Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 5. Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 5:11 PM for 10h 05m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1959, rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson are killed in a plane crash along with the pilot near Clear Lake, Iowa, an event later known as The Day the Music Died.
The American economy continues to perform well:
The American labor market unleashed a burst of hiring in January, producing another wave of robust job growth even as interest rates continue to rise.
Employers added 517,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said on Friday, an increase from 260,000 in December.
The unemployment rate was 3.4 percent, the lowest since 1969.
Even as hiring surged, wage growth slowed slightly to 0.3 percent compared with December.
The hefty hiring figures defied expectations and underscored the challenges facing the Federal Reserve, which is trying to cool the labor market in its effort to tame rapid inflation. By raising interest rates — on Wednesday, Fed officials did so for the eighth time in a year — policymakers hope to force businesses to pull back on their spending, including hiring.
Yet the labor market has remained extraordinarily tight. In addition to the report on Friday, the government released data this week showing that the number of posted jobs per available unemployed worker — a measure that policymakers have been watching closely — rose again in December. And despite a cavalcade of layoffs in the technology sector, the overall number of pink slips has stayed extremely low.
In a big country like America, the national economy is not a single state’s economy, as it is not a single city’s economy. States and cities that repeat the same economic mistakes of the last several years will not enjoy the nation’s level of success. They’ll lag behind.
Worse, of course: states and cities that refuse to admit that they’ve been repeating the same economic mistakes of the last several years.
See astronauts work outside space station in 2nd spacewalk of 2023: