It’s bad:
Yesterday, Trump justified slashing unemployment benefits by claiming he had created a “tremendous number of jobs.”
TRUMP: “They’re thinking about doing 70 percent of the amount. The amount would be the same, but doing it in a little bit smaller initial amounts so that people are going to want to go back to work, as opposed to making so much money that they really don’t have to. But we were very generous with them. I think that it’s been a tremendously successful program. The whole thing has been successful, if you look. I mean, we have — we’re in a pandemic, and yet we’re producing tremendous number of jobs.”
Today, new Census Bureau data shows the number of employed people fell by four million last week, wiping out all the job gains since mid-May.
New York Times: “Data from the Census Bureau on Wednesday showed that the number of employed people fell by more than four million last week, the fourth-straight weekly decline. Taken literally, the results indicate that the economy has given up all the job gains since mid-May, before the recent surge in coronavirus cases.”
Meanwhile:
Meanwhile, the Republicans are in very serious disarray on this bill. I have no idea what’s going to come out of it. We know they don’t care about the well-being of their constituents but apparently many of them are so far gone they no longer even care about keeping their majority. In fact, it appears they are actively trying to hurt the American people. But, of course, there’s nothing particularly unusual about that.