The January jobs report suggests the nearly nine-year-old economic expansion remains plenty capable of generating solid job growth: 200,000 last month and an average of 192,000 over the past three months. More interesting, it provided fresh evidence that a tightening labor market is also capable of accelerating wage growth.

The Great Recession and Financial Crisis were so severe, it was going to take a good long while for labor markets to heal, but not enough to permanently damage. Lots of slack needed to be soaked up.  But as the expansion has plodded along, that is just what seems to be happening.

“While there are no doubt structural problems in the labor market and things we should do to address this, the extent to which these factors were either permanent or resistant to cyclical improvement was clearly exaggerated,” economist Adam Ozimek recently wrote.

Read the full article about the healing U.S. job market by James Pethokoukis at AEI.