In other news, the UN's International Labour Organization says the world won't return to pre-pandemic levels of employment for a long time; possibly years. About 400 million jobs have been lost worldwide and data is getting worse because the coronavirus hasn't been controlled.
In related news, about half of American adults don't have jobs with a deficit of about 30 million compared to pre-pandemic levels.
The employment-population ratio — the number of employed people as a percentage of the U.S. adult population — plunged to 52.8% in May, meaning 47.2% of Americans are jobless, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics. As the coronavirus-induced shutdowns tore through the labor market, the share of population employed dropped sharply from a recent high of 61.2% in January, farther away from a post-war record of 64.7% in 2000.
This ratio is a broader look at the employment picture. It takes into account adults not in the labor force and captures those who were discouraged about the prospects of finding a job, whereas the unemployment rate looks at people actively looking for a job.
The economy still shed nearly 1.5 million jobs last week. But assuming the economy turned around tomorrow and started adding about ~150,000 jobs per month as has been typical under Trump, it would take somewhere around 200 months to recoup 30 million jobs. You can see how much of a problem this is. It would take 120 months to create 30 million jobs even if we added 250,000 per month. Even under that more optimistic scenario, it would take 10 years. And the economy could lose millions more jobs as the coronavirus resurges. Just doing this math was a little depressing to me.
And in even more related news, Politico reports that Trump has a sad and has told close associates that he thinks he's losing. Their strategy for turning things around is to attack Joe Biden, but they've already been doing that and it hasn't helped Trump so far.
The president has privately come to that grim realization in recent days, multiple people close to him told POLITICO, amid a mountain of bad polling and warnings from some of his staunchest allies that he's on course to be a one-term president. [...]
Trump's team insists the president’s numbers are bound to improve as he steps up his public events and intensifies his attacks on Biden. People involved in the campaign say they have settled on two main avenues to go after the former vice president: That he’s beholden to liberals who want to do away with law and order, and that he’s a consummate Washington insider.
Still, Trump advisers acknowledge that tearing down Biden will require a level of discipline he isn’t demonstrating. They have pleaded with Trump — who has used his Twitter account to vilify critics from MSNBC host Joe Scarborough to former National Security Adviser John Bolton — to stop focusing on slights that mean little to voters.
The same old shit just doesn't work when things are as real as they are now for most Americans. Trumpism isn't hypothetical now the way it was in 2016.
You can't "Sleepy Joe" your way out of 130,000 deaths (and counting) and an even bigger catastrophe building on the horizon.