The Trump White House just released a massive announcement via the White House website, revealing that the first few months of the second Trump Presidency, real wages for working Americans, particularly blue-collar wage workers, have ramped up at the fastest rate in over six decades.
As background, the second Trump Administration has tried to focus not just on tax cuts that help everyone, but on specific policies that help the sort of working Americans who have been largely left behind in the past few decades. Examples of that newfound effort include trying to implement a “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” policy in the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
Now, as the administration struggles to ram that bill through the RINO-heavy Senate, Trump’s White House was able to announce a massive wage win for hourly workers. It said, beginning the huge news release, “In President Donald J. Trump’s first five months in office, real wages for hourly workers have seen their largest increase under any administration in nearly 60 years — and we’re just getting started with pro-growth, pro-prosperity policies that finally put America First.”
Continuing, it noted that blue-collar workers have been particularly helped in terms of real wages, meaning wages controlled for inflation, noting that they have finally risen, rather than painfully decreasing in real terms, as they did during the high-inflation Biden era.
Making that point about how helpful Trump has been for blue collar workers, the statement said, “Blue-collar workers have seen real wages grow almost two percent in the first five months of President Trump’s second term — a stark contrast from the negative wage growth seen during the first five months of the Biden Administration.”
Commenting on the matter during the New York Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast in an episode that released on Wednesday, June 18, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted that there was similar wage growth during the first Trump term, but, otherwise, it hasn’t been this high in a long while. As he put it, “The only other time it’s been this high was… during President Trump’s first term.”
In fact, Treasury data reveals that the nearly 2% bump in real blue collar wage growth seen so far is, other than the 1.3% achieved in his first term, the only president since Richard Nixon in 1969 to see real wage growth for blue collar workers in the first five months of his first term, as the New York Post reported.
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Going on to explain what might be going on in this case of blue collar wage growth, Secretary Bessent noted on the podcast that part of the wage growth appears to be fueled by President Trump’s “emphasis on manufacturing,” with tariffs and renewed focus on the matter pushing wages in the sector higher.
Further, Secretary Bessent noted that closing the border and deporting illegal aliens is highly salutary to blue-collar wages, as open borders and the labor surplus created by them mean lower wages. As he put it, “Biden opened the border, and it was flooded. And for working Americans, that’s a disaster because it’s pressure on their wages.”
Watch Bessent here: