Former U.S. Labor Secretary under President Donald Trump and economic analyst Eugene Scalia sat down with Fox Business’ Neil Cavuto to mull over Friday’s release of what another of the cable network’s anchors termed a “tepid” August jobs report, as only 315,000 jobs were added by U.S. employers in the month, compared to July’s gain of 528,000. The estimate for August, the network reported, was 300,000.
Scalia, the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, told Cavuto that seeing the labor participation rate “[budge] some” in recent months has been a positive thing, but it’s not the full story when weighed with another report about job openings:
That’s been one of the concerns coming out of the pandemic economy and really, going even farther than that, which is that we still have too many people on the sidelines, and that didn’t seem to be budging.
That’s budged some. About 790,000 people came [into] the workforce. So, what I think that we’re seeing, Neil, is that we’re still getting job gains from coming out of the pandemic economy. We still have jobs to add, but we didn’t see, I don’t think, any serious recessionary impacts either.
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I would also point out, as you know, that another important report that came out recently is the [July] job openings report. We still have 11.2 million job openings, while we only have about 6 million people who say they’re unemployed. So, there still is a hot job market out there — and we’ll continue to watch the impact on wages and, therefore, on inflation.
Later in the interview, the host pressed Scalia by asking whether this “good” report was, in the analyst’s estimation, something that retailers and other business leaders might worry won’t “stay this way” long term.
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Scalia agreed, adding that one issue is the sharp contrast between the current Biden “regulatory environment,” which burdens businesses, with what we had “during the Trump years”:
When I talk to executives and talk to my clients, as they look down the road, among their concerns are the regulatory environment. As you know….from our prior discussions, I thought that one of the reasons during the Trump years that the job market was just so incredibly good was that the president was loosening the burdens on the economy.
We’re in a phase now where President Biden is increasing regulatory burdens. You look at what the Securities and Exchange Commission is doing; you look at the Federal Trade Commission. The Labor Department is looking at a rule to make it harder for companies to use independent contractors. I know that those kinds of regulatory costs and hiring costs are on the minds of executives.
My colleagues have written extensively about similar burdens on California businesses and independent contractors from that state’s onerous AB5 law — which the leftists in the White House and Congress would love to unleash on the entire nation — either through unelected bureaucrats on Team Biden, or via federal law–if allowed to garner more seats in the House and Senate in November. Your vote is more important than ever before.
You can watch the full interview below, via Fox Business:
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