About Those Improved Unemployment Numbers

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President Trump held a Rose Garden press conference Friday to crow about the improving economy. Hitting a new low, he even invoked the shade of the lynched George Floyd, whom Trump imagined smiling down from heaven at the good economy.

Trump’s happy state was based on a Thursday Bureau of Labor Statistics report, which bore the surprising news that the unemployment rate fell in May, thanks to the fact that the economy had added jobs in such fields as construction, restaurants, and retail trade. Officially, the economy added 2.5 million payroll jobs, cutting the unemployment rate to 13.3 percent.

Trump went on to predict a V-shaped recovery that will be roaring along at pre-corona levels just in time for his November election. “This is far better than a V,” he said, “This is a rocket ship.” As my grandmother used to say, he should live so long.

For starters, official unemployment is down in part because millions of workers are staying on payrolls only thanks to the Paycheck Protection Program. That expires in three weeks, on June 30. It was extended six months in the House-passed HEROES Act, which Mitch McConnell adamantly opposes. So McConnell could help sandbag Trump’s imagined recovery.

As the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould explains in this indispensable short piece, if you add to the officially unemployed statistic those workers who were staying home for health or family reasons but reported themselves as employed, and workers who reported that they had left the labor force but would seek work if it were available, the adjusted unemployment rate for May is 19.7 percent.

The clincher is the number of workers still drawing unemployment compensation, which was just under 30 million the week of May 16, according to the same BLS report.

In addition, while the private sector added jobs in May, state and local government employment declined by several hundred thousand. Here again, if the trillion dollars of aid to those governments in the HEROES Act is not passed, that loss will turn into a cascade.

So Trump should hold the champagne. And if he and his Senate Republicans do not get their signals straight, they will rain on his imagined parade.

Coda: Some reporters complained that their chairs at the Rose Garden event were too close together, defying social-distancing guidelines in order to make for nice visuals. It’s not as if anyone is making them attend or as if their presence counts as reporting.

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