The Biden administration got a disastrous jobs report on Friday: in April, the economy added only 266,000 workers, which was one quarter of what the Democrats had optimistically predicted would happen after they printed money like Weimar Germany or Venezuela and then handed out massive stimulus checks.  For me, it was déjà vu all over again, because the same thing happened in England in the late 1970s.

Had Trump stayed in office and continued with his economic policies, I believe that the economy would have added the 1 million jobs Democrats so blithely predicted.  Instead:

The US added just 266,000 jobs in April — far below economists' expectations of 1 million — and the unemployment rate rose slightly to 6.1 percent, the feds said Friday.

Significantly, and sadly, the worst hit were Blacks and women, who were thriving under Trump:

Looked at this way, the establishment being back in charge and bringing everything back to normal isn't nearly as exciting or positive as the propaganda media has made it out to be, is it. pic.twitter.com/UlRxENSDhC

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) May 7, 2021

If you can't read the small print, it says Black unemployment is now up to 9.7 percent (with Black men at 10% unemployment).  Meanwhile, women had a "net loss of jobs," thanks to the Democrats' (and the teachers' unions) mania for keeping schools closed.

There are a lot of culprits: closed schools, burned out businesses, the end of the Keystone pipeline, continued and obsessive lockdowns, broken supply chains, and inflation are all contributing to the problem.  However, one of the biggest issues is those incredibly generous stimulus checks that are keeping people at home:

People who lost their jobs in the pandemic are now earning more in benefits than they did in wages, creating a nightmare economic situation that is stopping people from returning to work and in turn, driving up inflation.

In March 2019, the average weekly payment to an unemployed person was $348 when combining federal and state unemployment payments.

That nearly tripled to $938 in April 2020, when Trump passed COBRA — a temporary economic plan that boosted weekly unemployment payments by $600 and also gave employed people one-off stimulus checks. COBRA expired in July and the unemployment boost was halved to $300-a-week. Now, they are $638-a-week on average and they'll stay that way until September 6 at least.

It means, someone who was working 40 hours a week before the pandemic now gets nearly $16-an-hour to do nothing at home, which is more than double the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

Tucker covered the issue in his opening monologue:

https://t.co/eE5pCXZnwZ

— Bookwormroom (@Bookwormroom) May 8, 2021

And about my déjà vu feeling: I arrived in England as an exchange student in 1981, a year and a half into Margaret Thatcher's first term as prime minister.  Labor was up in arms at her plans to return the free market to England.  Most of my friends were anti-Thatcher.  Half of them, though, left England after graduation to get jobs.

I've never forgotten what one of them told me.  The summer before coming to university, he had worked in the local zoo, cleaning up after the animals, especially the elephants.  It was unpleasant work, to say the least.  Meanwhile, his sister spent the summer "collecting the dole and watching soaps on the telly."  At summer's end, she had more money than he did.  He told me, "That was when I decided I was an idiot to have worked."

We'd better have a Margaret Thatcher (or maybe a Ron DeSantis) in our future.  Otherwise, we need to prepare for the grim postwar economy that shackled Britain for decades and, if things look really bad, contact any Venezuelans we might know for some good rat stew recipes.

Image: Easy money by rawpixel.com.

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