The numbers astound.
Yes, I’m talking about this phenomenal economy, but one segment of it has heads turning: The construction industry.
In an August 28 news release put out by the Associated Builders and Contractors, a Kabateck Strategies client, pointed out, “The July 2018 not seasonally adjusted national construction unemployment rate fell 1.5 percent to 3.4 percent from July 2017. At the same time, the construction industry employed 303,000 more workers nationally compared to July 2017, according to BLS statistics.”
Two weeks earlier, another Kabateck Strategies client the National Federation of Independent Business, the nation’s largest small-business association, issued its monthly Optimism Index showing the second-highest reading in the Index’s 45-year history.
Are we at full employment? Economics writer Clive Crook explains the term. “To economists, full employment means that unemployment has fallen to the lowest possible level that won’t cause inflation. In the U.S., that was once thought to be a jobless rate of about 5 percent. U.S. Federal Reserve economists currently put this so-called natural rate of unemployment at between 4.1 percent and 4.7 percent.”
The latest unemployment rate: 3.9 percent.
Thank you, job creators. But Kabateck Strategies would like to remind everyone that the secret sauce in job creation is predictability. Business owners need to know if tax rates and employment regulations will be the same, more specifically, not increase, in a few years’ time before they decide on that new hire.
State legislatures can chip away at the good economic news, because many of their members think quite the opposite: Now’s a perfect time to boost a tax or add a new regulation.
Who has your back in Sacramento?
