The Jobs Report Could Be Seen as Good News for Biden –

Slowing job and wage growth, alongside rising labor force participation in August, is good news for President Biden and his hopes for a smooth transition to a more stable economic expansion.

The jobs report on Friday was the first of the summer to support the case Mr. Biden and his economic aides have been making for months: that the economy is beginning to step down from a high-growth, high-inflation expansion coming out of the pandemic recession but avoiding another recession.

The report showed the country added 315,000 jobs in August, down from 526,000 in July. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly, to 3.7 percent. That cooling is enough to support Mr. Biden’s contention, which he first laid out in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in May, that the country is set to “see fewer record job-creation numbers, but this won’t be cause for concern.”

There were also signs in the report that inflation could be coming down, as the Federal Reserve aggressively raises interest rates in order to tame price growth that has reached a 40-year high. Average wages continued to rise, the Labor Department said, but not as quickly as in previous months. Administration officials have been hoping for the Fed’s rate increases to bring down inflation while not slamming the brakes on growth, triggering a recession and plunging millions of Americans out of work.

One of the most encouraging signs in the report for the White House was that more workers were searching for work, which could further dampen inflation. The labor force participation rate grew by 0.3 percentage points in August, matching its highest rate in the recovery from the pandemic.

But the report seems unlikely to aid Mr. Biden’s efforts to persuade many Americans that the country is not in recession, which polls suggest more than half of voters believe to be the case. The president has argued that strong job growth is a sign that the economy is nowhere near a recession, because employers generally fire workers and hire fewer people in a downturn.

Voters, though, seem less focused on the labor market. Only one in nine respondents to a poll by The Economist and YouGov said jobs reports were the best evidence of a recession. The most cited recession indicator — preferred by more than two in five respondents — was “the price of goods and services you buy.”