#New York’s recovery trails nation and other commentary

Economy desk: NY’s Recovery Trails Nation

Private-economy employment in New York “remained far below pre-pandemic levels last month, badly trailing the jobs recovery in the rest of the country,” warns the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon. Private jobs here were down 12.2 percent (i.e., by about 1 million) from a year earlier, twice the nation’s 6 percent falloff. Only Hawaii had a steeper job deficit, and among big states, “only California (down 9.7 percent) even approached a double-digit drop.” Notably, Gotham, off 15.3 percent, led the state’s losses. By contrast, Texas and Florida saw lower-than-average declines, despite winter COVID-19 surges. Though Empire State employment “began to recover in May,” since September, there has been “virtually no net improvement.” Bottom line: New York “has a lot riding on” the resumption of normal activities.

From the right: Joe’s Middle-Class Tax Hike

President Biden never meant it when he “insisted again and again he would only hike taxes on individuals earning over $400,000,” snark the editors of the Washington Examiner, and now “he’s just hoping the middle class and the news media won’t notice the tax hikes if he hides them well enough.” Biden always planned tax hikes for “certain middle-class families,” but “he keeps adding new middle-class tax hikes to his agenda in order to pay for his boatloads of free money and a massive expansion of the federal government.” The Tax Foundation estimates that his corporate-tax hike would “slash 159,000 jobs” and “harm the bottom quintile of workers.” Biden refuses to admit “that he’s taxing anyone but the rich,” but “if he wants to curb the inflationary impact of his pumping trillions into the economy,” he knows he will “need to tap into the middle class.” It’s time he came clean.

2024 watch: Biden Won’t Run Again

When President Biden was asked last week whether he would run for re-election, he could have deflected “by saying he had more important things to worry about” but instead “opted for a seemingly decisive and confident” affirmative response, reports Peter Funt at USA Today. In fact, “there is no chance, zero, that Joe Biden will seek to become the nation’s first octogenarian presidential candidate.” Indeed, Biden’s age “has already created enormous pressure on Kamala Harris,” and “no vice president has entered office with so much speculation that she would be frontrunner for her party’s presidential nomination in the next cycle.” It would be better for his party, then, if he found “a way to signal he’s only serving one term.”

Conservative: BLM’s Radical Founders

The Black Lives Matter movement was founded by “three self-described ‘radical black organizers,’ ” Scott Walker observes at First Things. Early organizer Opal Tometi, who first created BlackLivesMatter.com is, per her biography on the site, “a student of liberation theology” and a “transnational feminist.” Alicia Garza, who first coined the phrase, is a dedicated Marxist-Leninist who sniffs at Bernie Sanders because he “offers ‘not socialism,’ but only ‘democratic capitalism.’ ” Patrisse Cullors started the hashtag; the epigraph of her 2017 memoir is a quote from Black Liberation Army terrorist Assata Shakur, and the book praises the likes of the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Afrika, “a violent black separatist group.” Liberal sympathizers, caveat emptor.

Culture critic: The New Racist ‘Anti-Racism’

Racism is the “toxic pathology” of hating an entire group of people based on its race, writes Victor David Hanson at American Greatness. “But now there grows a strange new ahistorical ‘antiracism’ racism” — one that blames “all of one’s own unhappiness, indeed all of the cosmic injustice in the manmade and natural world . . . on a white racial collective.” And it isn’t just the ideology of an academic elite, but has turned into federal policy in the form of anti-white farm relief bills, among many other instances. “The new anti-racism racism, whatever its original intentions, unfortunately exhibits the historical telltale signs of its noxious genre: an a priori negative stereotyping of all whites.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board