April Job Report Could Be Worse Than Feared

• Author: Kelly Cooke
• Posted: 2023-12-21

Americans didn’t know until the first full week of April just how bad May’s jobs report was. That’s how these things work; it takes a bit of time to calculate all the numbers. So while at a glance economists and politicians can relay certain numbers, like saying X amount of people lost their jobs in April, no one will know until Sunday, April 10, just how bad things really were last month in totality. Unfortunately, most economic experts are predicting that things were a whole lot worse than politicians were leading on.

It might be hard to fathom that things could be worse than 30 million Americans without jobs, drawing unemployment from an already overburdened federal government. Though one should keep in mind that harm to the economy usually snowballs and usually lingers. Most experts agree that it took a full 10 years, until 2019, before America finally got over the housing collapse of early 2009. While it initially started in 2008, it took until the next year to fully illustrate its ramifications on the nation, and on the globe.

This is very similar to how these jobless numbers could end up affecting the economy. It could be a growing issue that we don’t notice for some time, which could take a decade to get over. We will not know the full breadth of the issue for another three days, however, and right now all experts can do is speculate on how bad things might actually be.

What we’re told by media and politicians is that, in total, around 30 million Americans have become unemployed since the Covid-19 virus pandemic landed in America. So they were estimating around a 13% nationwide unemployment number. Though according to some economists who have been crunching the data, even absent the full report, they claim it’s actually a lot worse than that. It’s closer to 16% of Americans unemployed, with 21 million Americans losing their jobs in April alone, which would bring the total number closer to 50 million jobs lost since the start of the pandemic.

Sunday’s looming report from the Labor Department is slated to the worst in the history of the United States. Already in America, based on what we know absent the report, more Americans are unemployed than were even in the workforce during the era of the Great Depression. Without the trade power of the US and China on a global scale, American interests in oil (which are waning), and the ability through the federal reserve to take on untold amounts of debt to be settled later, America may have already fallen into a crisis that made the Great Depression look tame by comparison. That’s how many people are out of work, and how many businesses and industries have been shut down.

The Odds of a May Rebound

If at all there exists a silver lining for this dark cloud, it’s the fact that many states are starting to loosen their restrictions in order to get people back to work. While we will not see a total rebound until central hubs like New York, California and Illinois reopen, it’s still going to help greatly to have states like Georgia again doing business. Even in a practical penny-for-penny sense, every person working in America is not only helping to keep a business afloat but is also less of a burden financially for the federal government. That’s a very important factor here, seeing as the federal government is paying out $600 per week in federal unemployment to every American who files for the benefit.

Though that’s still only a proverbial Band-Aid on the wound. What America’s dealing with is an unprecedented level of unemployment that was spurred on by the immediate closures of the vast majority of businesses. Food and medical industries were deemed essential. Political and journalism industries were kept alive and thriving. Everything else? They weren’t so lucky. Bakeries and beauticians and plumbers and electricians, and on it could go for thousands of businesses. They all closed up, with many of them having to shutter permanently. So even when the economy opens back up, tens of thousands of businesses will be entirely out of business.

Sunday’s report will let us know how bad things really are. If these economic predictions are true, then America is looking at a huge uphill climb.