Forty million Americans are currently unemployed and the unemployment rate is still hovering at over 10 percent if you believe the latest government report, but Mike Pence is still touting the economy under Donald Trump and lying about Obama’s jobs record to do it.
Heading into 2020, the unemployment rate had been under 4 percent largely thanks to the continuation of former President Barack Obama’s economic policies. Trump’s own policies resulted in the start of a minor recession in February, which exploded into an economic catastrophe when Trump refused to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously. Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs.
In a panic, Trump moved to reopen the country early, choosing the stock market over the lives of 170,000 Americans.
Trump has been bragging about jobs reports ever since because they show a few million Americans getting the jobs back that they lost. In short, Trump has added no jobs at all.
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But Pence claimed otherwise and declared that Trump has created more jobs in three months than Obama did in eight years.
We’ve created more jobs in the last 3 months than Joe Biden and Barack Obama created in their 8 years in office. pic.twitter.com/kwk5YhL3TJ
— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) August 13, 2020
Again, these are jobs that came back after the country reopened, people who merely went back to work. And let’s not forget that these millions of jobs would not have been lost in the first place had Trump taken the pandemic seriously.
But Pence’s math is so ludicrous that CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called it out.
This claim is bonkers.
1) He’s starting after a loss of 22M jobs, counting only the 9M added back
2) *Even if you accept his premise*, which you shouldn’t, economy added more jobs (11M) under Obama. (And Obama inherited deep recession; gain was more than 15M from 2010 low) pic.twitter.com/LHe399Qo0E— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) August 13, 2020
In short, Trump cannot claim that he created any jobs these last few months. He is counting people who already had jobs but were temporarily sent home to help stop the spread of the virus. They were going to get their jobs back anyway. Most Americans, however, have not been so lucky, or else the number of jobs “added” would be much higher. Unemployment is still unacceptably high and tens of millions are out of work. That’s not something to brag about, especially since Trump inherited a humming economy from Obama and an unemployment rate just a little over 4 percent.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
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