Appearing on Fox News, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett tried to explain away the latest disappointing jobs report by arguing the losses came down to two factors: government layoffs and a post-World Cup hiring slowdown. Construction and manufacturing, he said, were still strong.
Strip those two categories out, Hassett argued, and “you actually had a number that was about plus 100,000” — roughly in line with recent trends.
In other words: the jobs report looks bad only if you count the jobs that were lost.
“Yeah, so the strength is what we’ve seen before,” Hassett insisted. “Construction workers, manufacturing workers, and so on.”
“The weakness in this number were really just two things,” he continued. “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 and the government workers, we actually had a number that was about plus a hundred thousand,” he added.
The New York Times reports, “Employers shed 23,000 jobs in July, and gains in previous months were revised down sharply, in a downbeat report that suggests the labor market is weaker than previously believed.”
Somewhere in the White House, Trump is screaming, “STOP THE COUNTING!”