We The People
Welcome new subscribers 🥳
Happy Labor Day, all!
I wanted to start off by welcoming our new subscribers over the past couple weeks. We’re glad you’re a part of the conversation and community 😁. A few of you decided to help support Sowing Hope by becoming a paid subscriber; thank you so much for that! My goal is to keep these weekly posts freely available without ads, so your support really helps. It also means I can do more for you at Sowing Hope like reaching out for interviews from people and offering my content at a custom URL (you can now go to or share www.sowinghope.how to find my posts).
As always, if becoming a paid subscriber does not make sense for you, I’m glad to have you as a supporter reading and sharing my posts. That is why keeping the content free is so important to me 😁.
Update
Last post I shared about Oliver Anthony and highlighted how his song showed what I’ve been saying: most Americans regardless of political views agree on most topics.
I wanted to take a moment to 1) share his original post since I found it later in the week, and 2) correct a comment I made in the post that may have misrepresented Oliver Anthony.
I shared a tweet with a clip from this video and the video from Beau talking about it. I shared those because at the time I could not find Oliver Anthony’s original video. Below you can find a link to his website and the video where he, himself, talks about his song. I hope you enjoy 😁.
As we mentioned last week, I wanted to highlight him because I feel its important for us to remember just how much we the people agree.
I also wanted to mention it seems I was wrong about his thoughts on welfare and safety net programs. While I thought he was against them, listening more to him talk and his other songs I found he seems to actually be against fraud and waste, not safety net programs. Now that I better understand I do agree with being against fraud and waste like I suspect most of you do. While it would have been fine for us to disagree, I want to make sure to call out when I am wrong so I can correct myself.
I feel for me to earn your trust, I need to be willing to quickly and transparently admit when I am wrong. This is me doing that 😁.
Disclaimers
If you are new here, welcome again 😁. This is where I share the perspective that informs the stances I share here at Sowing Hope. In my first post, Out of Many, One, I committed to us being opinionated, open-minded, and kind. One way I do that is sharing where I’m coming from.
Americans have proven strong and resilient
The U.S. economy is strong with no signs of recession coming
The American people are the heroes of this story
State of Labor
This Labor Day we have another strong report for the economy and jobs in the United States (BLS monthly jobs report). We have continued to create jobs with 187,000 net new jobs added in August while the unemployment remains under 4%, continuing the longest stretch of unemployment this good in over 50 years (I first mentioned it here). That is especially encouraging considering we saw a slight increase to the labor force participation rate, the percent of the working age population engaged in the labor market.
Also note-worthy is average hourly earnings for U.S. workers continued growing faster than inflation. Workers over the past few months have continued seeing wage growth over 4% year-over-year with inflation at 3.2% over the last 12 months, much better than a year ago and keeping real wages solidly in positive territory.
This continues to point to what I’ve been saying for a while; the American economy is strong because American workers are resilient. Strategic legislation, persistent resilience, and the hard work of average American workers like us has built back a strong economy for everyone rather than a recession that would have hurt all of us. We are the heroes of this story, and you should be proud of your hard work.
Bonus Tracks
Today, I wanted to share a few songs I enjoy. No particular reason. Hope you enjoy them 😁🌱.
I love seeing wage growth surpassing inflation. Thank you for the update. Just something as simple as that can create waves of morale in the work force.