How Come (Just About) Everyone Hates Joe?

I was watching Joe give a speech yesterday on the jobs report, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how come he is so disliked? I thought about it more this morning and now I’ll share my thoughts with you. But let’s first start off with a few facts. Not alternate facts, real facts, okay?

The unemployment rate is 3.5% That’s not full employment. That’s more jobs available than there are people to fill them or even apply for them. When I drive to work in the morning, I go past a dozen or so machine shops which make metal components for the big items — refrigerators, heavy machinery, cars — and every, single shop has a ‘Help Wanted’ sign in front of it, something I have never seen before, and I have been driving past these shops since 1995.

The local supermarket chain is advertising warehouse jobs starting at $16.95 plus a sign-on bonus of a thousand bucks. The local convenience chain will pay $105,000 plus bennies for someone to deliver gasoline from the wholesale depot to their retail pumps. You can rent a very nice, two-bedroom apartment with off-street parking for $800 a month. Do the math, get it?

Everybody made a big what Grandpa would call a ‘gevalt’ (read: complaint) when we pulled out of Kabul. But for the first time in more than twenty years, American troops aren’t coming back from the Middle East in steel…