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Friday's February job report looks to be disastrous: The GOP excuses are already flying [1]
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Date: 2025-03-06
The US Bureau of Labor will release the February jobs report on Friday. We know it will be bad because Challenger, Gray & Christmas dropped a bombshell report Thursday morning that showed a 245% increase in announced layoffs from January to February, and the worst February since 2009. From the report:
U.S.-based employers announced 172,017 job cuts in February, the highest total for the month since 2009 when 186,350 job cuts were recorded. It is the highest monthly total since July 2020 when 262,649 cuts were announced.
If dry analysis is not enough, we also know it will be terrible because rightwingers are already trying to protect Trump from the bad news.
On Wednesday. Fox News’ Larry Kudlow was chatting with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins about the predicted flat or declining job numbers. He said:
KUDLOW: “Some very, very smart people are telling me that the jobs number that’s coming at the February jobs number that’s coming out Friday could be flat, even negative, Brookie! The GDP now tracker from the Atlanta Fed is showing, I mean, for the first quarter, a minus two and a half or -2.8%, and we’ve had lousy numbers on things like housing and business investment. My generic point here, with respect to affordability and the economy, is we’re going to have to suffer through some bad news!”
He then weaseled:
“And I’ve got people on the left who are blaming Trump. How can you blame Trump when he wasn’t President when these seeds were planted?”
Brookie was quick to join the deflection.
ROLLINS: “Well, you couldn’t be more right about that because we’ve only been here 30 plus days. You can’t turn an entire economy around in 30 days.”
This point has superficial merit. But it is sophistry. Hiring decisions are made based on economic expectations. If business management thinks the economy will ramp up, they keep hold of marginal employees and hire to meet anticipated demand. For example, businesses hire employees to deal with holiday sales spikes.
If they expect a downturn, they do the opposite.
If businesses waited around to see what would happen before making employment decisions, they wouldn’t hire economists and business analysts to read economic tea leaves.
In addition, as it was two rightwingers consoling themselves that it was someone else’s fault, you can be sure hypocrisy was hitting the fan. While they are quick to blame a Democrat for bad things that happen during a Republican President’s term, conservatives will take credit for all the positive statistics after a Republican is elected President, even as the sitting Democratic President finishes his term.
Even the man desperate to blame others for dismal GDP forecasts in his second term is willing to take credit for good things that happened before he was President the first time. Trump congratulated himself on the Q4 2016 stock market increase, which occurred during his election, but while Obama was still President. He was not alone. Most analyses of the rise in the stock market credited Trump’s election.
None of this bad news will make any difference to the MAGAs. They will always find the silver lining to the tornado. However, the voters who swung to Trump in 2024 will wonder if the product lives up to the advertising.
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