Tag: unemployment

Lindsey Graham won’t stop attacking workers who’ve lost their jobs

Lindsey Graham won’t stop attacking workers who’ve lost their jobs

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) continued to attack laid-off workers in the middle of a health crisis, vowing that he would do everything he could to block an extension of additional unemployment benefits once they expire at the end of July.

“July the 31st is when this expires and I promise you, over our dead bodies, this will get reauthorized,” Graham said in front of  South Carolina’s COVID-19 advisory team on Tuesday.

Graham argued that the benefits are so generous that people will opt to receive them rather than go to work, and called them an “aberration” he promised to fix. Continue reading.

CBO: Unemployment rate could hit 12 percent by summer

The new estimate was based in part on news that new weekly unemployment claims hit 6.6 million

The Congressional Budget Office says the unemployment rate will shoot up above 10 percent and gross domestic product will contract by at least 7 percent in the second quarter in an updated economic forecast reflecting the disruption caused by the coronavirus.

The decline in GDP could be “much larger,” CBO Director Phillip Swagel wrote in a blog post Thursday where he noted that the forecast included the impacts from the more than $2 trillion law signed into law Friday, March 27. Swagel called the estimates “very preliminary” based on economic data available as of Thursday morning.

“CBO expects that the economy will contract sharply during the second quarter of 2020 as a result of the continued disruption of commerce stemming from the spread of the novel coronavirus,” Swagel wrote. Continue reading.

Donald Trump flubs how unemployment is calculated

The following article by Louis Jacobson was posted on the Politifact website April 4, 2017:

“When you look for a job, you can’t find it and you give up. You are now considered statistically employed.”

— Donald Trump on Tuesday, April 4th, 2017 in a CEO town hall

At a town hall with CEOs, President Donald Trump revived some of his longstanding concerns about how the nation’s unemployment statistics are calculated.

Appearing to reference the number of Americans out of work, Trump said, “We have 100 million people if you look. You know, the real number’s not 4.6 percent (for the unemployment rate). They told me I had 4.6 percent last month. I’m doing great. I said yeah, but what about the hundred million people? A lot of those people came out and voted for me. I call them the forgotten man, the forgotten woman. But a lot of those people — a good percentage of them would like to have jobs and they don’t. You know, one of the statistics that, to me, is just ridiculous — so, the 4.6 sounds good. But when you look for a job, you can’t find it and you give up. You are now considered statistically employed. But I don’t consider those people employed.” Continue reading “Donald Trump flubs how unemployment is calculated”