the week ending October 2nd.

So that's a decrease of 38,000 from the week before. So some of the highest states that are experiencing the most unemployment are like Illinois, where you're based out of actually the highest at 4.2. This is a little bit different than normal unemployment. But Illinois, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, Nevada are the top state struggling. But overall, we saw this drop in unemployment this week. Now, in recent weeks, the last few weeks, we've actually seen unemployment rise. Now, of course, we want unemployment to be low.

But another reason this really matters is if you follow our podcasts or at the cintersquare.com, you'll know that we've been covering these federal unemployment benefits, which have been really a big topic. So the summary, the short version is that Congress passed $300 weekly unemployment benefits because of COVID. And they've been going all year. many governors felt that they were contributing to elevated unemployment despite widespread job availability. So there's lots of jobs and lots of unemployed people and people that were unemployed weren't going back to work. So they said, oh, I bet it's because of these $300 payments. Well, the payments expired at the first week of September.

So it's really time to see if that was true. Will people go back to work? The first few weeks, they didn't. And so we kind of raised questions, even, you know, all economists, you know, just registered story today quoting Goldman Sachs who's predicting that unemployment would drop but it hadn't been happening but now this week unemployment did drop now which suggests that all these predictions that unemployment will lower go down because of the benefits being gone that those can be true but I think we'll need a few more weeks to really know for sure because if we come back on here next week

and unemployment rose again it's really going to be like man what's what's going on who's right or the analyst wrong so I think it's going to take a few more weeks but this does seem to suggest that the economist's predictions were accurate, at least right now. Right. This was the first drop in a few weeks. So that's not a trend. So we'll have to continue to monitor what happens week in and week out with unemployment benefits. And if this trend does continue. And 36,000 is a pretty significant drop, I will say. It's not a small drop. But yeah. Right. So if this. Crime does continue. Certainly that's good for the U.S. economy, but also it actually could mean that this elimination of the supplemental unemployment benefits, federal unemployment benefits, on top of state benefits, ended a few weeks ago.

Republicans are tied the continued increase in unemployment benefit claims to these supplemental federal unemployment benefits. It would be interesting to see if that trend continues, but we won't know that for at least a few weeks. That's right. All right, that's all the time we have this week for America and Focus podcast, Casey.

Thank you for joining me. Once again, we'll be back next week. We'll talk to you then.