by Steve Cortes
The booming U.S. economy is proving the Democrats wrong yet again — liberals keep predicting a recession, but businesses just keep on hiring.
According to the recently published data from the Department of Labor, nonfarm payrolls surged by 304,000 jobs in January, nearly doubling the 165,000 jobs that so-called experts predicted in light of the government shutdown.
“The job market weathered the government shutdown well. Despite the severe disruptions, businesses continued to add aggressively to their payrolls,” Moody Analytics chief economist Mark Zandisaid Wednesday in anticipation of the report. “As long as businesses hire strongly the economic expansion will continue on.”
Although the unemployment rate rose slightly — from 3.9 percent to 4.0 percent — that was partly because the labor force participation rate also increased to 63.2 percent, its highest level since President Trump took office.
The strong private sector growth in January directly contradicted the doomsday forecasts of Democrats and the mainstream media, who spent weeks arguing that the government shutdown would negatively impact the economy.
“It’s Christmas Eve and President Trump is plunging the country into chaos,” then-House Speaker nominee Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement last December.
Their deliberate fear mongering was amplified by the mainstream press and TV news networks, which saw the theme as a convenient way to detract from the President’s stellar handling of the economy while attacking him for demanding that Congress provide funding for border security.
An analysis by USA Today in December, for example, argued that the “shutdown more broadly adds to a climate of uncertainty spawned by the market’s big drop since late September, the Trump administration’s trade war with China, rising Federal Reserve interest rates, and the economy’s expected slowdown next year.”
Even though the government shutdown dragged on for a record-setting 35 days, these grave warnings about its impact on the economy proved to be just as inaccurate as every other doom-and-gloom economic forecast made by President Trump’s critics over the past two years.
Some of the naysayers are blinded to reality by their intense hatred of the President, but others are simply unable to grasp the implications of Donald Trump’s pro-growth, America First agenda, which has upended the conventional economic assumptions developed during the eight years of abysmal growth under President Obama.
Remarkably, the unemployment rate has been hovering at or below 4 percent for almost a year — even reaching a 49-year low in November. Meanwhile, GDP growth surprised even some of the most optimistic economists, with 2018 likely to be confirmed as the first full year since 2005 that America has posted a 3 percent growth rate once the final reports are issued.
This stunning economic turnaround was no accident. President Trump is a strong believer in the power of the free market, and he made it a priority to unleash the full potential of the private sector with historic tax cuts and long-overdue deregulation.
The President also ended decades of complacency on international trade by aggressively challenging the rampant abuses perpetrated by America’s trade partners, protecting U.S. workers with tariffs while negotiating reciprocal trade agreements that restore a level playing field.
Thanks to President Trump, the U.S. economy has become a true juggernaut of wealth creation, one that is capable of withstanding even China’s best efforts to smother it. Contrary to the fake narrative peddled by the mainstream media, business is booming in the Trump economy.
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Steve Cortes is a CNN political commentator and a member of President Donald Trump’s Hispanic Advisory Council.
