Kevin Hassett on Jobs Report: If You Look at the Overall Economy, Things Are Really Booming

RUSH EXCERPT:
HASSETT: "Yeah. I think that one of the things we‘re seeing is that these jobs numbers are getting revised left and right. You can remember over the last couple of years, there were millions of revisions. And the bottom line is that if you look at the overall economy, then things are really, really booming. As an example, there are 83,000 construction workers building factories right now. That‘s a number that we‘ve never seen before. Initial claims for unemployment insurance are the lowest they‘ve been since world war two. There are more job openings than there are unemployed workers. So all these things that suggested the numbers should have been really strong. And when it didn‘t come out strong, we sort of dug in and we saw that the two things that made it negative, one of them was a reduction in government workers, that it was mostly teachers. At state. It states, you know, taking July off. And the other thing was that the FIFA ended. And so that we had a whole bunch of hospitality workers, you know, filed for unemployment in July. And so anyway, so you take those two out and you get back to what the consensus number was, about 100,000 job creation. And the point is, if that were in isolation, I wouldn‘t be carrying, caring about like throwing this or that on the side because it‘s a special story. But the fact is, everything else is so strong that I think that it makes sense that the consensus was about right."