Sunday, March 20, 2022

August 6, 2021: An Excellent Jobs Report, and a Missing $5,800 Bottle of Whiskey

 

8/6/21: The July jobs report is out. With Mr. Biden seated in the Oval Office, another 943,000 jobs are added to the U.S. economy. 

The figures for June are revised upward to show 938,000 Americans went back to work that month.


 

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Trump fans can never admit – their Orange God actually saw jobs decline under his cult leadership.

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In fact, the unemployment rate falls to 5.4% in July, meaning that in his first six full months in office, Joe Biden has slashed the rate from 6.3% to 5.4%, whereas Mr. Trump managed in four years to increase it from 4.7% on the day he took over to 6.3% when he handed over the mess he created to Mr. Biden. 

Starting with figures for February (we never count the month of January, when a new president is inaugurated), Mr. Biden has seen the following solid jobs growth: 

February:        536,000 jobs added

March:            785,000

April:              269,000

May:               614,000

June:               938,000

July:                943,000

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Total:              4,085,000 jobs added.

 

This total is: 

A.    Already much higher than for any year of the Trump presidency.

B.     Already much higher than for all four years of the Trump presidency combined, since, during his four years in the Oval Office, Loser Don oversaw a net loss of nearly 3,000,000 jobs.

 

This is actually pretty funny. Trump fans can never admit – or perhaps cannot count on their regulation ten digits – that their Orange God actually saw jobs decline under his cult leadership. 

We’ve pointed out repeatedly that under Trump’s predecessor, more jobs were added monthly, on average, in Obama’s last 76 months in office, than were added on average during Trump’s solid pre-pandemic run of 37 months (February 2017 to February 2020). 

You can look it up, add the monthly figures, and divide if you like. Sadly, if you love Trump like orange marmalade, you won’t like what you find.

 

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WE ALSO LEARN that a new Inspector General is investigating the disappearance of twenty kinds of gifts from the State Department’s vault during the course of the “drain the swamp” Trump administration. Dozens of items that were in the vault, before Trump and his toadies descended on State, are missing. Two officials told The Hill “that most of the missing items were gifts that the U.S. had planned to give to other countries, with many bearing former President Trump’s insignia. You could argue that anything with Trump’s mark on deserved to be tossed in a dumpster. But the case of the $5,800 bottle of Japanese whiskey really got the IG’s attention. Also, the missing gifts and booze make you understand why Trump fired Steve Linick, the previous IG at State, last year, without giving reasons, as required by law. 

The bottle in question was given to Secretary Pompeo – the guy who really wanted Trump to fire Linick –and by rule should have been retained by the State Department. One reason diplomats may not keep gifts valued at more than $390, unless they pay the difference, is easy to grasp. 

If diplomats keep expensive gifts then it would be increasingly likely that they would succumb to bribes.

 

The former Secretary of State says he doesn’t remember getting an expensive bottle of whiskey, doesn’t know where it might be, doesn’t remember drinking it or sniffing it, and couldn’t pick it out of a lineup, if the other beverages in the lineup were: 

A)    a can of Diet Mountain Dew

B)     a bottle of Rolling Rock

C)    a quart of motor oil

D)   a head of lettuce. (See: 5/19/20 for the Linick firing.) 

 

FUN FACT: The U.S. State Department is said to have a reputation, worldwide, for handing out modest gifts. In 2014, Sec. of State John Kerry famously handed over two large Idaho potatoes to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. Not quite a $5,800 bottle of whiskey, but, if baked, a tasty snack. 

In 2015, the gift exchange was a little more impressive. Kerry gave Lavrov a briefcase. Lavrov gave Kerry a basket – yes, a basket – of potatoes, threw in a basket of tomatoes, and topped it off with a “Victory” t-shirt commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. 

(We kind of helped, by the way.)

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