No. of Recommendations: 7
When attacking for the audience at home, she went after the state of the country at the end of his Presidency - that he left office with the highest unemployment...-------------
This was an area where Harris grossly mis-stated facts and Trump failed to handle the point.
She stated that Trump left office with the highest unemployment since the Depression. Actually, no. Trump merely experienced the highest unemployment rate DURING his term but he didn't exit his term with unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/ci...March 2020 unemployement was 4.4%. It spiked to 14.8% in one month in April 2020, then returned to 6.7% by December 2020 then reached 3.9% by December 2021. 6.7% unemployment in December 2020 was certainly higher than politicians and the public had been used to over the prior decade but 6.7% unemployment is hardly disasterous and it was clear it was continuing to go down to its prior absurdly low norm.
There are two points to learn from that. One is that Trump didn't CAUSE that 14.8% unemployment. The pandemic did. In the absence of a vaccine AND viable treatments for those contracting COVID AND any better knowledge on how to stop a viral infection, the US economy was basically committed to eating that spike in unemployment. But literally NO ECONOMIST ON THE PLANET expected any country's unemployment to return to prior levels within six months. Every economist was predicting the future via outdated economic theories of what was happening and thought that spike in unemployment would trigger a depression.
What all of those economists failed to understand is that an economy with consistent 4% unemployment is reflecting a labor market with a chronic shortage of bodies. The minute physical circumstances allowed, a majority of those not disabled by COVID returned to work and unemployment vanished. Note that because "unemployment" only reflects those who WANT to work full time, it is not safe to assume lower unemployment means more net jobs. Remember, tens of thousands of teachers, nurses and other "front line" workers QUIT their jobs in disgust over poor treatment by the public and their employers while bearing most of the exposure risk prior to vaccine availability. If you are wondering why unemployment can be so low yet it seems like there are fewer workers, it is because those two statistics are not strictly positively correlated. Unemployment can go down without total jobs rising if people are abandoning the workforce.
If Trump had any grasp of actual economics and if he hadn't allowed himself to become totally distracted by working to defend his ego throughout the debate, he could have picked up on this mis-statement from Harris and made her look stupid. But Trump doesn't know the facts and doesn't know the theory to make the point so it sailed over his head.
WTH
