Stormy Daniels

UGCR

For The Washington Post

RUSSIA-US-DIPLOMACY-BASKET-COURT

Contributor

The Washington Post

(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-LAMOTT

Sonia Sotomayor,Clarence Thomas,John Roberts,Samuel Alito,Elena Kagan,Amy Coney Barrett,Neil Gorsuch,Brett Kavanaugh,Ketanji Brown Jackson,Michael Dreeben

Children holding hands

ONE TIME USE FOR OP-CARNEY KIDS 

FEDERALISTGALA

Four Dalmatian Puppy

other

People visit the site of the Nova festival, in Reim

Fake Electors Indictment Arizona

Israel Palestinians Campus Protests

US-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-EDUCATION-CONFLICT

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-SMITH-HIGHER-ED

Former U.S. President Trump's criminal trial on charges of falsifying business records continues in New York

POOL

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Narrative of Trump snoozing in court takes hold — much to his annoyance

Of course Trump intertwined the Trump Organization into his presidency

Trump might not go to jail, but this trial is a close second

Malaysia’s appetite for oil and gas puts it on collision course with China

Horse’s rooftop rescue gives flood-hit Brazil ‘something we could root for’

Russia unleashes new attacks on Ukraine’s Kharkiv border region

Google’s new ‘Find My’ device network is useful but a stalking risk

Apple apologizes for iPad ad after blowback 

Hack targeting hospital chain Ascension is impacting patient care

The urgent air defense lessons of April 16 

Are smartphones destroying childhood? It’s complicated.

In the campaign against Donald Trump, do the ends justify the means?

Nats win opener at Fenway behind Patrick Corbin and a lockdown bullpen

Jayden Daniels makes Commanders debut at rookie minicamp: ‘He’s a stud’

To get outs with his fastball, Trevor Williams put his ego aside

Bishop vanished. His species can still be saved.

In photos: Extreme solar storm brings spectacular northern lights

What actually happens within your lawn when you don’t mow it

The case for eating at Italian gas stations

Cruise ship drags dead whale into New York, prompting investigation

5 big travel lessons from an accomplished conservationist

Kristi Noem’s dog killing is pure Southern gothic

Claire Messud turns her family’s history into a masterpiece

Joseph Epstein, conservative provocateur, tells his life story in full

I used to dismiss my mom’s advice. Then I found a note she wrote before she died.  

Photos of his mom at lunch are a balm people didn’t know they needed

Dog hit by car loses leg, is adopted by firefighter who helped her

Miss Manners: Journalist posts on social media about a typo at another outlet

Carolyn Hax: Why is he trying to sabotage his partner’s very public success?

Ask Amy: What do I say about my former walking buddy who yelled at me?

Courtroom photo ban adds to hurdles for Trump trial journalists

Israel’s shameful ban on Al Jazeera

Checks, not sex, and other takeaways from Trump’s New York hush money trial

US-POLITICS-BIDEN

Andrew Kelly

Americans might be loath to believe it, but on paper, the U.S. economy is doing pretty well. So well, in fact, that we’re outperforming forecasts made even before the pandemic began.

The nation’s employers added another 199,000 jobs in November, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/08/jobs-november-unemployment/" target=_blank>U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported</a> on Friday. This is slightly better than Wall Street expectations. More significantly, it means that overall employment is now 2 million jobs higher than was expected by now in forecasts made way back in January 2020 by the nonpartisan <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/data/budget-economic-data#11" target=_blank>Congressional Budget Office</a>:

This is pretty astounding. When the pandemic hit, many economists feared it would leave lasting scars. After the 2007-2009 Great Recession, after all, it took a long time for the job market to heal and for displaced workers to regain their footing. Yet, somehow, following a once-in-a-century public health crisis that led to record-breaking job losses, American workers didn’t just recover all the ground they’d lost. They’re doing better than ever, better than had been imagined even before this traumatic global shock.

The labor market has outperformed pre-pandemic expectations on other metrics, too. For example, the CBO had expected <a href="https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm" target=_blank>the unemployment rate</a> to be 4.2 percent at the end of 2023. Instead, it’s near half-century lows, at 3.7 percent. It’s been at or below 4 percent for the last two years.

Relatedly, the share of American adults who are actively in the labor force (that is, either working or looking for work) is also slightly higher than the Congressional Budget Office had expected.

The job market isn’t the only front on which we have bested forecasts made in the Before Times. The overall size of the economy, as measured by gross domestic product, is <a href="https://twitter.com/jasonfurman/status/1729932969002070113" target=_blank>larger than it was expected to be</a> around now, as Harvard University economics professor and former Obama administration official Jason Furman has pointed out:

And the Congressional Budget Office isn’t alone in understating where we would be by now. The <a href="https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2023/10/10/world-economic-outlook-october-2023" target=_blank>International Monetary Fund</a> says that U.S. gross domestic product is higher today, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it had expected at the beginning of 2020. The IMF ran these calculations for countries around the world, and found the United States was an outlier in beating the organization’s pre-covid forecasts:

So why did well-regarded professional forecasters underestimate the strength of the economy? And how is it that jobs and GDP are doing better than they expected, even as inflation has been unmistakably worse?

To some extent, all these things are related.

Forecasters obviously did not anticipate the pandemic. They also did not anticipate the unprecedentedly enormous government response to the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a>.

When the public health crisis hit and displaced millions of American workers, policymakers swung into action with a swiftness and single-mindedness they hadn’t exhibited in prior downturns. They implemented unusually generous fiscal and monetary stimulus — unusually generous relative both to prior U.S. recession responses, and to the <a href="https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/imf-and-covid19/Fiscal-Policies-Database-in-Response-to-COVID-19" target=_blank>responses in other countries</a>. These choices to aggressively stimulate the economy happened during both the Trump and Biden administrations, to be clear.

Such stimulative measures helped get people back to work sooner, and avoided the long, painful slog back to normal that had followed the Great Recession. Hence, faster job growth.

They also massively stoked consumer demand, at a time when the productive capacity of the economy (i.e., companies’ ability to make and deliver the things their customers want) couldn’t keep up. Employers faced all kinds of shortages — of products, materials, workers — and consumers eager to buy stuff bid up the prices of whatever inventory companies actually had available. Hence, faster price growth.

More than three years after the pandemic began, those effects are finally fading. Price growth has cooled off a lot. Hiring is no longer showing the kinds of eye-popping numbers we once saw, but it’s resilient nonetheless. If you had asked me back in, say, January 2020 how Americans might feel about an economy with an “extra” 2 million jobs, unemployment less than 4 percent, and inflation just over <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=noSM" target=_blank>3 percent</a>, I probably would have guessed the public would be pretty content.

Well, obviously, that would have been the wrong call. People are still furious about the extra price growth they’ve already endured to date, and unimpressed by all that extra job growth. Maybe voters just don’t like surprises. Or maybe it’s human nature for people to view better jobs or pay as things they’ve earned, while painful price hikes are things inflicted upon them — even if both are, to some extent, two sides of the same coin.

Weidenbaum Center Award for Evidence-Based Journalism, 2010

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2011

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2012

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2018

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2019

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2020

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2021

Online Journalism Award, 2021

Princeton University

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. She frequently covers economics, public policy, immigration and politics, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism. Before joining The Post, she wrote about economics and theater for the New York Times. 

Catherine Rampell

washpost

How good is the U.S. economy? It’s beating pre-pandemic predictions

the-washington-post

FILE PHOTO: Signage for a job fair is seen on 5th Avenue after the release of the jobs report in Manhattan, New York City

Reuters

Editorials

Columns

Guest opinions

Cartoons

Submit a guest opinion

Today's Opinions newsletter

Opinions

Sign up for Democracy, Refreshed, a newsletter series on how to renovate the republic.

Opinion Columns

Opinion Columnists

Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for opinions on the biggest questions in politics

Washington Post Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.