Donald Trump Is Celebrating the Wrong Economic Accomplishment – The New Republic

But that 3.1 million job gain is wiped out when you take into account a statistical glitch that the BLS admits tothe misclassification of about five million workers as employed who said they were not at work for other reasons than losing their jobs. The likelihood that these people will get their old jobs back diminishes with each passing day. But even aside from the question of job viability for these workers, the BLS is required to classify such people as unemployed, and for some as yet ill-explained reason, it didnt. If it had, the BLS says, the unemployment rate would have risen in May to 16.1 percent. And thats before seasonal adjustment to the jobless count, which would raise the rate even higher.

Jason Furman, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, and Wilson Powell III, his colleague at Harvards Kennedy School of Government, calculate that when you figure in this and other problems with the May calculations, the true unemployment rate is 17.1 percent. (Lets also remember that any single-digit job gain must be balanced against a two-month loss in March and April of more than 22 million jobs.)

Without diving into the weeds, though, it appears that even an honest reckoning of Mays employment trend, based on the limited data available, yields a rather surprising gain rather than the loss most observers were anticipating. Furman and Powells reckoning of the realistic unemployment rate at 17. 1 percent is, as they note, lower than their similarly realistic calculation that Aprils true unemployment rate was 20.5 percent. We all want unemployment to go down, so that really is something to celebratehowever cautiously.

Its also a reason to congratulate the president on his administrations greatest (indeed, sole) domestic accomplishment: the $600 sweetener added to weekly unemployment benefits. Trump being Trump, hed rather you didnt. He agreed to it only at the prodding of congressional Democrats in March, and reportedly hes itching to discontinue the payout when it expires at the end of next month.

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Donald Trump Is Celebrating the Wrong Economic Accomplishment - The New Republic