Ali Velshi: The jobs numbers aren't ‘rigged.' Trump owns this economy.

Yahoo

2 days ago

This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 2 episode of 'Velshi.'
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released an alarming monthly employment report, exposing that the United States' job market is much more fragile than many had expected. Only 73,000 net new jobs — that's new jobs created, minus jobs lost — were added in July.
But worse were the revisions to the two previous job reports. May's jobs report was revised from 144,000 jobs to only 19,000. June's 147,000 jobs were mostly a mirage, too; it turns out only 14,000 jobs were added that month. That's 258,000 fewer jobs than previously thought. The average for the last three months is 35,000, far fewer than the 150,000 or more needed for job growth to keep up with population growth in this country.
Now, revisions to government statistics are normal in subsequent months. It's the nature of large numbers. They happen regularly, but they almost never show this dramatic a shift. It was a bad report, no doubt about it. It was particularly bad for a president who, in political terms, owns this job market and this economy, which has been roiled by the chaos of his tariffs and trade wars.
But instead of addressing the numbers and the challenge they present, Donald Trump said they were fake and fired the head of the department that collects them. The president baselessly claimed the jobs numbers were 'rigged' and accused the fired commissioner of inflating numbers for the Biden administration and sabotaging them under his own administration.
Trump baselessly claimed that jobs reports were overstated during the previous presidency to prop up Joe Biden and are now being underestimated to hurt Trump. The president has zeroed in on the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, labeling her a 'Biden appointee' and ignoring the fact that she was confirmed in the Senate by a bipartisan vote of 86-8, with six senators not voting. Among the 86 yeas was now-Vice President JD Vance.
This is becoming a common refrain for Trump. He has also accused Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, of being a Biden appointee. But Trump is the one who elevated him to the position in 2017.
Friday also marked the president's self-imposed, but often delayed, deadline for reaching trade deals with countries across the world. Back in April, Trump claimed he had already struck 200 deals, despite the fact that there aren't even 200 countries in the world. The number of deals before the Aug. 1 deadline was closer to eight, though you could arguably consider the European Union, which is a single trading bloc, as 27 countries.
Deals were struck with the European Union, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, the United Kingdom and Vietnam, and talks are ongoing with Mexico and China. Nowhere close to 200. That was just a lie.
An executive order signed by Trump late Thursday outlined tariff rates for 69 countries, including several changes from the rates announced on 'Liberation Day' in April. Smaller countries like Lesotho and Guyana were originally hit with massive tariffs, simply because they are poor countries that sell more to America than they buy and as a result have large trade deficits with America, but those rates have since been cut.
The day before, Trump also jacked up tariffs on Brazil to 50% for what he views as the political persecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is on trial for attempting a coup in 2022. Trump has called that trial a 'witch hunt.'
Forget a deal with one of the U.S.' oldest and biggest trading partners, Canada. The White House is upping the ante on our neighbor to the north, announcing a 35% tariff on Canadian goods, up from 25%. That's on goods not included in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.
Plus, on Wednesday, the Commerce Department said gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the largest measure of economic activity we have, increased at a 3% annual rate in the second quarter.
Some journalists jumped on that exciting top-line number, one that seems far more impressive than the first quarter's GDP increase of just 0.5%.
But if some of those journalists had taken about 45 seconds to look under that shiny hood, they'd have found a far less impressive rebound than it initially seemed. Here's why: That upward swing in GDP growth came from a massive and fully expected decline in imports, after a massive and fully expected increase in imports in the first quarter in anticipation of tariffs. Lots of money left our economy to bring goods in before the first tariff deadlines in April, so when imports sharply dropped, the smaller resulting trade deficit boosted the GDP growth figure.
But that's not so much evidence of economic prosperity as it is the result of a math equation and how GDP is calculated.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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