Since President Joe Biden took office, the economy has created 16.2 million jobs. Sure, some of those increases are a result of the post-pandemic recovery, but since June 2022, when total employment returned to pre-COVID highs, 6.8 million jobs have been added . In another sign of the economy’s strength, the proportion of the population that is working or actively looking for work is now at a level not seen in nearly thirty years. While these aggregate numbers are impressive, they sometimes fail to convey what is really going on in towns and cities across the country or at individual work sites. For example, consider the steel mill in Senator J.D. Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio, which employs approximately twenty-four hundred people and has long played a vital role in supporting the city and region. around.

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In his 2016 memoir “ Hillbilly Elegy ,” Vance, now a Republican Vice Presidential candidate, described how his grandparents moved from a small town in the Appalachian Uplands of eastern Kentucky to Middletown, where Vance’s grandfather, known as Papaw, got a job at the steel mill, then owned by Armco, a company that dated back to 1899. Vance wrote: To me, Armco was an economic savior – the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky to America’s middle class.” “My grandfather loved this company and knew every make and model of vehicle built from Armco steel.”