Juan Manuel Canals and Basma Eddaheri, both in their 20s, are part of the reason why Spain has confounded predictions of massive job losses...
Perhaps the most striking difference between the middle class of 50 years ago and the middle class today is a loss of confidence — the confidence that you were doing better than your parents and that your children would do better than you.President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar suite of economic proposals is aiming to both reinforce and rebuild an American middle class that feels it has been standing on shifting ground. And it comes with an explicit message that the private sector alone cannot deliver on that dream and that the government has a central part to play.“When you look at periods of shared growth,” said Brian Deese, director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, “what you see is that public investment has played an absolutely critical role, not to the exclusion of private investment and innovation, but in laying the foundation.”If the Biden administration gets its way, the reconstructed middle class would be built on a sturdier and much broader plank of government support rather than the vagaries of the market.Some proposals are meant to support parents who work: federal paid family and medical leave, more affordable child care, free prekindergarten classes. Others would use public investment to create jobs, in
More evidence of the job market’s recovery could emerge Thursday morning when the Labor Department reports the latest data on new claims for unemployment benefits.The increasing pace of vaccinations — combined with the easing of restrictions on business and consumer activity in many states, and the arrival of stimulus funds — has helped lift hiring in recent weeks.On Friday, the government reported that employers added 916,000 jobs in March, twice February’s gain and the most since August. The unemployment rate dipped to 6 percent, the lowest since the pandemic began, with nearly 350,000 people rejoining the labor force.Most experts expect a continued economic recovery, buttressed by the passage of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package in March. Most individuals have received payments of $1,400 provided by the bill, and the funds from the legislation should add firepower to an economy that is expected to grow by more than 6 percent this year.“As more and more of the service sector comes online, I think we will see substantial declines in the number of claims,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics.Still, there is plenty of ground to make up.Even after March’s job gains, the economy is
