Trump Finally Allows Jobs Report After Shutdown. Nobody Gets Dolls Or Pencils For Christmas!
Tiny 64,000-jobs gain in November, after loss of 105,000 jobs in October.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics finally released its jobs report for November yesterday, after a delay in data gathering allegedly caused by the government shutdown. If you want to also blame Donald Trump’s evisceration of the federal workforce and his distrust of the BLS, we certainly won’t blame you. After holding at 50-year lows for most of the second half of Joe Biden’s term, the unemployment rate is up to 4.6 percent, the highest it’s been since September 2021, when we were finally pulling out of the pandemic recession. But really, the White House says, everything is fine, the economy just has to shake off the doldrums of the Biden economy, please ignore the “50-year low” stuff since that was all made up, OK?
Another key metric, the number of job-seekers who are working part-time now but would prefer to have full-time work, plus those who want work but are discouraged from looking, is up to 8.7 percent, a full percentage point higher than it was last year at this time. See how Donald Trump is making everything fine?
The report showed the economy added 64,000 jobs in November, following a far greater loss of 105,000 jobs in October. How accurate the numbers actually are is open to question; last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned there could be “something of a systematic overcount” of as many as 60,000 jobs per month in recent BLS reports, although he attributed such errors to problems with getting solid data, not Trumpfuckery. Everything is fine, okay? FINE.
Also, those job losses in October did not include federal workers idled or working without pay because of the government shutdown, BLS explained. They were counted as still employed, but the October numbers did reflect the actual departures of federal employees who accepted buyouts/deferred shitcanning earlier in the year, and who actually fell off payrolls at the end of September. This is great news for the economy, since none of those people deserved to be working.
The truncated October count is the third time in six months that US payrolls declined, and there were also downward revisions to the reports for August (down by 22,000 jobs for a total loss of 26,000) and September (down 11,000 jobs, trimming the month’s gains to 108,000). Everything is fine!
Economists, having long grown accustomed to finding dark clouds in Joe Biden’s strong job growth reports, were at least pleased to explain these bad numbers are unmistakably bad:
“The U.S. economy is in a jobs recession,” said Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. “The nation has added a mere 100,000 in the past six months. The bulk of those jobs were in healthcare, an industry that is almost always hiring due to America’s aging population.”
The White House rolled out a beautiful new tube of Trump-branded lipstick for the jobs report pig, with a triumphant social media post proclaiming “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt donned a brand-new pink joseon-ot so she could insist, “The strong jobs report shows how President Trump is fixing the damage caused by Joe Biden and creating a strong, America First economy in record time.”
Everything is going so perfectly, she lied, claiming that “Workers’ wages are rising, prices are falling, trillions of dollars in investments are pouring into our country, and the American economy is primed to boom in 2026.” See? Donald Trump fixed everything on Day One, and that will mean lower prices finally arrive somewhere around Day Five Hundred, unless Joe Biden wrecked the economy so badly that they don’t.
OK, the bit about wages rising wasn’t a complete lie: Wages were up a whopping tenth of a percent, for an annual gain of 3.5 percent from a year ago, the smallest annual gain since May of 2021, when, once again, we were still struggling our way out of the pandemic.
All in all, it was a perfect jobs report, just in time to have a war with Venezuela, and for healthcare premiums to soar through the roof, hooray!
When Republicans Said They Wanted Federal Workers Fired, They Didn't Mean Jesse Watters's Friends!
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Big Brother has raised the chocolate ration from 25 grams to 20 grams.
Oh sure, blame the President for the economy. Like it's all his fault! All he's done is to impose random, inflated tariffs, drive out and/or terrorize undocumented workers, cut taxes on the wealthy, nuke tens of thousands of government jobs...
Okay, fine, maybe it is his fault.