As we reported earlier, the jobs report for May came out today and it wasn’t good.
As I predicted earlier this week, the signs were that it wasn’t going to be what Joe Biden needed to stand on to say he was pursuing the right approach. That prediction was correct. It turned out to be 111,000 fewer jobs than Biden’s people had predicted, even when they were trying to be conservative after the horrible miss on predictions in April. Those aren’t “new” jobs really, but people coming back to work after the pandemic when we were down millions. So in the context of the pandemic, that number is an anemic number indeed. At best, one could say that it wasn’t the disaster that the April jobs report was.
BREAKING: Job gains were again underwhelming in May with the 559k falling well short of the estimated 670k. https://t.co/B0sao4BPOQ
— Axios (@axios) June 4, 2021
But guess who was taking “credit” for the flaccid report? Kamala Harris.
Today’s jobs report:
-559k jobs added in May
-A record 2 million jobs created in our 1st 4 months
-Lowest unemployment rate since the start of COVID
-Fastest drop in long-term unemployment in a decadeWe’re making historic progress for workers, small businesses, and our economy.
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) June 4, 2021
Now, first of all, it had nothing to do with anything they did. Indeed, they’re making the recovery slower and harsher by extending the unemployment benefits so people are taking longer to come back to work. Additionally, they’ve played footsie with the teachers’ unions who dragged out reopening schools and in-person instruction thus keeping some parents from being able to return to the workforce. So not only don’t they deserve credit, they deserve criticism for slowing the recovery.
So no, having some of the millions return to work is not exactly “creating” 2 million “new” jobs. Plus, the unemployment number actually went up last month, so she’s going to try to take credit for it being a bigger drop now? Again, not a normal situation because of the pandemic. But the real drop in unemployment came under President Donald Trump.
There’s nothing like a picture to show Kamala a little reality. Here’s the picture of the unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics between May 2019 and May 2021.
BLS unemployment rates: pic.twitter.com/UtUy9WX5Qa
— Dr. Nickarama (@nickaramaOG) June 4, 2021
So when she talks about the “biggest drop,” she’s spinning her head off. Who was president from April 2020 to January 2021? You can see that it was under Trump that most of the jobs hit by the pandemic came back. Notice also how the numbers largely start to level off and not drop as much after Biden came into office.
But this is all she and the Biden team have done so far — spin, spin, spin.
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