So our tax burden plummets, and our job growth skyrockets. Think that’s mere coincidence?

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In welcome pre-holiday news last week for everyone except those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Labor Department announced that job growth exceeded all expectations last month, as U.S. employers added 266,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate plummeted to a 50-year low of just 3.5%. 

Just as significantly, employee wages jumped by an impressive 3.1% from the previous year. 

Meanwhile, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced in its annual Revenue Statistics report that the U.S. tax burden fell more than any other nation’s following President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts: 

U.S. tax burdens dropped by the largest amount among developed countries in 2018, and the U.S. now has lower taxes than all but three countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the report said Thursday.  Driven by the federal tax cut that Congress and Mr. Trump enacted at the end of 2017, U.S. taxes at all levels of government fell to 24.3% of gross domestic product in 2018…  That 2.5 percentage point drop was only the fourth time since 1995 that any country’s tax burden has declined by at least that much in one year. 

So our tax burden plummets, and our job growth skyrockets. 

Think that’s mere coincidence? 

If you do, look just north of our border, where our supposed socialist superiors in Canada just suffered 71,000 lost jobs in November, which is the equivalent of losing 700,000 jobs in the U.S. due to our larger population: 

The Canadian economy posted its biggest monthly job loss since the financial crisis in November, pushing the unemployment rate higher and raising the possibility of the Bank of Canada may cut interest rates next year.  Statistics Canada said Friday the economy lost 71,200 jobs last month and the unemployment rate rose four-tenths of a percentage point to 5.9 percent, its highest point since August 2018, when it hit six percent.  Economists on average had expected a gain of 10,000 jobs and the unemployment rate to hold steady at 5.5 percent. 

So Canada’s unemployment rate exceeds ours by over two percentage points, and new jobs surpassed expectations here while they fell 81,000 short of economists’ expectations there. 

Perhaps instead of making snarky remarks about President Trump behind his back as caught by an open microphone at the NATO summit last week, leftist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should’ve spent more time seeking his economic tutelage.  Ditto Trudeau’s snark partner French President Emmanuel Macron, whose nation continues its descent into widespread riots and worker strikes as its economy stagnates. 

It’s the same story across the world, where the global economy continues its slowdown, while America’s economy continues to blossom after eight years of Obama Administration malaise.  Remember when monthly Labor Department reports amounted to a litany of discouraging news about stagnant wages and workers continuing to drop out of the labor force?

China, facing the fallout from President Trump’s more confrontational approach, is also weakening to a degree not witnessed in decades. 

Along with President Trump’s deregulatory campaign, his tax cuts have played a major role in U.S. growth while the rest of the world treads water.  As the OECD report highlights, the U.S. tax burden as a share of its overall economy is fully ten percentage points below the OECD average of 34.3%.  We’re now at 24.3%, compared to 25.9% in 2016. 

Additionally, while the U.S. tax burden fell, the corresponding tax burden figure for the OECD average was actually an increase of 0.1% over the past year.  And we’re witnessing the results. 

President Trump owes his 2016 election in large part to widespread dissatisfaction with economic growth, job opportunities and wage stagnation throughout the Obama years.  Three years later, even The New York Times – whose leftist laughingstock economist Paul Krugman infamously predicted on election night in 2016 that markets would crash and literally “never” recover – admits that they blew it.  “[T]he biggest lesson,” Times economics correspondent Neil Irwin wrote last week, “when you contrast where the labor market stands at the end of 2019 versus where smart people thought it would stand just a few years ago, is that there’s a lot we don’t know about just what is possible and how strong the United States economy can get.” 

That’s probably as close as we’ll come to an admission from the Times that “President Trump was right, and we were wrong.” 

In any event, the American public can be thankful as we enter this holiday season for that reality.