Curb Our Enthusiasm More signs of a strengthening economy.By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/curb-our-enthusiasm-1509651474
It’s important to remember that Thursday’s roll-out of the House plan for pro-growth tax reform is just the first step in a long legislative path. It’s important to remember that the current economic recovery, slow as it’s been, is getting very old and won’t last forever. It’s important to remember that health care policy remains unreformed. Stocks are not cheap and the federal debt is not small. Last week this column noted that it’s still too early to call Trumponomics a success. Still, recent news is making it harder to stifle a sense of optimism about the prospects for American revival.
The National Federation of Independent Business survey of owners of small firms shows another solid month of job creation in October and there’s more good news for both longtime employees and recent hires: “Owners are raising compensation at rates not seen since 2000,” says NFIB chief economist William Dunkelberg.
Long term, workers need to keep getting more efficient at making goods and services to earn raises. Across the economy, there’s good news on that front as well. The Journal reports:
U.S. workers boosted output per hour this summer at the best rate in three years, a sign that long sluggish productivity gains might finally be breaking out.
Nonfarm business-sector productivity, measured as the goods and services produced per hour worked, increased at a 3.0% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the third quarter, the Labor Department said Thursday. The gain was better than economists had expected and the largest quarterly improvement since the third quarter of 2014.
Last quarter’s increase could be skewed due to the effects of the recent hurricanes, but the broader trend points to firmer productivity gains after the measure trended near zero much of 2015 and 2016. Through the first nine months of this year, worker productivity advanced at a 1.5% annual rate—putting 2017 on pace to be the best year for efficiency gains since 2010, when the economy was first emerging from a deep recession.
Employers and employees are still waiting for the promised tax relief from Washington but it seems that other parts of the Trump agenda are beginning to have an impact. This morning your humble correspondent was fortunate to appear on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business program and also fortunate to be able to ask Mike Ryan of UBS about the impact of the Trump deregulatory agenda. Mr. Ryan, who is the chief investment officer for the Swiss bank’s wealth management business in the Americas, said that Washington’s new regulatory restraint is not only fostering business confidence but already helping companies improve earnings. Mr. Ryan added that the benefits go beyond the repeal of particular burdensome rules. He said that ”stopping the regulatory encroachment”—providing assurance that Washington is not preparing to spring expensive new surprises on the private economy—is a boon to business investment.
As of the start of October, federal red tape scorekeeper Wayne Crews found that Mr. Trump was off to an historic beginning. Mr. Crews measures the number of pages of new and proposed rules spewing forth from Washington. Last month he reported:
The Federal Register stands at 45,678 pages. Last year at this time, Barack Obama’s Federal Register stood at 67,900 pages. (Obama’s 2016 Federal Register set an all-time-record: 97,110 pages).
Compared to Obama at this time last year, Trump’s page count is down 32 percent so far in his first year.
It took a few years for Ronald Reagan to achieve his ultimate, one-third reduction in Federal Register pages following Jimmy Carter’s then-record Federal Register. So by this metric, Trump is moving much faster. CONTINUE AT SITE
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