The State Of Things

WaPo:

The economy added 4.8 million jobs last month, based on a survey taken mid-month, sending the unemployment rate down to 11.1 percent — a sign of how many businesses were scrambling to emerge from the depths of the recession.

But new data also released Thursday by the Labor Department showed that 1.4 million people filed unemployment claims for the first time last week as many businesses reversed themselves and closed again during the surge in coronavirus cases. This trend has not fallen off in recent weeks.

This marked the 15th straight week of unemployment claims that exceeded 1 million, a sign that the economic recovery has not taken hold for many Americans.

The data bring into sharper focus the turmoil facing the U.S. economy after many businesses sent workers home in March during the beginning of the spike in deaths caused by the virus. Many companies began rehiring in May and June, but there are still more than 10 million people who lost their jobs during the crisis and have not been rehired.

Federal and state officials have stumbled during reopening plans, and now some of the states that reopened the fastest are seeing a large spike in coronavirus cases that are causing them to backtrack swiftly, leading to new job losses.

In last month’s report, there was a particular focus on a misclassification error the Bureau of Labor Statistics said it made that marred how it calculated the unemployment rate. On Thursday, it said that issue had mostly been fixed.

The BLS said the true unemployment rate is probably closer to 12.1 percent, 1 percentage point higher than the official rate it gave. Last month, it said the unemployment rate was 13.3 percent, but the data collection error had artificially lowered it from 16.3 percent. The disconnect stems from the way surveyors interview people about their job status, as many Americans are unclear about whether they have actually been laid off or just sent home temporarily.

We're not coming out of either the pandemic or the economic slump anytime soon.

And President Stoopid doesn't seem capable of understanding how those two things go together.