BREAKING: Awful Jobs Report; 23,000 Jobs Lost; May & June Numbers Revised Down | Receipts Live - The Bulwark

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Transcript64 lines

[00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing out of the Bulwark, sitting in for JVL along with Katherine Rampel. We are doing another receipts live, and this one is. This is a bad one. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The numbers for the jobs came out this morning and they sucked. Let's just be real. They really sucked. Catherine.
[00:20]
B
Yeah. I want to clarify. When you say this is a bad one, it's not that this episode is a bad one.
[00:25]
A
Well, that's tbd. Well, let's see how we handle each other here. You know, there might be too much friction.
[00:32]
B
Yeah. The jobs numbers were not good. They were expected to be modestly positive. You know, that employers added a few jobs. In fact, we lost jobs in July. We lost jobs in July. And the previous couple of months, which had looked pretty strong, stronger than people had thought, like, initially. Turns out once the revisions came in, we actually had 100,000 fewer jobs than originally reported. So it's like, been very anemic. Job growth, which may be charged.
[01:06]
A
Look at that chart.
[01:08]
C
Oof.
[01:08]
A
Well, there's a lot of red in that chart. More red than I expected. Those are negative job growth. Yes, Months. And that is pretty brutal. Let me give you the top line. Come in. Lost 23,000 jobs in July, while May and June's reports revised down by a combined 103,000 jobs. Unemployment rate actually ticked down a hair to 4.1% as. And this is the thing the White House has been like, yeah, we got the unemployment rate lower, but this is why 260,000 people left the labor force. In other words, employers aren't hiring workers and workers are starting to notice them, can't get jobs, so they're just leaving the labor force altogether. Prior to getting on here, I said, what are your three big takeaway or data points from this report? What are they?
[01:53]
B
So a few things. One would be the. The revisions from the previous couple months, which I just mentioned, because it, it means that we should be, like, revisiting how strong we thought the economy was before and what we thought was like a really, really resilient job market, despite all of the crap that's been thrown at it in terms of war and tariffs and all the other erratic policy measures and shocks and all that. Like, it looked like it was pretty resilient, maybe a little less resilient than we thought. That would be data point number one. Data point number two would be the fact that the share of people who, who are unemployed, who have been unemployed long term, six months or more is now at like a quarter of that group. So like, that's normally, you know, unemployment is a regular feature of an economy. People cycle into jobs, people cycle out of jobs. It sucks when you lose your job, but as long as you can find new ones, like, it's a temporary pain. The problem here is that this is a persistent long term pain for a lot of workers. There just aren't that many opportunities. So that would be my second thing that I would harp on and then, sorry, my cat has strong opinions about the job market too.
[03:16]
A
Live TV folks.
[03:18]
B
There you go. The third thing that I think I would emphasize is what's going on with manufacturing, which Donald Trump loves to talk about the manufacturing industry in the abstract. You know, when he was coming into office, about how he's going to have this major renaissance and this comeback. And in fact, we have fewer manufacturing jobs today than we did when Donald Trump took office.
[03:41]
A
I thought there was manufacturing job gains in this report. But they were kind of minimal, right?
[03:45]
B
They were minimal. And you know that I try to focus like on the longer term because any one month can be very noisy. So there's like a minimal, basically not that different from zero in this past month. But from the time that Donald Trump took office, we have had a net loss. So that's not great, particularly given the things that Donald Trump ran on and that volatility that we've seen there and the general downward trend, that's a reflection partly of structural problems like manufacturing is just not as important a part of the U.S. economy today as it was 50 years ago, 70 years ago, 100 years ago. But also the things that Donald Trump has actually been doing with regard to manufacturing have been very damaging. You know, like having tariffs on inputs like steel and aluminum, very bad for industries that depend on steel and aluminum as inputs like the auto industry or. Yeah. Or appliances or whatever.
[04:48]
A
So long and short of a good market for house cats, bad market for anyone else.
[04:52]
C
Look at that.
[04:53]
A
I just want to. That data set at the end, we have this chart up. If you just look at that number, the months, the five months listed right there. So March 214,000 jobs created. April 148,000. May 63, June 20, July negative 23. I mean, that's an obvious trend, a negative trend. Now you said we got to look at the big picture. And I don't know, is five months, six months a big enough window for you to draw or extrapolate anything from a trend line like that? Which seems pretty bleak.
[05:26]
B
I think the big takeaway is, again, The. The economy and the job market are not as resilient as once thought. I don't think we're in recession yet.
[05:37]
A
That's where I was. I was kind of tiptoeing there, but
[05:39]
B
I didn't want to say I don't think we're in recession yet. You know, most numbers are still positive, like weekly positive things like GDP growth, for example. You know, it's not in negative territory yet.
[05:51]
A
We're not positive. You don't mean week by week. You mean they are not.
[05:55]
B
No, no, no. Week. W E A K. Yes, yes, yes. So it's like still above zero, but maybe doesn't feel that much better than being at zero or slightly below zero. So it's like, you know, things are fragile, I guess, is what I would say, but they're not in free fall. And a lot of this makes the Federal Reserve's job harder because.
[06:20]
A
Pause on that, because I want to do a whole segment on what happens with worship. But before we do that, I want to talk about your boy, Kevin Hassett. My boy's boy? JBL's boy, Kevin Hassett.
[06:31]
B
So Kevin, JBL deserves ownership more than I do.
[06:35]
A
Kevin gets the job of putting, you know, a good spin on a big turd. And this is his job, and he plays it very well. I'm gonna give him credit for that. You know, I don't think he does the best spin, but he goes out there and he just takes, you know, bullets, and he, you know, has a smile on his face. And today was a day where he really brought his. I don't want to call it a game, because it really wasn't that great, but he did bring it. So let's play Kevin Hassett being asked about these jobs numbers, and I want you to decipher the spin here.
[07:05]
B
Sure.
[07:06]
C
The weakness in this number were really just two things. Government workers and a sort of rebound from all the employment we got from the World cup because the World cup was ending. If you throw out the World cup of the government workers, we actually had a number that was about plus 100,000, which is about what we expected, given that the unemployment rate went down. And there's so many other factors, like manufacturing booming, capital spending booming, real wages growing for the typical manufacturing worker, almost $4,000 since President Trump took office after adjusting for inflation. So there's all these strong numbers out there.
[07:40]
A
There's so much misdirection and outright untruth there. But what do we want to go through them all?
[07:46]
B
I mean, this is the prototypical other Than that. How was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Response. Right. Like, it's like, well, if you strip out sectors that are doing badly are actually doing really well. And just like, if you, if you want to, like, dig down into the weeds here on some of the specific claims that he's made.
[08:06]
A
Yes.
[08:06]
B
So he's like, oh, it's all government jobs. It is true that there were losses in government jobs, but that was mostly about losses in local government education. Not. This is not like an artifact of jobs.
[08:19]
A
A job.
[08:20]
B
I'm sorry, A job is a job. Also true. Also true. But I think the spin he was trying to put on it was like, you know, this is about drowning government in a bathtub or whatever.
[08:30]
A
That's what they always say. It's like, look, these are, these are jobs we don't care about. These aren't real jobs there. This is taxpayer jobs. And so you should be grateful. I don't know. Jobs. A job people need.
[08:41]
B
Yeah.
[08:42]
A
The salary.
[08:43]
B
Yeah. And look like, given that it was local education jobs, just to be fair, there could have been some weird seasonal adjustment things going on there because it's
[08:52]
A
like summer school or something like that.
[08:54]
B
I don't know. Yeah. So it could be. So I don't want to make too much of that, but I would not write it off as being about, like, this is just clearing out the dead wood of government. I don't think that's the case. And as you say, a job is a job. So he said that he talked about the World Cup.
[09:11]
A
Yes.
[09:11]
B
First of all, I don't think that's right based on the timing for like, when the world.
[09:17]
A
Yeah, let's think about. So this world. This is the July jobs numbers. Okay, let's. I'm going to do this all Google when did the World cup and July 19th. So there was.
[09:31]
B
Yeah, so. So like the way that they, the way that they survey companies. That doesn't make any sense. Like, people still would have been shown showing as employed because it's about like, did you work at all during that pay period anyway? So I think that's.
[09:45]
A
There were fewer games as they, as the tournament got tighter and people were
[09:49]
B
like, yeah, but whatever. I'm just, I don't, I don't think that's it. And, and besides that, the sectors that lost jobs besides local and local education, so that would be like public schools were largely retail. So I don't really know. Maybe that's connected to the World Cup. Maybe it's like people were shopping less at Walmart because they weren't Like Dick's
[10:13]
A
Sporting Goods or something.
[10:14]
B
I don't know.
[10:15]
A
Hey, the cat's back.
[10:16]
B
Cat is. Cat is back. Sorry about that, everyone.
[10:20]
A
She. She has real thoughts about the World Cup.
[10:22]
B
She was happy.
[10:24]
A
She's not happy. Spain prevailing there. All right.
[10:28]
B
I just think it's. I think that's.
[10:30]
A
And besides, what about his wage growth claim? Because that one, that felt factually not true to me. He's like, well, wages have really grown relative to inflation that.
[10:40]
B
No, they haven't. I mean, especially not in the last. Whatever. What is. It's. Excuse me, it's August and the war began in late February. Like, no, in that period of time, inflation has been eating up, basically, all of which, I mean, like, if you look, you know, one month over another month, if gas prices fell a little bit and what, like overall. No, your people's paychecks are not going as far as they used to. And it is because specifically of actions that this administration has taken related to the war, related to tariffs and. And other like, own goals to extend. Sorry, this is very distracting. To extend the world.
[11:23]
A
She just does not want to do the live show. I'm gonna rip.
[11:27]
B
She like knows. She knows when I'm on a live zoom or something. Or a show. Yeah.
[11:33]
A
The other thing that Hassan mentioned, and I want to take a little riff on this, let's play what he said about immigration and I'm going to pick up on this one.
[11:41]
C
Now, the break even point for unemployment is about 40,000 because labor force participation is declining. And of course, the other thing is our tight border policy. So we don't have all these foreign illegal workers, you know, stampeding into the economy. And that used to also show up as inflated. Okay.
[12:00]
A
So the idea here, I'm just trying to make sure I understand this, is that we used to have more job growth because we had so many people crossing the border getting jobs and employers were registering them as new employees. That's what he's saying. Right. And now because we don't have that, it means employers are not registering new employees. Now, this makes no sense to me because if you're an employer and you need to hire someone to do a job, you go and you find them whether or not they cross the border or not. You don't just hire someone because they knocked on your door and said, hey, I'm from Honduras, I've been traveling through Mexico and I need to work. You hire someone because you need someone to fulfill a job. So also, let me just add this. The big case for. From J.D. vance and Stephen Miller, around this deportation regime, the big economic case, and they've said it many times, we can probably find video in a, in a second, is that if you get rid of all these illegal immigrants who are here, you're going to open up jobs for a lot of people.
[13:11]
B
Yes.
[13:12]
A
And you're just going to, there's going to be a hiring bonanza of native born Americans.
[13:15]
B
It's a zero sum game. Is, is basically how they frame it, right. That every job that goes to an immigrant is a job that would have gone to a native born American. And now Kevin.
[13:29]
A
But now Kevin's not saying that. Kevin.
[13:31]
B
No, he's saying the opposite. He's saying that like they're not hiring. Yeah, yeah, we've cleared out those workers and also we've cleared out those jobs. That is effectively what he's saying. And there's, and to be clear, there is no evidence, in fact for the initial zero sum argument that suddenly if you got rid of all of the immigrants, that there were going to be, you know, a gazillion new job opportunities, great job opportunities for native born Americans who, but for the immigrants taking their jobs would have been rich, would have been gainfully employed, would have been doing just better on all fronts in the world. There was no evidence for that. You know, there's maybe some evidence that like immigrants compete with each other for jobs or they, you know, newer immigrants compete with old. Like I'm not saying that there's no competition for jobs, but the idea that immigrants were the reason why they were keeping Americans from getting ahead and keeping American native born Americans from getting jobs, it just does not exist. That evidence does not exist. That was the argument that they were making. Now they are pivoting, as you point out, to saying actually we don't want those jobs anyway. Like whatever those jobs were, they shouldn't be done. I don't know, maybe they'll be done by AI, maybe they'll be done by robots. Probably they won't be done by at all. Particularly since immigrants are disproportionately employed in industries that already had labor shortages. So agriculture, other kinds of food services, construction as well as healthcare. So those are some of the industries where now jobs are probably going begging. Our colleague Jonathan Cohn has written expertly about, for example, the health aides, nursing home aides who have been, who are being displaced, people who were on temporary protected status, people from Haiti who were taking jobs working in nursing homes and things like that. Those nursing homes are not going to easily find a lot of Americans Native born Americans who want those jobs. So what's going to happen? We're going to have shortages. We're going to have less available care for native born Americans who rely on the their their friends and neighbors and workers to help take those jobs and fill those jobs and contribute to their commun. So I guess we're supposed to celebrate that now that we're not going to have the same hard working labor force working in fields and food services. And yes, I just want to stress
[16:00]
A
though, because this was so central, the idea here was that okay, we'll get rid of TPS status for Haitians in Miami and that might be disruptive immediately, but there's so many Native born Americans who will come and gladly fill those roles. And yes, we'll get rid of these agricultural workers and that might be a little problematic for our food supplies in the interim, but there's plenty of people out there looking for jobs who are willing to do that hard backbreaking work in the fields and that's going to be great for Native born Americans. It was so central that we, Matt Marshall, I should say our fearless producer, as we were talking, found this clip from Donald Trump at the 2024RNC Convention.

Summary5 min read

Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Bulwark
Episode: BREAKING: Awful Jobs Report; 23,000 Jobs Lost; May & June Numbers Revised Down | Receipts Live
Date: August 7, 2026
Hosts: Sam Stein, Katherine Rampel
Guests/Audio Clips: Kevin Hassett

Episode Overview

This episode dives into the grim July 2026 jobs report, with hosts Sam Stein and Katherine Rampel analyzing disappointing employment numbers and their broader political and economic implications. The discussion covers weakening job growth, labor force participation, persistent long-term unemployment, flaws in political spin around the numbers, and the impacts of immigration policy and manufacturing trends. The conversation maintains an informal, unsparing tone while tackling the serious implications of the current economic climate.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Awful" July Jobs Report (00:00–05:26)

Headline numbers:
- July 2026 saw a loss of 23,000 jobs.
- May and June were both revised downward by a combined 103,000 jobs.
- The unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 4.1%, but only because 260,000 people left the labor force—fewer people looking for work, not more jobs.
Quote (Sam Stein, 00:08):
“The numbers for the jobs came out this morning and they sucked. Let's just be real. They really sucked.”
Labor force concerns:
- Fewer people are participating in the labor force, suggesting discouragement among workers as hiring slows.
Recent job trend:
- There’s a clear negative trajectory:
  - March: +214,000 jobs
  - April: +148,000
  - May: +63,000
  - June: +20,000
  - July: -23,000
Quote (Katherine Rampel, 03:44):
“From the time that Donald Trump took office, we have had a net loss (in manufacturing jobs). So that's not great, particularly given the things that Donald Trump ran on...”

2. Three Main Takeaways From the Report (01:53–05:26)

a. Downward Revisions and Questioned Resilience

Past reports were more optimistic than reality; strong months look much weaker after revisions.
This challenges the narrative that the job market was exceptionally resilient despite global disruptions (wars, tariffs, erratic policy).

b. Rise of Long-term Unemployment

About a quarter of the unemployed have been out of work for six months or more, indicating persistent pain (“This is a persistent long-term pain for a lot of workers. There just aren’t that many opportunities.” — Rampel, 02:52).

c. Manufacturing's Struggles

Minimal job gains in manufacturing for July, but overall, manufacturing jobs are down since Trump’s inauguration.
Structural shifts and harmful policy (tariffs, etc.) cited as reasons.

3. Political Spin and Fact-Checking Kevin Hassett (06:20–11:32)

a. Hassett’s “Spin” Defense

Kevin Hassett (Trump economic advisor, audio clip at 07:05) attributes weak job numbers to:
- Losses in government and World Cup-related jobs.
- Claims “manufacturing booming, capital spending booming, real wages growing.”
Dissection:
- The hosts point out spin, misdirection, and outright falsehoods in Hassett’s commentary.
- Losses in government jobs are mainly local education—“A job is a job. Also true.” (Rampel, 08:19)
- World Cup effect is “nonsense” based on the timing and nature of employment surveys (09:11–09:48).
- Wage growth claims are directly challenged:
  - “No, they haven’t [grown]. ... Inflation has been eating up, basically, all of which.” (Rampel, 10:39)
Memorable moment (Sam Stein & Katherine Rampel, 07:39–07:46):
- “There’s so much misdirection and outright untruth there. But what do we want to go through them all?”
- “This is the prototypical ‘Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?’ response.”

4. Immigration, Labor Supply, and Political Contradictions (11:32–15:59)

a. Hassett on Immigration & Unemployment

Hassett blames “tight border policy” for fewer available jobs (clip, 11:40), suggesting past job growth was inflated by undocumented workers.
Hosts’ rebuttal:
- Sam Stein: “This makes no sense to me—if you need to hire someone, you hire someone, regardless of immigration status.”
- Rampel notes that the “zero-sum” claim (every job given to an immigrant is a job taken from a native-born American) has never been supported by evidence.
- New contradiction: Now, officials argue that excluding immigrants leads to fewer jobs overall, undermining their earlier case.
Quote (Katherine Rampel, 13:30):
- “Now [Hassett’s] saying … we’ve cleared out those workers and also we’ve cleared out those jobs. That is effectively what he’s saying. And … there is no evidence, in fact, for the initial zero-sum argument…”

b. Impact of Immigration Limits

Industries with labor shortages (agriculture, food service, construction, healthcare) are especially hard-hit by reduced immigrant labor.
Example: Loss of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian workers in Miami nursing homes, creating shortages that native-born Americans aren’t eager to fill.
Quote (Rampel, 14:13):
- “Those nursing homes are not going to easily find a lot of native born Americans who want those jobs. So what’s going to happen? We’re going to have shortages.”

5. The Political Framing and What Comes Next (Throughout)

There’s an increasing disconnect between how policymakers are spinning the numbers and the actual experience of American workers and employers.
Hosts predict further labor shortages, service disruptions, and limited upside for the “native-born” workforce.
The Federal Reserve’s job is now even harder due to economic fragility.

Notable Quotes

Sam Stein (00:08):
“The numbers for the jobs came out this morning and they sucked. Let's just be real. They really sucked.”
Katherine Rampel (02:52):
“This is a persistent long-term pain for a lot of workers. There just aren’t that many opportunities.”
Sam Stein (07:39):
“There’s so much misdirection and outright untruth there. But what do we want, to go through them all?”
Katherine Rampel (10:39):
“No, they haven’t [wages grown]. … Inflation has been eating up, basically, all of which.”
Katherine Rampel (13:28):
“Now [Hassett]’s saying … we’ve cleared out those workers and also we’ve cleared out those jobs. That is effectively what he’s saying. … There is no evidence, in fact, for the initial zero-sum argument…”

Memorable Moments

Repeated interjections by Rampel’s cat, adding levity (“Live TV, folks.” 03:15, “The cat’s back.” 10:15)
Hosts debunking Hassett’s World Cup and wage claims live, including Googling World Cup dates on air (09:16–09:45)
The hosts’ unsparing tone in calling out spin and falsehoods, “This is the prototypical ‘Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?’ response.” (07:46)

Key Timestamps

00:00: Episode begins, hosts react to jobs report
01:53: Three main takeaways from the data
03:44: Manufacturing discussion and Trump’s promises
06:20: Segment begins on political spin and Kevin Hassett
07:05: Audio clip—Hassett’s defense and host response
09:10: World Cup employment effect debunked
11:40: Immigration, border policy, and job numbers—Hassett’s argument dissected
13:11: Zero-sum game myth about immigrants and jobs
14:13: Labor shortages resulting from immigration restrictions

Conclusion

This episode delivers a forthright, data-driven, and politically pointed discussion of the worrying July 2026 jobs report. The hosts challenge prevailing political narratives and campaign spin, especially as they relate to manufacturing, labor participation, wage stagnation, and immigration policy’s unintended consequences. Their analysis exposes contradictions in economic messaging, while offering a clear-eyed view of the challenges facing America’s workforce.

Loading summary

Transcript64 lines

[00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing out of the Bulwark, sitting in for JVL along with Katherine Rampel. We are doing another receipts live, and this one is. This is a bad one. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The numbers for the jobs came out this morning and they sucked. Let's just be real. They really sucked. Catherine.
[00:20]
B
Yeah. I want to clarify. When you say this is a bad one, it's not that this episode is a bad one.
[00:25]
A
Well, that's tbd. Well, let's see how we handle each other here. You know, there might be too much friction.
[00:32]
B
Yeah. The jobs numbers were not good. They were expected to be modestly positive. You know, that employers added a few jobs. In fact, we lost jobs in July. We lost jobs in July. And the previous couple of months, which had looked pretty strong, stronger than people had thought, like, initially. Turns out once the revisions came in, we actually had 100,000 fewer jobs than originally reported. So it's like, been very anemic. Job growth, which may be charged.
[01:06]
A
Look at that chart.
[01:08]
C
Oof.
[01:08]
A
Well, there's a lot of red in that chart. More red than I expected. Those are negative job growth. Yes, Months. And that is pretty brutal. Let me give you the top line. Come in. Lost 23,000 jobs in July, while May and June's reports revised down by a combined 103,000 jobs. Unemployment rate actually ticked down a hair to 4.1% as. And this is the thing the White House has been like, yeah, we got the unemployment rate lower, but this is why 260,000 people left the labor force. In other words, employers aren't hiring workers and workers are starting to notice them, can't get jobs, so they're just leaving the labor force altogether. Prior to getting on here, I said, what are your three big takeaway or data points from this report? What are they?
[01:53]
B
So a few things. One would be the. The revisions from the previous couple months, which I just mentioned, because it, it means that we should be, like, revisiting how strong we thought the economy was before and what we thought was like a really, really resilient job market, despite all of the crap that's been thrown at it in terms of war and tariffs and all the other erratic policy measures and shocks and all that. Like, it looked like it was pretty resilient, maybe a little less resilient than we thought. That would be data point number one. Data point number two would be the fact that the share of people who, who are unemployed, who have been unemployed long term, six months or more is now at like a quarter of that group. So like, that's normally, you know, unemployment is a regular feature of an economy. People cycle into jobs, people cycle out of jobs. It sucks when you lose your job, but as long as you can find new ones, like, it's a temporary pain. The problem here is that this is a persistent long term pain for a lot of workers. There just aren't that many opportunities. So that would be my second thing that I would harp on and then, sorry, my cat has strong opinions about the job market too.
[03:16]
A
Live TV folks.
[03:18]
B
There you go. The third thing that I think I would emphasize is what's going on with manufacturing, which Donald Trump loves to talk about the manufacturing industry in the abstract. You know, when he was coming into office, about how he's going to have this major renaissance and this comeback. And in fact, we have fewer manufacturing jobs today than we did when Donald Trump took office.
[03:41]
A
I thought there was manufacturing job gains in this report. But they were kind of minimal, right?
[03:45]
B
They were minimal. And you know that I try to focus like on the longer term because any one month can be very noisy. So there's like a minimal, basically not that different from zero in this past month. But from the time that Donald Trump took office, we have had a net loss. So that's not great, particularly given the things that Donald Trump ran on and that volatility that we've seen there and the general downward trend, that's a reflection partly of structural problems like manufacturing is just not as important a part of the U.S. economy today as it was 50 years ago, 70 years ago, 100 years ago. But also the things that Donald Trump has actually been doing with regard to manufacturing have been very damaging. You know, like having tariffs on inputs like steel and aluminum, very bad for industries that depend on steel and aluminum as inputs like the auto industry or. Yeah. Or appliances or whatever.
[04:48]
A
So long and short of a good market for house cats, bad market for anyone else.
[04:52]
C
Look at that.
[04:53]
A
I just want to. That data set at the end, we have this chart up. If you just look at that number, the months, the five months listed right there. So March 214,000 jobs created. April 148,000. May 63, June 20, July negative 23. I mean, that's an obvious trend, a negative trend. Now you said we got to look at the big picture. And I don't know, is five months, six months a big enough window for you to draw or extrapolate anything from a trend line like that? Which seems pretty bleak.
[05:26]
B
I think the big takeaway is, again, The. The economy and the job market are not as resilient as once thought. I don't think we're in recession yet.
[05:37]
A
That's where I was. I was kind of tiptoeing there, but
[05:39]
B
I didn't want to say I don't think we're in recession yet. You know, most numbers are still positive, like weekly positive things like GDP growth, for example. You know, it's not in negative territory yet.
[05:51]
A
We're not positive. You don't mean week by week. You mean they are not.
[05:55]
B
No, no, no. Week. W E A K. Yes, yes, yes. So it's like still above zero, but maybe doesn't feel that much better than being at zero or slightly below zero. So it's like, you know, things are fragile, I guess, is what I would say, but they're not in free fall. And a lot of this makes the Federal Reserve's job harder because.
[06:20]
A
Pause on that, because I want to do a whole segment on what happens with worship. But before we do that, I want to talk about your boy, Kevin Hassett. My boy's boy? JBL's boy, Kevin Hassett.
[06:31]
B
So Kevin, JBL deserves ownership more than I do.
[06:35]
A
Kevin gets the job of putting, you know, a good spin on a big turd. And this is his job, and he plays it very well. I'm gonna give him credit for that. You know, I don't think he does the best spin, but he goes out there and he just takes, you know, bullets, and he, you know, has a smile on his face. And today was a day where he really brought his. I don't want to call it a game, because it really wasn't that great, but he did bring it. So let's play Kevin Hassett being asked about these jobs numbers, and I want you to decipher the spin here.
[07:05]
B
Sure.
[07:06]
C
The weakness in this number were really just two things. Government workers and a sort of rebound from all the employment we got from the World cup because the World cup was ending. If you throw out the World cup of the government workers, we actually had a number that was about plus 100,000, which is about what we expected, given that the unemployment rate went down. And there's so many other factors, like manufacturing booming, capital spending booming, real wages growing for the typical manufacturing worker, almost $4,000 since President Trump took office after adjusting for inflation. So there's all these strong numbers out there.
[07:40]
A
There's so much misdirection and outright untruth there. But what do we want to go through them all?
[07:46]
B
I mean, this is the prototypical other Than that. How was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Response. Right. Like, it's like, well, if you strip out sectors that are doing badly are actually doing really well. And just like, if you, if you want to, like, dig down into the weeds here on some of the specific claims that he's made.
[08:06]
A
Yes.
[08:06]
B
So he's like, oh, it's all government jobs. It is true that there were losses in government jobs, but that was mostly about losses in local government education. Not. This is not like an artifact of jobs.
[08:19]
A
A job.
[08:20]
B
I'm sorry, A job is a job. Also true. Also true. But I think the spin he was trying to put on it was like, you know, this is about drowning government in a bathtub or whatever.
[08:30]
A
That's what they always say. It's like, look, these are, these are jobs we don't care about. These aren't real jobs there. This is taxpayer jobs. And so you should be grateful. I don't know. Jobs. A job people need.
[08:41]
B
Yeah.
[08:42]
A
The salary.
[08:43]
B
Yeah. And look like, given that it was local education jobs, just to be fair, there could have been some weird seasonal adjustment things going on there because it's
[08:52]
A
like summer school or something like that.
[08:54]
B
I don't know. Yeah. So it could be. So I don't want to make too much of that, but I would not write it off as being about, like, this is just clearing out the dead wood of government. I don't think that's the case. And as you say, a job is a job. So he said that he talked about the World Cup.
[09:11]
A
Yes.
[09:11]
B
First of all, I don't think that's right based on the timing for like, when the world.
[09:17]
A
Yeah, let's think about. So this world. This is the July jobs numbers. Okay, let's. I'm going to do this all Google when did the World cup and July 19th. So there was.
[09:31]
B
Yeah, so. So like the way that they, the way that they survey companies. That doesn't make any sense. Like, people still would have been shown showing as employed because it's about like, did you work at all during that pay period anyway? So I think that's.
[09:45]
A
There were fewer games as they, as the tournament got tighter and people were
[09:49]
B
like, yeah, but whatever. I'm just, I don't, I don't think that's it. And, and besides that, the sectors that lost jobs besides local and local education, so that would be like public schools were largely retail. So I don't really know. Maybe that's connected to the World Cup. Maybe it's like people were shopping less at Walmart because they weren't Like Dick's
[10:13]
A
Sporting Goods or something.
[10:14]
B
I don't know.
[10:15]
A
Hey, the cat's back.
[10:16]
B
Cat is. Cat is back. Sorry about that, everyone.
[10:20]
A
She. She has real thoughts about the World Cup.
[10:22]
B
She was happy.
[10:24]
A
She's not happy. Spain prevailing there. All right.
[10:28]
B
I just think it's. I think that's.
[10:30]
A
And besides, what about his wage growth claim? Because that one, that felt factually not true to me. He's like, well, wages have really grown relative to inflation that.
[10:40]
B
No, they haven't. I mean, especially not in the last. Whatever. What is. It's. Excuse me, it's August and the war began in late February. Like, no, in that period of time, inflation has been eating up, basically, all of which, I mean, like, if you look, you know, one month over another month, if gas prices fell a little bit and what, like overall. No, your people's paychecks are not going as far as they used to. And it is because specifically of actions that this administration has taken related to the war, related to tariffs and. And other like, own goals to extend. Sorry, this is very distracting. To extend the world.
[11:23]
A
She just does not want to do the live show. I'm gonna rip.
[11:27]
B
She like knows. She knows when I'm on a live zoom or something. Or a show. Yeah.
[11:33]
A
The other thing that Hassan mentioned, and I want to take a little riff on this, let's play what he said about immigration and I'm going to pick up on this one.
[11:41]
C
Now, the break even point for unemployment is about 40,000 because labor force participation is declining. And of course, the other thing is our tight border policy. So we don't have all these foreign illegal workers, you know, stampeding into the economy. And that used to also show up as inflated. Okay.
[12:00]
A
So the idea here, I'm just trying to make sure I understand this, is that we used to have more job growth because we had so many people crossing the border getting jobs and employers were registering them as new employees. That's what he's saying. Right. And now because we don't have that, it means employers are not registering new employees. Now, this makes no sense to me because if you're an employer and you need to hire someone to do a job, you go and you find them whether or not they cross the border or not. You don't just hire someone because they knocked on your door and said, hey, I'm from Honduras, I've been traveling through Mexico and I need to work. You hire someone because you need someone to fulfill a job. So also, let me just add this. The big case for. From J.D. vance and Stephen Miller, around this deportation regime, the big economic case, and they've said it many times, we can probably find video in a, in a second, is that if you get rid of all these illegal immigrants who are here, you're going to open up jobs for a lot of people.
[13:11]
B
Yes.
[13:12]
A
And you're just going to, there's going to be a hiring bonanza of native born Americans.
[13:15]
B
It's a zero sum game. Is, is basically how they frame it, right. That every job that goes to an immigrant is a job that would have gone to a native born American. And now Kevin.
[13:29]
A
But now Kevin's not saying that. Kevin.
[13:31]
B
No, he's saying the opposite. He's saying that like they're not hiring. Yeah, yeah, we've cleared out those workers and also we've cleared out those jobs. That is effectively what he's saying. And there's, and to be clear, there is no evidence, in fact for the initial zero sum argument that suddenly if you got rid of all of the immigrants, that there were going to be, you know, a gazillion new job opportunities, great job opportunities for native born Americans who, but for the immigrants taking their jobs would have been rich, would have been gainfully employed, would have been doing just better on all fronts in the world. There was no evidence for that. You know, there's maybe some evidence that like immigrants compete with each other for jobs or they, you know, newer immigrants compete with old. Like I'm not saying that there's no competition for jobs, but the idea that immigrants were the reason why they were keeping Americans from getting ahead and keeping American native born Americans from getting jobs, it just does not exist. That evidence does not exist. That was the argument that they were making. Now they are pivoting, as you point out, to saying actually we don't want those jobs anyway. Like whatever those jobs were, they shouldn't be done. I don't know, maybe they'll be done by AI, maybe they'll be done by robots. Probably they won't be done by at all. Particularly since immigrants are disproportionately employed in industries that already had labor shortages. So agriculture, other kinds of food services, construction as well as healthcare. So those are some of the industries where now jobs are probably going begging. Our colleague Jonathan Cohn has written expertly about, for example, the health aides, nursing home aides who have been, who are being displaced, people who were on temporary protected status, people from Haiti who were taking jobs working in nursing homes and things like that. Those nursing homes are not going to easily find a lot of Americans Native born Americans who want those jobs. So what's going to happen? We're going to have shortages. We're going to have less available care for native born Americans who rely on the their their friends and neighbors and workers to help take those jobs and fill those jobs and contribute to their commun. So I guess we're supposed to celebrate that now that we're not going to have the same hard working labor force working in fields and food services. And yes, I just want to stress
[16:00]
A
though, because this was so central, the idea here was that okay, we'll get rid of TPS status for Haitians in Miami and that might be disruptive immediately, but there's so many Native born Americans who will come and gladly fill those roles. And yes, we'll get rid of these agricultural workers and that might be a little problematic for our food supplies in the interim, but there's plenty of people out there looking for jobs who are willing to do that hard backbreaking work in the fields and that's going to be great for Native born Americans. It was so central that we, Matt Marshall, I should say our fearless producer, as we were talking, found this clip from Donald Trump at the 2024RNC Convention.