Growth is determined by a perpetual tug-of-war between entrepreneurship and government redistribution. When President Obama was in office, we believed incredible technological innovation would allow for economic growth in spite of Obamacare, greater redistribution, higher taxes and increased regulatory burdens. We thought it would be a Plow Horse Economy, and that things would get better if we did not grow government so much.
From mid-2009 through early 2017, real GDP grew at a 2.2% annual rate, with plodding growth in wages. It certainly wasn't an economic boom, but it wasn't recessionary either. For us, this meant we were shunned by both sides of the press.
We consistently repeated that the economy would grow faster with a better set of policies. So we became pariahs: liberal commentators didn't want to hear about the free market policies we thought would improve economic growth; while conservative commentators didn't want to hear about the economy being anything other than awful.
Now, thanks to the long-awaited corporate tax cut and deregulation, policies are more pro-growth.
In the past year, nonfarm payrolls are up 210,000 per month while civilian employment, an alternative measure that includes small-business starts-ups, is up 200,000 per month. Some say, "hey, that's not any faster than recent years" and that's true, but the longer expansions go, the tougher it is to sustain rapid job growth as the pool of available workers shrinks. In other words, today's job growth is more of an achievement than it was during earlier stages of the recovery.
More important is the acceleration in workers' paychecks. Average hourly earnings are up 3.1% from a year ago, the fastest wage growth for any 12-month period dating back to 2009. Factor-in robust gains in the total number of hours worked, and total cash earnings for workers are up 5.5% in the past year (even excluding one-time bonuses and commissions, like those paid after the tax cut was enacted late last year). That's the fastest growth in cash earnings since recording began in 2006.
Meanwhile, the Employment Cost Index, a different measure of workers' earnings, has also accelerated. Wages and salaries for private industry workers are up 3.1% from a year ago, the fastest pace since 2008. A year ago, in the third quarter of 2017, this measure of wages was up 2.6%. The ECI holds the weight of each industry and occupation the same over time, so the boost to wage growth is more likely to reflect faster pay increases for workers at the same job, rather than pay increases due to a shift in the mix of jobs towards those already paying higher wages.
