Side Note

America is firing workers faster than it’s hiring them

This hasn’t happened since the Great Recession.

Despite Donald Trump’s repeated claims that American companies are making jobs rain down upon the American people — check out the below tweet and accompanying Decker: Unclassified-esque video, for example — according to Donald Trump’s own government, American companies are actually doing... not that.

In a recently released report, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics found that American companies eliminated more jobs than they created — 140,000 more, to be specific. That number — termed “gross job losses” — might not sound like a lot, but as you can see below shows, the last time the number of job losses eclipsed the number of jobs gained occurred during the Great Recession.

These job losses were spread across 9 of the 13 industries examined by the report, with small businesses — which the BLS defines as companies with under 50 employees — bearing the brunt of these losses. All of this seems bad, and should be taken as further proof that the reality that Donald Trump lives in is not the one that we occupy.