> 4.2% unemployment rate, which is amazing given where we were a year ago
That's not exactly an accurate way to describe what's happening...
Look at the 25 year trends:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate
59% of the population is currently employed, down from 65% in 2000. We're down ~2.5% from where we were in 2020. Which doesn't exactly seems to jive with the reported "unemployment rate" - https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
In 2020, 158M were employed, now 155M are employed (with millions increase in population). We're probably looking at a gap of at least 5 million.
Average working hours have not increased:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/average-weekly-ho...