To hear President Donald Trump tell it, you'd think the U.S. was in the worst shape since the Great Depression.



"It's a mess. At home and abroad. A mess. Jobs are pouring out of the country. You see what's going on with all of the companies leaving our country. Going to Mexico and other places. Low pay, low wages."

And Trump vowed that his administration would clean up that mess.

"We'll take care of It, folks," he said. "We're going to take care of it all. I just want to let you know. I inherited a mess."

When it comes to the U.S economy, though, that "mess" isn't borne out by most measures.

The stock market is at all-time highs. Though growth in the gross domestic product is slow by historical standards, the economy is in the tenth year of one of the longest sustained expansions in history.

And the U.S. job market, which is creating jobs faster than employers can fill them, appears to be stronger than it's been in nearly a decade.

The supporting evidence goes far beyond the nonfarm unemployment rate that draws the most attention every month.

The latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the decades-old survey that Trump took issue with during the campaign — showed that the U.S. economy added an estimated 227,000 new jobs last month, while the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.8 percent.

So, why the gloom and doom about jobs within the Trump administration and among tens of millions of his supporters?

While those job market indicators show strength overall, they mask a much longer-term shift that has sharply divided the fortunes of American workers.

Simply put, the U.S. doesn't have a jobs shortage, it has a skills shortage.

For a variety of reasons, workers with less than some college training have been losing ground to their better-educated peers for decades.

Since 2000, more than 17 million of the new jobs created have gone to applicants with a bachelor's degree or higher, according to BLS data. Those with some college have filled more than 5 million new jobs.

But during that period the level of employment for those with a high school diploma or less has fallen by nearly 4 million.