Economy
Mike Pence Gets Hammered After Claiming Trump Created More Jobs in 3 Months Than Obama Did in 8 Years
It’s always hilarious when Vice President Mike Pence gets owned and that’s exactly what happened Wednesday night following an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity when he opened himself up to a good swift kicking by claiming the Trump administration has created more jobs during the past three months than President Obama did during his two terms in office.
Which led economics experts to let him know he was wrong, wrong, wrongity, wrong.
Pence told Hannity that the president had stumbled through, er I mean, led the country through “the worst pandemic in 100 years,” claiming “We’ve already created more jobs in the last three months than Joe Biden and Barack Obama created in their eight years in office,” Business Insider reported.
Cue the economics experts to remind Pence that he seemingly “forgot” about April, when the U.S. economy hemorrhaged a 20.8 million jobs courtesy of the coronavirus pandemic. Only about 9 million, or just under half of those jobs have since been recovered.
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Under the Obama administration, the economy added a net total of 11.6 million jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports. This picture hasn’t looked nearly as rosy under the Trump administration and if April’s figures are added in, the U.S. is now down 11.8 million jobs when compared to immediately before the pandemic.
In a tweet, Betsey Stevenson, who served as an economist in Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, shared a tweet that showed just how deep the job crisis is in the U.S.
https://t.co/Cxq3Ltj9me pic.twitter.com/CGCXEQioXy
— Betsey Stevenson (@BetseyStevenson) August 13, 2020
And at least a couple of experts hinted the Trump administration might be doing a little cherry-picking the economic data.
What about the last *4* months? https://t.co/y4WRwnhX7G
— Ernie Tedeschi (@ernietedeschi) August 13, 2020
Alternatively phrased, we've lost more jobs in the last four months than we've lost over the entirety of any previous recession. https://t.co/unKKtWHXkP
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) August 13, 2020
Kind of like bragging about losing 20 pounds after you put on 50. https://t.co/PWcAG0x6B7
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) August 13, 2020
The July jobs report, released last week, looked equally gloomy, with the U.S. regaining just 1.8 million jobs and that the unemployment rate was 10.2 percent, higher than it was at any point during the Great Recession more than a decade ago.
And the data compiled by the BLS is pretty sobering: 20.8 million jobs vanished in April. In May, only 2.7 million jobs were regained, and the statistics for June and July were equally depressing, with only 4.8 million jobs and 1.8 million jobs regained respectively.
Trump has pushed to reopen the economy by trying to say that the measures used to attempt to contain the virus were more disastrous than the virus itself, but experts now say the loosened restrictions that resulted have led to further surges in infections last month, leading to more deaths. These tragedies have set the economy back even further, but then that’s how Trump handles things. He’s tone-deaf on issues like this and it’s unlikely that he cares that 170,000 Americans (and counting) have now died in this pandemic.
It’s just not in his emotional makeup.
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