Donald Trump's Best Economy In US History Sheds 92,000 Jobs, Smile Or Else!
On the upside, Trump spent yesterday morning trying to get Bill Maher fired.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report for February released Friday morning shows that the economy lost 92,000 jobs last month, a far worse outcome than expected by economists who predicted a slight gain of 50,000 jobs in the monthly Dow Jones guess-the-beans contest. The unemployment rate edged up a teensy bit to 4.4 percent, which wasn’t far off the predicted 4.3 percent.
The surprising job decline was pushed in part by crappy weather and by a healthcare worker strike at Kaiser Permanente in California and Hawaii, which took some 30,000 workers off the job, although that strike has since been resolved.
Also not great economic news: The December jobs report, which initially showed a 48,000 jobs gain, was revised downward bigly, so the month actually saw a net job loss of 17,000. January still saw jobs gains, but was still revised downward by 4,000, from 130,000 jobs to 126,000. All told, the economy has lost jobs in three of the last five months, and now we have a new war that’s costing over $890 million daily, by one estimate, or maybe that’s as much as $2 billion a day, according to Pentagon scuttlebutt.
Also too, with Iran closing off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, gas prices are already increasing sharply, up by around 35 cents a gallon a few weeks ahead of the usual higher costs we see during summer driving season. Oil prices are way up, exceeding $90 a barrel, and Kuwait has cut its oil production since it’s running out of storage for the oil it’s not able to ship to the rest of the world. Liquefied fossil “natural” gas prices are also up sharply since LNG ships are also unable to transit the strait of Hormuz.
Those of us with electric nerd cars would just like to point out again that electricity prices are regulated by states, and become even less volatile when utilities add more renewables to their energy mix. In fact, the faster the world transitions away from fossil fuels, the less reason there’ll be to go to war over oil.
Faced with a surprisingly bad jobs report, the White House sent Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, to share a smarmy shit-eating grin on CNBC and to insist that the economy is already really strong, and even more Good Times are right around the corner, OK?
Hassett said the jobs report was “consistent with everything else we’re seeing, which is the economy is really strong,” because if you average everything else out, all the immigrants who have been deported and lost jobs are being magically replaced by “30,000 or 40,000 jobs a month” for US citizens, even if there aren’t any statistics to support that claim.
Besides, he added, his face fixed in a spooky death’s head rictus, the economy is great for rich people and the trickles should be coming down soon on everyone else any minute now. “The pessimists really need to understand that, as the US gets richer, and richer and richer, that it creates more jobs for folks, and it’s a good thing,” Hassett said, still smiling, as he attempted to slap out dozens of small fires breaking out all over his pants.
Still, there are plenty of reasons for optimism! Defense contractors will be making bank replacing all the munitions we’re firing at Iran and at the missiles and drones Iran is shooting back with, and our friends in Kuwait may have helped sell some $100 million replacement fighter jets to replace the three F-15E Strike Eagles a Kuwaiti pilot accidentally shot down.
In any case, we’re sure that as the midterm elections draw closer, the US economy will just keep getting better and better, especially with more new tariffs coming, and Donald Trump’s flunkies will enthusiastically wave their hands even more frantically to tell us how good we all have it. Look, is this the face of a man who’s forcing himself to smile?
[BLS / CNBC / CNN / NYT / Yahoo Finance]
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Related, Trump:
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mgi2umya4x2c
He sounds like he's only able to speak because of some elaborate bellows and keyboard contraption rigged inside his corpse.
Every time I think about the tariffs it pisses me the fuck off. First he institutes tariffs which companies pass the cost of on to us, so he taxes us without approval from congress. Then the courts say he has to refund the tariffs, which will come out of our tax dollars and go to the companies that already passed the cost on to us, so we get taxed a SECOND time.
Corporations reap a windfall, we get taxed twice, and PAB faces ZERO consequences.
EDIT: It's a regressive tax too! It falls on the poorest the hardest. The poor already can't afford shit, and you know those refunds are going to come out of social programs.
FUCK I MISS OBAMA.