Friday’s government jobs report is already three weeks old. As Daily Kos’ Meteor Blades wrote, while not by design, the true magnitude of job losses in the United States will not be represented at all by those numbers. But to get even the slightest handle on the scope of what is coming in the next few days and weeks and months, estimates range from 9 million to 26 million jobs directly impacted by the pandemic so far. What we do know is that new unemployment claims rose well over 6 and half million just last week.
We know that unemployment claims numbers have been designed to undersell the true numbers of people in need of help and employment. But that only means that the numbers are almost always artificially lower than the real problem. The surge in unemployment claims is the result of a national crisis that tests Trump and friends’ bogus assertions that America has a bad cold. To put that into perspective, here’s a short GIF you can send off to friends and family that illustrates the historic nature of our current unemployment issues.
Remember to breathe.
One of the failures of the multitrillion-dollar bailout that Trump and the GOP dragged their heels on is that it does not take into account how weakened and booby-trapped our social safety net programs have become under conservative leadership. This is something that Florida is dealing with right now. For years, conservatives have used a two-pronged attack on protections for citizens in the unemployment sphere, the first being to try and cut the budgeting of unemployment benefits, and the second was to create sizable hurdles while choking off the infrastructure that provides those benefits. Both of these gimmicks create the singular result bootstrap conservatives want, which is to artificially lower the numbers of people applying for and receiving unemployment. It is an sham lowering because it elides the issue of how many people actually need, want, and could benefit from some financial help.
As Politico writes, Republicans know that GOP-built unemployment systems were made to hide problems and not deal with them. The big issue for Republican leadership now is that those chickens have come home to roost, and every active GOP operative wants someone else to take the blame. Florida’s unemployment system uses a measly $77.9 million, and predictably the surge in unemployment numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic is a test it is not equipped to pass.
“It’s a sh-- sandwich, and it was designed that way by Scott,” said one DeSantis advisor. “It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.”
To be clear, the Republican Party is not interested in seeing this problem as a reckoning of bad policy. They are in conservative crisis mode where it’s rat-eat-rat, and the blame game is the only maneuvering being done. Remember, this political party isn’t even interested in saving the lives of Americans—they could care less about whether or not the ones that do survive thrive.
Graph credit: Len Kiefer.
