Remember last year when the job market was the best since the 1960s and that wages were rising and employees had more choices than ever? I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t because the media didn’t talk much about it because everyone was obsessed with eggs.
Well, it’s all over now anyway. Rolling Stone reports:
Donald Trump’s disastrous governance has successfully tanked America’s labor market.
The federal government released another weak jobs report Friday, after the previous poor jobs report resulted in Trump lashing out and firing the Commissioner of Labor Statistics. At the time, Trump baselessly claimed that the “Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
The latest jobs report found that the economy only added 22,000 jobs in August, meaning there are more unemployed people than there are jobs. The unemployment rate increased slightly from 4.2 percent to 4.3 percent, the highest figure since 2021.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also revised down the numbers from June to show there was negative job growth for the first time since the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, as Bloomberg editor Joe Weisenthal noted.
The weak labor market is the culmination of Trump’s impulsive approach to economic policymaking. The president has repeatedly imposed new and shifting tariffs on imports from other countries, creating widespread economic uncertainty — at a time when Americans were already dealing with a brutal post-Covid economy and years of higher prices. (That brutal economy is exactly why Trump beat Kamala Harris last year.)
For the time being, as the monthly job reports underscore a Trump economy that is far from the golden age that his 2024 campaign had vowed to immediately unleash, a top administration-wide priority on this matter appears to be just blaming others for the Trump’s economy, and hoping that enough of the American public buys it.
Howard Lutnick said today that the numbers are all cooked and Trump said yesterday that he’d believe it if the numbers were good otherwise the only ones that matter are the ones we’ll see next year.
Nothing to see here folks. Move along.