President Trump boasted at a news conference Thursday that the economy is “roaring back” after another better-than-expected jobs report. The Dow also popped about 400 points after the Labor Department said the economy added 4.8 million jobs in June, which brought the unemployment rate to 11.1 percent. Analysts had expected about 3 million new jobs. “It’s coming back extremely strong,” Trump said. Here are 10 reasons you should take this proclamation with a tablespoon of salt:
1) Layoffs continue. The Labor Department also revealed Thursday that 1.4 million people filed unemployment claims for the first time last week, the 15th straight week of more than a million new people seeking jobless benefits.
2) New cases are surging. The United States reported 52,789 fresh infections of the coronavirus on Wednesday, the highest total since the start of the pandemic.
For example, American Airlines has just warned that it has about 8,000 too many flight attendants because people are not traveling. The carrier plans on paring down its flight staff to the bare minimum required by the FAA. And McDonald’s just announced that it will pause plans to bring back dine-in service.
4) This data is already dated. “The monthly jobs report is based on a survey taken during one week of the month in question — in this case, the week ending June 12, before the rising number of coronavirus infections reached their current level,” Eli Rosenberg, Heather Long and Jeff Stein report. “There is no precedent for the government to try and tabulate unemployment figures that are this high and move around this much.”