Revised March jobs report is less than half as good as report that Trump called 'terrible' f
On May 11, 2012, the Great and Powerful Ooze tweeted thusly:
(The shortened URL went on to reveal the rest of Trump's tweet: "... would be 11.1%.")
The jobs report Trump called "terrible" five years ago showed a net gain of 115,000 jobs, which was somewhat underwhelming, to be sure. However, the jobs report released today showed a downward revision for March from a dismal 79,000 jobs to a godawful 50,000. April's jobs number was also revised downward, from 211,000 to 174,000.
So after Obama — who inherited from his predecessor an economy on the brink of depression — handed Trump a thriving economy that added well over 200,000 jobs in January, Trump has badly stumbled two out of four months. (In addition to the voluminous shart of a jobs report Trump gave us in March, only 138,000 jobs were added in May, according to today's report.)
All of this is spelled out at the very unfair, anti-Trump FAKE NEWS website Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov).
But what about the second part of Trump's tweet, in which he claimed the official unemployment rate would have looked much worse if it had taken into account the falling labor participation rate? Well, sure, if people would just drag their asses out of hospice and find gainful employment like they did in the good old days, we could really get this economy humming. Unfortunately for Trump, the labor participation rate is a full percentage point lower than it was when he called out Obama back in 2012. Sure, the deep recession of 2008 created millions of discouraged workers who stopped looking for jobs, just as the election of 2016 created millions of discouraged humans who stopped leaving the house or bathing, but perhaps the biggest reason behind the trend is the continued aging of the population.
Now, to be fair, it's silly to cherry-pick jobs reports from one month to the next and use these snapshots in time to hector elected officials — but that's exactly what Trump did all the time. And now as president, Trump — who has enacted precisely zero major economic initiatives in his first four months in office — is quick to glom onto every last morsel of positive economic news, going so far as to claim that the same unemployment numbers he called fake when Obama was president are now 100 percent accurate.
And during Trump's announcement yesterday that he intends to singlehandedly destroy the earth and everyone in it, he barfed up this nonsense:
"Before we discuss the Paris accord, I'd like to begin with an update on our tremendous, absolutely tremendous economic progress since election day on November 8. The economy is starting to come back and very, very rapidly. We've added $3.3 trillion in stock market value to our economy, and more than a million private sector jobs."
Well, that's really interesting, because Trump wasn't president for two and a half months of that, and he's done essentially nothing to affect the economy's trajectory other than take a temporary hiatus from bankrupting companies.
Anyway, we'll see where we are in four years. And we encourage Barack Obama to tweet out snarky commentary every time the economy produces fewer than 115,000 jobs.
<Sigh>
We know he won't.
