National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett sat down for an interview on State of the Union with host Jake Tapper where he shut down his claims that the economy was not in a bad spot right now, citing jobs numbers from a recent report to back up his assessment. Hassett told Tapper that Americans are “living in the greatest economy.”
“The economy, according to BLS, lost 23,000 jobs in July, when economists were expecting a 95,000-job gain,” Tapper stated during the interview. “The job creation you boasted about for the previous two months, unfortunately, those numbers were also sharply revised down. It turns out 100,000 jobs were not created in May and June. You said in June that this was — quote — ‘the strongest job market in your lifetime.’ By what metric?”
“The bottom line is that, if you look at the overall economy, then things are really, really booming,” Hassett replied. “As an example, there are 83,000 construction workers building factories right now. That’s a number that we have never seen before. Initial claims for unemployment insurance are the lowest they have been since World War II.”
Hassett then explained that the “reduction in government workers” and hospitality workers filing for unemployment following the conclusion of the World Cup made the numbers look a bit softer than they were. But Tapper continued to argue that July’s numbers had become the norm and were not an outlier, to which Hassett greatly disagreed.
“There have been job losses for six out of the 18 full months of President Trump’s second term,” Tapper pressed. “That’s a third of them. And the Trump administration has only added 548,000 net jobs so far, which is considered very slow growth. It’s growth, but very slow. Two million jobs were created in the last 18 months of Biden’s presidency. Are you really arguing that your numbers are better than that?”
“Well, I disagree with your number. We’ll have to follow up on email, but you know, I just looked at the latest number. It was that job creation under President Trump since January 20th is about 880,000 jobs. But we won’t argue about 800 or 500, you know, factually out of sync right now. But the fact is that the thing that really jumps out at us is that those are really good jobs,” Hassett explained to the left-leaning host.
“They’re manufacturing jobs. They’re construction jobs. The number of manufacturing jobs under Joe Biden dropped by 230,000. And the reason that matters is the intuition that you know candidates of both parties understand that these blue-collar jobs in construction and manufacturing they’re really high-paying jobs,” he continued.
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“And so the typical construction or manufacturing worker in the U.S. has seen an increase under President Trump, of three or $4,000 in salary, and under Joe Biden, it was about negative that, and it dropped about 3,000. And the reason is that manufacturing was collapsing, and so the high-paying jobs were going away. And so I think that we’ll take our record over his every day.”
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