Fox News host Charles Payne and White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett celebrated yesterday’s jobs numbers like Happy Days Are Here Again.
Payne said, “It feels like maybe even the White House to a degree caught off guard with just how quickly, how swiftly this economy is coming back.”
He laughed when Hassett said, “The only person at the White House that wasn’t really surprised by these numbers was the president.”
“The president’s policies are working and we saw that today in the numbers that were really extraordinary,” Hassett continued. “Think about it. The typical Wall Street economist missed today’s number by 10 million. … It’s just an astonishing, astonishing bit of news.”
Speaking of missing numbers, it turns out that jobs report had a “misclassification error” that made the unemployment rate look better than it is. It was more likely 16.3%, three points higher than the 13.3% reported, but still an improvement from the approximately 19.7% rate for April, using the same standards.
They were too busy celebrating on Fox to mention it.
“It happened because the president and Secretary Mnuchin and the economic team designed policies to basically build a bridge for small businesses,” Hassett gushed. “Four and a half million small businesses got loans from the government so that they would be there when the economy turned back on and they could bring the workers back and it’s happening way faster than we expected.”
“The June numbers are going to be something like this, and it means that we’ve hit bottom and we’re coming back way faster than anyone other than the president thought possible,” Hassett added.
A graphic showing that black unemployment barely budged, up 0.1% to 16.8% prompted Payne to whine, “The media’s going to zero in over and over again on negativity particularly when it comes to the black community.”
The jobs report may be good news for Trump but the rest of us are dealing with the fact that there is still a lot of economic pain in the country, including the roughly 30 million Americans receiving unemployment benefits right now. That’s not counting the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is still going and the country is convulsed over the police killing of George Floyd. But Hassett and Payne acted as though everything will be hunky-dory again in the wink of an eye.
Also not mentioned was Trump’s shockingly tasteless boast that yesterday was “a great day” for George Floyd and “a great day for everybody.”
You can watch Payne and Hassett ignore the pain of millions of Americans below, from the June 6, 2020 Cavuto Live.
But coincidently helping blacks – and only regarding unemployment – doesn’t mean you care about them. Especially since so much of Trump’s stimulus was wasted on corporate America who plowed an overwhelming percentage of their windfall into unproductive stock buy back and dividend programs to juice their stock prices – totally wasted in the COVID-19 stock market collapse.
I can’t stand always smirching Hassett. Call him Mr. Chuckles – sheesh! Here he fumbles with the same issue I mention above to, again, paint Trump as the black man’s savior. He seemingly comes up with nothing specific Trump is doing to target that demographic but then mumbles something about Opportunity Zones yet in such as way as to make me think he knows it’s a political stink bomb. So I look it up and, sure enough, it’s nothing but a scam to gentrify cities while giving his rich real estate buddies (and potentially himself) massive tax windfalls. I’ll let the NYT explain:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/business/tax-opportunity-zones.html
And because Trump and the GOP are best friends of workers in all demographic groups Chuckles brings up Moscow Mitch’s and Trump’s demands for COVID-19 liability wavers for all employers as a precondition for any more stimulus. And here’s a clue to chuckles, since black unemployment looks stickier at this point than white unemployment don’t you think stimulus would help them the most? If Trump really cares and all that.
I won’t get into the confusing discussion on unemployment statistics overlooking mathematical mistakes and how black unemployment is going up a tick while they’re boasting their employment numbers went up. My head hurts enough already!
Source: Washington Post
When the U.S. government’s official jobs report for May came out on Friday, it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major “error” indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate.
The special note said that if this “misclassification error” had not occurred, the “overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported,” meaning the unemployment rate would be about 16.3 percent for May.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs reports, said it was working to fix the problem.
“BLS and the Census Bureau are investigating why this misclassification error continues to occur and are taking additional steps to address the issue,” said a note at the bottom of the Bureau of Labor Statistics report.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/05/may-2020-jobs-report-misclassification-error/