gradually rose before the pandemic. and as you would expect, it plummeted. and as you would also expect, it began to come back. but what was probably less logical or less expected was that it then stagnated, bounced up and down a little bit, and that red circle with the little line down it is what you just alluded to, which is that the number of adult americans looking for jobs actually fell by a little bit last month. and contrast with the chart on the right, which is job openings, and you can see a pattern you d expect. the economy was doing okay, job openings are reasonably high. economy falls off a cliff. economy starts to recover, job openings come back. and now they have soared to over 8.5 million. that is an all-time record number of job openings in this country. so the conundrum, obviously so how do you explain that? how do you explain that less people are looking for jobs, while we have record job openings? well, there are a variety of
explanations, joe. and like everything that goes on these days. it seems to be somewhat politicized. one explanation is the effect of the $300 a week of extra unemployment insurance that many americans are getting. other people say that their child care issues, their public health issues, some baby boomer types have decided simply to retire from the labor force. leave the labor force, depressing the size of the labor force. this is going to be a fruitful study for economists for a very long time. but let me show you what the impact of all of that is starting to be on wages. so this looks at just blue collar wages in leisure and hospitality, among our lowest paid professions. and you can see that it was on a trend line to continue to go up from about $14.50 to about 15 an hour right before the pandemic. and you can see a dotted extrapolation of where it would have gone in a normal world. and then the pandemic hits. not surprisingly, wages fall. businesses lay off a lot of
consistent with each other, that you confuse, you overwhelm, and people like me laugh at such ludicrous lies, thinking nobody would be stupid enough to believe them, and well, actually, tens of millions of people do believe them. katie, i wanted to just just so we can educate people that maybe just started watching news over the past five years, younger americans, can you talk about that wall? there was such a solid wall between the white houses and the justice departments in the past. and if the wall was broken through, that become huge news. even on much smaller items than this. i go back to 93 during travelgate when one or two clinton officials went over and talked to a justice department officials about the wording of a press release. my god, republicans, you would have thought that it was
a lot of us just assume because of history and redistricting, the republicans, it s going to be a slam dunk for republicans, but democrats have a few advantages breaking their way, too. kurt bardella, earlier, jonathan lemire asked about what sort of commission should be set up. talk about a commission that nancy pelosi could set up in the house. you were there during benghazi. you saw how republicans set up benghazi and used it to their advantage. but what is the most bipartisan commission that the speaker could set up that while it will still get takd by republicans anyway, at least americans could see it as being a fair look at the events that happened on january the 6th. yeah, joe, she could put together a select committee that looks a lot like what a 9/11-style bipartisan commission would have looked like. have an equal number of republicans and democrats. the key thing here is you
Unemployed Americans know about COVID-19-related financial relief, including enhanced unemployment benefits, but an overwhelming majority (80%) aren't taking advantage of them, a recent survey from.