The Great American Comeback: Unemployment Rate Falls As Economy Adds Jobs

Among the many stories we had heard over the past few months, economic “experts” believed that, with a shuttered American economy, the unemployment rate would rival or even pass the rate we saw during the Great Depression of 25%, with tens of millions, or perhaps even more, losing their jobs.
 
In some small way, we were going in that direction, but with businesses opening back up in most states (and the riots essentially destroying any argument for keeping the lockdown restrictions, so silver-lining), we are beginning to see once again the sort of great economic news we were witnessing over the last three and a half years.
 
According to the latest job’s report, the unemployment rate fell to 13.3% and the economy added 2.5 million jobs, as businesses began to be allowed to reopen throughout May.
 
Just a month earlier, the economy had shed around 20.5 million jobs, the worst monthly decline on record dating back to 1939. So to see this sudden turnaround (which should not really be all that surprising if we are opening back up) is quite the great and refreshing news to hear.
 
According to Breitbart: “Economists had expected the unemployment rate to rise to nearly 20 percent and the economy to shed an additional 8 million jobs.” And this is perhaps the biggest reason as to why I put quotation marks around the word “expert”; these people really don’t know what they are talking about half the time, at best.
 
They expected the economy, which has been reopening as of late, to shed an additional 8 million jobs, when in reality, that 8 million jobs lost turned out to be 2.5 million jobs CREATED. This was easily the biggest one-month jobs gain in recorded U.S. history since 1939.
 
After hitting a record-high of 14.7%, the unemployment rate has gone back down after a couple of months of increase.
 
Breitbart also explained that “[t]he mandatory closures of many businesses and stay-at-home orders slammed what had been a very healthy labor market hard. The economy added jobs for 113 straight weeks through February, a record streak of growth. The unemployment rate was 3.5 percent in February. And yet job creation was running very hot, with the economy adding an average of 211,000 new jobs each month.”
 
This only further shows the strength that the Trump economy had before the virus hit. For a little over two straight years, we had been adding jobs to our economy, and even despite being at a virtual full-employment, we still kept on adding more jobs every month.
 
The economy was particularly helped by the fact that the federal government was pumping money into it and supplementing aid for businesses to retain jobs. Roughly 150 million taxpayers received stimulus payments, the Treasury’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) “is backing $669 billion of loans to small businesses” so that they can be forgiven if borrowers don’t lay off their employees and the federal government has been “providing an additional $600 on top of state unemployment benefits”, allowing some Americans to be paid even more money.
 
Record data also suggests the labor market to be stabilizing and improving following the record-high of 6.8 million jobless claims back in March, with each following week seeing less and less jobless claims being filed relatively speaking. Last week, the number fell to roughly 1.8 million jobless claims.
 
Over the past few months, over 40 million Americans in total lost their jobs, but ongoing claims remain at around 20 million, indicating that over half the people that lost their jobs in that time span have regained employment.
 
In sum, shutting down our economy was an extremely costly endeavor that was not at all worth it in the end, especially as data suggests that there was “no statistical connection between improved health outcomes and pandemic policies that forced nearly 40 million people into the unemployment lines,” according to The Federalist.
 
In other words, we shut down our economy and left tens of millions unemployed, and destroyed tons of small businesses in the process, for no statistical connection between improved health outcomes and the lockdown orders. The lockdown orders did not contribute anything positive to keeping people from dying of the Chinese coronavirus.
 
In the end, the lockdown did nothing but kill off the jobs we are now trying to get back. If the riots themselves weren’t enough proof that we do not need the lockdown orders to stay in place, this definitely does. They achieved nothing for the sake of keeping people from dying of the virus and only contributed to the worst economic news we had seen in nearly a century.
 
Whoever is still insisting that we continue with the lockdown orders (and even Whitler is easing up on them) is a bad faith actor seeking only to destroy the economy for nothing more than political benefit to hurt Trump’s chances at re-election.
 
Let’s open back up in full. Yes, that even means New York (because God knows the lockdown orders aren’t being applied fairly, so what’s the point?)
 
Jeremiah 29:11
“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”