It’s the Pandemic, Stupid
The shutdowns aren’t what’s driving the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression.
The April jobs report published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning was record-breaking in every conceivable and terrible way.
The unemployment rate rose to 14.7 percent, the highest rate in the history of the statistic, going back to 1948. Unemployment reached a record high for almost every measured demographic—men, women, teenagers, whites, Asians, Hispanics.
The worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression is also the most sudden in history. Before this morning, the BLS had never recorded a monthly decline in employment larger than the 1.9 million jobs lost in the spring of 1945. But between March and April
