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Following the release of June employment data on Thursday morning, President Trump quickly called a news briefing to offer a few tweet-sized assessments of how the economy was doing. Well, in short — as evidenced by various employment gains seen among various occupational and demographic groups. No mention was made of the fact that the assessment used to estimate employment preceded the recent resurgence of the coronavirus.
So we had Trump standing before the television cameras hyping a number of new employment records, praising “historic numbers in a time that a lot of people would have wilted,” as he put it.
As when he celebrated the month-over-month gain in employment:
“It was just put out that the United States economy added almost 5 million jobs in the month of June, shattering all expectations. … This is the largest monthly jobs gain in the history of our country.”
This is true. But it’s also a bit like a restaurant boasting about seeing an increase in customers after being cited by the health department for rampant code violations. Yes, the 4.8 million jobs added is more than in any prior month on record, stretching back to 1939. But that followed the record drop of 20.8 million jobs in April — a record of its own — which followed a drop of 1.4 million jobs in March, the third-highest figure on record.
While adding jobs is obviously good, it’s important to note that employment in the United States is still down significantly. Since February, when employment was at its peak, 14.6 million fewer Americans are working. Since Trump took office, 7.8 million fewer people are working.
This wasn’t the only record Trump touted.
The May jobs numbers, he said, were “revised upward to 2.7 million jobs for a combined total of 7.5 million jobs created in the last two months. And that’s a record by many millions of jobs.”
Again, it is. The next highest two-month increase in employment was 1.7 million in early 1946. That made up about 1.2 percent of the country’s population. The recent two-month gain is about 2.3 percent of the total population.
But, again, this follows two months in which job losses were about as bad as they’ve ever been. In March and April, 22.1 million jobs were lost, the worst two-month decrease on record.
The same dynamic applies to his celebration of industry-specific numbers.
“In June, we added 2.1 million leisure and hospitality jobs, 740,000 retail jobs, 568,000 education and health-care jobs, 357,000 service jobs. These are all historic numbers. And 356,000 manufacturing jobs.”
It’s important to note, first, that those leisure and retail jobs are at risk as coronavirus cases increase and restaurants and stores have to close down again (as is already happening in Florida and other…
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Read More: The grim, unmentioned downside of the employment records Trump is hyping
