Non-Farm Friday – Is America Working?

Up and up the Futures go.

Pretty much every day the Futures climb higher and higher yet, 3 weeks after we took back the 2,850 line on the S&P – we're only at 2,909 this morning but don't get too attached to that as the Non-Farm Payroll Report comes out at 8:30 and it's possible we'll show a loss over 20M jobs in the month of April, wiping out ALL of Trump's gains (4.7M), ALL of Obama's gains (8.9M) and, even if we ignore Bush Jr's losses, we've still lost so many jobs under Trump that it even eats into Clinton's (Bill, not Hillary – thank goodness she's not President, right?) 18.9M jobs gained.  

So, effectively, in year 4 of the Trump Administration, America has lost so many jobs (perhaps 30M total) that he has wiped out all of the US job gains since 1993.  Keep in mind, by the way, that there were only 260M people in the US in 1993 so we now have 70M more people and NONE of them have jobs!  Are you tired of winning yet?  I know a lot of you may think it's unfair to "blame" Donald Trump for his blatant mishandling of the virus response (still ongoing) but you have to ask yourself, honestly, do other developed countries have a 14.7% unemployment rate?  No, because their Governments acted to insure job security for their people during the lockdown.  

Do other countries have 1.25M infections and 76,000 deaths?  Of course not – we are just 4% of the World's entire population yet we have 32% of the World's cases so 8 TIMES WORSE than the average country and 76,000 deaths out of 270,000 Globally gives us 28% of that total too so 7 TIMES WORSE than the average country and, don't forget, without the US blowing up the curve – the average country would be 30% lower.

What's going on in the US is a travesty and it's a travesty of leadership and, although it sounds nice to say we should forget about politics and put all this blame aside and pull together and fight the virus – the virus isn't the problem.  EVERYBODY on Earth has the virus in their country – AMERICA is the country that is being devastated by it.  The reason American is being devasted by the virus is the incompetent failure of our Leadership – not being willing to recognize the problem is how we got here in the first place and it's how we're dragging the disaster out now!

When you have cancer, you don't tell the Doctor there are very fine cells on both sides of your body and we should just give the cancer another chance, do we?  No!  We cut it out!!!  When you recognize that something is killing you, you have to do what it takes to remove the problem and you can blame China, or you can blame the WHO or the CDC or whoever Fox is vilifying this week – but the proverbial buck stops at the desk of the President.

This was not some unpreventable catastrophe and, now that it's here, it's also not an unfixable catastrophe but if you don't have competent people in charge of fixing things – the catastrophe can be far worse.  See Puerto Rico or Katrina as recent examples.  Of course the President and his media lackeys want to wrap themselves in the flag and declare war on the virus (as if it cares) and tell everyone to pull togther – they are up for re-election and they don't want you to think very hard about why America is doing far worse than the rest of the World in their response or why relief still hasn't gotten to the vast majority of our citizens.  

This is NOT a chart you want to be leading the World in, people!  Or this one:

You are being told not to blame the President and that there's nothing we can do about the virus other than accept the fact that many, many more people will die (and they WILL be people you know and love) but that is BLATANTLY UNTRUE.  You are being told this by a failed Administration that is marching the entire country off to war against a disease without even the decency to properly equip us for the battle.  There are not enough tests, there is not enough PPE, there is no tracking system there are no quarantine rules – there is NOTHING that THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD IS DOING – NOTHING!!!

You can ONLY blame the President for a failure of this magnitude – it is ENTIRELY his responsibility and, by the way, his fault!  And if we aren't even able to get together as a nation and see what the problem really is and begin to do something about it – well then I guess we are simply going to get what we deserve. 

Have a great weekend, 

- Phil

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