Breitbart Business Digest Weekly Wrap: Trump’s Golden Age Sees Jobs Up, Feds Down, Foreigners Out
Welcome back to Friday! This is the Breitbart Business Digest weekly news wrap, our look back at the last seven days of the Golden Age.
This week the jobs numbers smashed expectations for the third consecutive month, lots of foreigners went home and lots of federal workers had to get a real job, factory output is growing rapidly, and manufacturing wages are in hot pursuit. Elizabeth Warren, a once-admirable legal scholar turned mad senator, frothed with fury because President Trump’s blind trust bought some stocks.
Let’s go.
Who Let the Jobs Out?
We regret to inform the legacy media that your favorite description of the labor market—low-hire, low-fire—is officially retired. We’re in a jobs boom: lots of hiring and very little firing.
The three-month moving average of monthly job growth moved up to 188,333 in May, according to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is a solid level of job growth by historical standards. The three-month average has been this high or higher only about 41 percent of the time in data going back to 1947. It is all the more impressive when we recall that we are more than six years out from the pandemic-lockdown recession trough. In fact, job growth at this pace, 73 months after a recession bottom, has occurred in only three prior postwar cases: the late Reagan expansion, the 1990s dot-com expansion, and the post-financial-crisis expansion.
The recent job growth looks even stronger when measured against the civilian labor force. Over the same three months, the labor force shrank at an average pace of 135,000 a month. Since 1948, payroll growth has exceeded labor-force growth by this much in only about six percent of three-month periods. Six years after a recession trough, the current payroll-over-labor-force spread is larger than in any comparable postwar episode.
Even when employment grew by just 10,000 on average a month last year, the “low-hire, low-fire” description was misleading. It was based on a model in which the growth of labor supply required hundreds of thousands of jobs each month to prevent unemployment from rising, a hurdle for which the economy often fell short. When viewed in light of a labor market breakeven rate that had fallen toward zero, the economy was actually hiring appropriately.
Now we’re far above the breakeven rate of job creation. We’re in a jobs expansion that is unprecedented in the post-World War II economy.
Fewer Foreigners, Fewer Feds
The foreign-born civilian noninstitutional population dropped by roughly 532,000 people over the past 12 months, according to Friday’s jobs report. The foreign-born labor force was also smaller than a year ago, though by a much more modest 94,000, and the foreign-born workers currently employed dropped by 107,000. That’s the immigration enforcement effect showing up directly in the BLS figures.
The federal government added 1,000 jobs in May after two consecutive months of shrinking payrolls. Let’s hope they are all in the Customs and Border Protection. Compared with a year ago, federal government payrolls are down by 275,000. Compared with the peak of federal employment in October of 2024, payrolls are down by 346,000.
This makes the net job growth we’ve seen even more impressive. It’s not being inflated by government expansion or cheap foreign labor. It’s a demonstration that the economy is reprivatizing and re-Americanizing.
No wonder the America-haters and the socialists are fuming.
House Music All Night Long
While the May payroll survey delivered the good news, something unusual happened in the household survey. It didn’t clap back but instead joined the party. Employers said they added 172,000 jobs in May, while the household survey showed employment rising by 149,000, unemployment falling, and the number of job losers declining.
In labor-data terms, this is practically a group hug. Recently, the two surveys have been spending at least part of each Friday glaring at each other from across the statistical cafeteria. In May, they sat at the same table, nodded politely, and agreed that the labor market looked pretty good.
The Golden Age of U.S. Manufacturing Is Here
“Donald Trump’s pledge to unleash a ‘golden age’ of US manufacturing sputters,” declared a headline in the Financial Times this week.
Sputters? Really? Maybe they don’t know what that word means — because we’re in the midst of the biggest wage boom for factory workers in over half a century. Weekly real wages for durable goods workers are up 3.5 percent, a pace not seen consistently since the post-war boom of 1947 to 1969. For context, real weekly gains averaged just 0.2 percent annually in the decade before the pandemic and were essentially stagnant going back to the 1970s.
Nominal weekly paychecks are up 7.4 percent year-over-year, hourly pay is up 5.3 percent, and overtime hours have jumped from 3.7 to 4.0 hours per week. On top of that, the One Big Beautiful Bill’s overtime tax cut means that take-home pay gains are even stronger than the gross figures suggest.
Real durable goods output grew at a 5.8 percent annualized rate in Q1, and productivity surged at a 5.5 percent annualized rate, meaning American factory workers are generating dramatically more value per hour, which is what makes the wage gains sustainable rather than inflationary.
And this is not coming at the cost of lower profits. In fact, in the broader nonfarm business sector, labor’s share of output fell to the lowest level ever—in data going back to 1947—in the first quarter of this year. That is providing the financial firepower that is fueling capital investment and improved productivity. Workers are seeing real gains, but those gains are being funded by productivity and profit expansion rather than by eating into margins in ways that might force price increases or set the Federal Reserve’s wage-price spiral Spidey-sense tingling.
The only things sputtering in our labor market are the folks who are outraged that the facts refuse to comply with their gloomy narrative.
What Is Elizabeth Warren Smoking?
Believe it or not, there was a time when Elizabeth Warren appeared to be a force for good. She was best known for a book focused on how the rise of two-income families had not done much to improve the quality of life of most Americans. We were working more but not getting ahead. Families had actually become more financially vulnerable despite providing the economy with far more labor. And she was a severe critic of the terms of the bailout of the financial system, correctly pointing out that the financial institutions had underpaid for capital injections of taxpayer money.
Then she became a U.S. Senator, a development which had exactly the kind of deleterious effects you might expect. This was on display this week in a Senate hearing in which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testified. Warren complained that Trump should be investigated for insider trading because his trusts bought shares of Bank of New York Mellon and Robinhood ahead of an April 6 announcement that the bank would be the financial agent for the Trump account, and Robinhood would be its brokerage partner.
“Both stocks, of course, have risen since then,” she sputtered.
So was there something nefarious about those trades? Did the Trump Account deal help Bank of New York or Robinhood shares? No and no.
Bank of New York is up around 15 percent since April 6. So is the S&P 500. Its big competitor, State Street, is up by almost 23 percent. Robinhood shares did a little better: up around 19 percent. So it beat the S&P at least. But it is underperforming its competitor, Interactive Brokers, which is up 28 percent.
In other words, there were no unusual gains from the Treasury deal. The stocks performed in line with the market and underperformed the closest comparable competitors. If the managers of Trump’s trusts are somehow cheating, they’re not very good at it.
The Original Declaration of Independence
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced his resolution for independence to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. John Adams seconded the motion. The resolution read:
“Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved. That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances. That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.”
Congress thought it of the utmost importance that independence be unanimously proclaimed. We must all hang together or we shall surely hang separately and all that. To ensure this, they delayed the final vote until July 2, when 12 colonial delegations voted in favor of it. But even still, the unanimity plan failed when those unreliable New York delegates abstained. (New York did get around to approving the resolution on July 9.) John Adams wrote that July 2 would be celebrated as “the most memorable epoch in the history of America.”
Which is not quite how things worked out. The explanatory document—the 18th-century version of an FAQ that we call the Declaration of Independence—hogged all the attention. And it wasn’t adopted until July 4, presumably because Congress thought it made more sense to declare independence on Independence Day.
Richard Henry Lee (1732 – 1794), the American statesman from Virginia who moved the motion that led to the Declaration of Independence. (Photo by MPI/Getty Images)
Perhaps completely unrelated to the lack of the public’s enthusiasm for celebrating the date of his resolution, Lee later became one of the most prominent opponents of the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. The Letters of a Federal Farmer that are traditionally attributed to Lee (although some scholars say it was another guy) were the counterpart to the Federalist Papers, warning about the dangers of concentrated power and arguing that a continental Republic was unsustainable.
He lost that fight and accepted nomination as one of two senators from Virginia in the hope of bringing about amendments to the Constitution. He proposed the Tenth Amendment in just about the form in which it was adopted, and subsequently became a warm supporter of Washington’s administration.
In autumn of 1792, after learning that he was being considered for another term in the Senate, Lee wrote a letter to the House of Delegates asking to retire. He explained that he had “grown gray in the service of my country” and suffered from “infirmities that can only be relieved by a quiet retirement.” Lee died at home in Virginia on June 19, 1794. By a twist of Providence, that day is now a federal holiday alongside July 4.
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