April 3, 2020: More than Nine Million Americans Have Lost Jobs

 

4/3/20: March goes out, not like a lion or lamb, but roadkill. The coronavirus continues to spread. As of Friday morning, 6,098 Americans are dead, another 5,421 in serious or critical condition. Before the day is out those numbers will rise even higher. 

As of noon today, the U.S. has 257,773 confirmed cases – just a shade under a quarter of all cases in the world.

 

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TO COMPOUND THE MISERY, a stunning 6.6 million people filed for unemployment in the last full week in March. That’s on top of 3.3 million who filed the week before. To put it another way, as many jobs were vaporized in fourteen days as were added to the U.S. economy in all the months since President Trump took office (7,065,000) – and all the jobs President Obama added in 2016 (2,341,000) – and all the jobs added in November and December 2015 (510,000). 

These are almost Great Depression numbers, a catastrophe for millions of individuals and families. 

Hundreds of thousands of businesses may fail. 

State and federal treasuries will soon be strained to the breaking point. The federal treasury was almost empty even before this virus exploded, because Trump cut taxes and promised his cuts would pay for themselves.

 

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“We have $21 trillion in debt. When this [tax cut] really kicks in we’ll start paying off that debt like water.”  

President Trump, July 26, 2018

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Because official numbers lag, preliminary reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a loss of “only” 701,000 jobs last month. Once the figures are adjusted in April the damage is almost sure to be ten times as bad. 

So ends a streak of job growth, started in October 2010, continuing for the last 76 months Mr. Obama was in office. The streak continued for 37 additional months under Mr. Trump – although fewer jobs were added monthly during his portion of the streak. There’s nothing complex about the math. If you look at the chart below, you can see which president “inherited a mess.” The facts show it wasn’t Donald J. Trump, as he has so often complained.

 

Now, should he be re-elected, he can say he inherited a mess, one he had a major hand in creating himself.

 

  

Officially, the unemployment rose last month to 4.4%, still slightly lower than the 4.7% level in January 2017. 

The percentage of Americans in the work force dropped to 62.7%, lower than the level (62.8%) on the day Trump sat down as president. 

And Trump can’t win the fictitious “War on Coal.” That’s after his E.P.A. (led by a former coal and gas industry lobbyist) has trashed most of the regulations meant to protect clean air and clean water. There were 50,900 men and women mining coal for a living the day Trump took over. 

As of April 1, there were 49,800.

 

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TO BE FAIR, not all of this damage is the fault of President Trump. As a good liberal, with his wits about him, this blogger would admit that no president could have avoided all the damage. 

Unfortunately, the president we have is an idiot as far as science is concerned. And the flatterers around him don’t dare brook him, no matter what idiocies spew from his lips. The failure of the Trump administration to act quickly, or to take the science seriously, ensured that the country would be hit harder than needs be. It was going to be hit very hard – even if Trump had done everything right; but governors took the lead. The State of Washington, hit hardest from the first, issued a quick “stay-at-home” order and slowed the spread. The president got mad and called the governor “a snake,” and kept insisting his administration had the virus under control. 

The Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine looked at what was happening on the Pacific coast and took quick action to put his state under lockdown. On March 29, Ohio had 1,653 confirmed cases. As of today (with the state updating later this afternoon), that number has grown to 2,902.

 

On that same day, March 29, the situation in Florida was getting out of hand. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a huge fan of President Trump, refused to take strong action, except to warn people from New York and New Jersey not to visit his state. Florida had 4,246 cases at that point. 

Then the explosion came. Currently, Florida has 9,585 cases – and I think you could argue that Ohio should keep any cars with Florida license plates from crossing the Brent Spence Bridge. 

Georgia, led by another big fan of President Trump, was also slow to shut down, issuing a stay-at-home order only on Thursday. Now the state has 5,831 confirmed cases of its own.

 

The president has finally said he may consider a nationwide stay-at-home order. But he’s been slow to the party. People in thirty-eight states are already under stay-at-home rules. Seven more states have orders covering parts of their populations. Only five, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Arkansas have avoided stay-at-home edicts. Nationally, nine out of every ten adults are under orders to stay home and somewhere close to 100% of K-12 students have been or will soon be told to remain away from class. If we take just those five states open for business, all five have closed schools. Ten states have ended school for the rest of the year. California and Nebraska are making a similar recommendation. 

Any good news? Not much, save for the fact that doctors, nurses and first responders are showing up for work despite grave risks. Robert Craft, owner of the New England Patriots, flew one of his jets to China and picked up more than a million critically needed N95 protective masks. 

 

FUN FACT – NITWITS: At today’s press conference, the President of the United States said he hoped to come in below projected death-toll models for the coronavirus.

Since the topic is death, he decides to add a joke, as even Fox News must report. “The models show hundreds of thousands of people are going to die,” he says. “I want to come way under the models. The professionals did the models. I was never involved in a model. But – at least this kind of a model.” 

Fox points out, making the best of his nitwitted aside, that Melania Trump was a model. They don’t bring up the Playboy model Don was banging while married to his third wife, or his previous claim he once dated super model Carla Brunei. 

(Brunei scoffed at that claim and seemed aghast that anyone would think she had such poor taste in men.)

 

FUN FACT – DUMBELLS: Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia admits today he did not know COVID-19 could be spread by asymptomatic persons. “This is a game changer for us,” he says, cluelessly.