Kamala Harris is the big winner from US jobs report

Good employment figures are welcome news, regardless of whom they help or hurt politically. In August, the US economy added 142,000 Americans to the ranks of the employed — good news whether you’re a Republican, Democrat or that one guy who created his own country in the California desert.

Even if hiring fell short of the projected 165,000 new jobs figure, it was much better than the dismal 89,000 jobs added in July, a figure which was itself revised down from 114,000. Unemployment is down to 4.2% and wages are up 3.8% over the past year, giving workers relief from elevated prices. Now the Federal Reserve will move to cut interest rates, making it likely that America will escape inflation without plunging into a recession, thus sticking that mythical “soft landing” we’ve been hearing about for three years.

But with the election only weeks away, it is impossible to look at the recent employment figures without treating them as the latest twist in America’s national obsession with trying to handicap November’s results. Today’s jobs numbers appear to help Kamala Harris in particular. But that does not mean that she and President Joe Biden have necessarily done a stellar job as economic stewards. For one thing, it is basic macroeconomics that flooding the economy with trillions of dollars would contribute to inflation. At the same time, inflation was a global problem in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, which the US handled better than most.