The economy is doing great. You just have to stop looking for work to see it.
The Labor Department says jobless claims fell to 208,000 last week. Fewest in ten weeks. Somebody get the champagne.
Now read the rest of the damn sentence.
June payrolls: 57,000 jobs. Less than half the month before. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.2%, and here’s the part they hope you skip — it dropped because people stopped looking. They left the labor force and stopped being counted. That’s not an economy getting better. That’s an economy that beat a woman until she stopped filing complaints.
They handed us a headline about the fewest claims in ten weeks and buried the fact that the reason the number looks good is that a bunch of Americans gave up. You don’t file for unemployment when you’ve stopped believing anyone is hiring. The number didn’t fall because people found work. It fell because hope died quietly enough to help the press release.
This is the same shit they’ve been pulling for forty years. “The economy is strong.” For who? For the people who can’t find a full-time job with benefits? For the family working two part-time schedules and praying nobody gets sick? For the town where the plant closed and nobody came back?
Fifty-seven thousand jobs in a country of 330 million people and they want a standing ovation. Meanwhile the people who stopped looking aren’t counted, aren’t helped, and sure as hell aren’t forgotten — they were never goddamn remembered.
The workers got the spin. The donors got the tax cut. The rest of us got told the economy is great by people who haven’t looked for a job since 1987.
Read the fine print.
Source story: US jobless claims fall to 208,000, fewest in 10 weeks.