The New Yorker:

Many of Donald Trump’s economic promises have come to pass, including in the home town of his running mate—they’ve just been enacted by Democrats.

By John Cassidy

This past Friday, job figures showed that the U.S. had added more than a quarter of a million jobs last month and the unemployment rate nudged down to 4.1 per cent. Since President Joe Biden came into office, the economy has created 16.2 million jobs. To be sure, some of those gains were the result of a pandemic rebound, but, since June of 2022, when total employment got back to its pre-covid high, 6.8 million more jobs have been added. In another sign of the economy’s strength, the percentage of the population working or actively looking for work is currently at a level not seen in nearly thirty years.

As impressive as these aggregate figures are, they can sometimes fail to convey what is actually happening in towns and cities across the country, or at individual places of employment. Consider, for example, the steel plant in Senator J. D. Vance’s home town of Middletown, Ohio, which employs about twenty-four hundred people and has long played a vital role in supporting the city and its surrounding area. In his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance, who is now the Republican candidate for Vice-President, described how his grandparents moved from a small town in the Appalachian Uplands of eastern Kentucky to Middletown, where Vance’s grandfather, referred to as Papaw, got a job at the steel mill, which was then owned by Armco, a company that dated back to 1899. “For my grandparents, Armco was an economic savior—the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class,” Vance wrote. “My grandfather loved the company and knew every make and model of car built from Armco steel.”

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