New unemployment numbers show that 21 million Americans are out of work and the unemployment rate is stuck at 13.3%. In response to celebrations in the White House, Coronavirus War Room Director Zac Petkanas issued the following statement:
“21 million Americans unemployed and a 13.3% unemployment rate is not something President Trump should be celebrating. Those numbers mean the United States is still in the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression and that millions of families are wondering how they are going to make ends meet.
“It didn’t have to be this way. America’s unemployment rate is twice as high as the EU unemployment rate.
“If President Trump had taken the crisis more seriously early on and taken steps like ramping up testing, the United States would not have had to totally shut down and millions could still have their jobs.
“Trump’s failure to control the rapid spread of the coronavirus is directly responsible for this financial crisis.
“It’s beyond obscene for anyone at the White House to be popping champagne corks today as tens of millions of Americans remain out of work, especially when many of them lost their jobs because Trump’s incompetence made the coronavirus crisis even worse. Donald Trump’s celebratory press conference is another example of how he puts photo ops and his personal politics before the well being of millions of Americans still out of work.”
BACKGROUND:
Experts confirm that the United States would NOT have had to totally shut down if Trump had simply taken the crisis more seriously and taken decisive action to prevent the rapid spread of the virus.
Unfortunately, he chose to downplay the threat and ignored the warnings of public health officials which allowed the United States to fall behind other countries in our response, especially in regards to testing.
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For example, South Korea tested ten times the number of people as the US eight weeks into the crisis.
As a result, other nations are doing much better than the United States with its 13.3 percent unemployment rate:
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The European Union’s unemployment rate only reached 6.6 percent in April.
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As of April, South Korea’s unemployment rate was only 3.8 percent. Australia’s unemployment rate was 6.2 percent and Japan’s unemployment rate was only 2.6 percent.
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The United States’ unemployment rate skyrocketed during the same timeframe other countries have experienced only modest increases. From February through April 2020, the United States’ unemployment rate increased by 11.2 percent. During the same period, Australia’s unemployment rate increased by 1.1 percent, Germany’s increased by 0.8 percent, and South Korea’s increased by 0.5 percent.
And now Trump is making things even worse.
His ongoing failure to get the virus under control is preventing states from safely and fully reopening — and is not giving Americans confidence to return to normal economic activity.
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He has still not fulfilled his promises on testing, a prerequisite to safe reopening. This includes his commitment that “anybody who wants a test can get one” and that they’d be conducting 5 million tests per day. To date, they have only conducted a total of 18 million tests in a country of 328 million.
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He allowed the crisis at meatpacking plants to get out of control by pushing them to open despite spikes in the virus within the plants which led to even larger spikes.
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According to the Food and Environment Reporting Network, rural counties that contain meatpacking plants have Covid-19 infection rates that are five-times higher than the rest of rural America.
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Trump has not given the majority of Americans confidence to resume economic activities. A May AP-NORC poll found that only 43 percent of Americans would feel comfortable going out to a bar or restaurant once restrictions lifted, only 14 percent would feel comfortable using public transportation once restrictions lifted, and only 26 percent would feel comfortable going to the movies, a concert, or the theater once restrictions lifted.
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A May 23-24 Harris Poll found that in the next three months only a small percentage of Americans would fly on a plane (31 percent), stay in hotels (40 percent), attend a sporting event (37 percent) or take a cruise (28 percent).
By pushing to reopen the economy instead of using the time Americans were in lockdown to manage the spread of the virus, Trump has let the virus spread uncontrollably, which backfired and has made economic recovery even harder.
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American Enterprise Institute director of economic policy studies Michael Strain has highlighted that the more Covid-19 infections a country has, the worse its economy performs:
This is why the United States now leads the world in the number of deaths, infections and is on the brink of economic collapse.