Trump Econ Chief Shrugs Off Startling Jobs Report With World Cup Explanation

President Donald Trump’s economic chief Kevin Hassett used the World Cup to explain away the poor employment report that saw the U.S. losing 23,000 jobs in July.

The report, put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed the unemployment rate dropping from 4.2% to 4.1%, but economists believe that’s due to fewer people looking for work. In addition, May and June jobs numbers were revised down by 103,000 jobs.

On Fox News’s America’s Newsroom, host Bill Hemmer introduced the National Economic Council director by saying the report was “well below the number we were expecting to add, about 80,000.”

“So, the strength is what we’ve seen before, construction workers, manufacturing workers and so on. The weakest in this number were really just two things: government workers and sort of rebound from all the employment we got from the World Cup, ’cause the World Cup was ending,” Hassett said, continuing:

If you throw out the World Cup and the government workers, we actually had a number that was plus 100,000, which is about what we expected given that the unemployment rate went down and there are so many other factors like manufacturing booming, capital spending booming, real wages growing for the typical manufacturing worker — almost $4,000 since President Trump took office — after adjusting for inflation. So there’s all these strong numbers out there, and I think we have to look through the special factors when we’re trying to judge this.

Hemmer then asked about the unemployment rate, with Hassett saying there was “a little bit of participation weakness.”

“Most of that really comes from two things,” Hassett said. “Thing one is the baby boomers are retiring now. We’re sort of in a demographic phase where there will be less labor force participation, and that’ll keep on going for a good long time.”

“And, of course, the other thing is our tight border policy. So we don’t have foreign illegal workers stampeding into the economy, and that used to also show up as inflated numbers,” he added.

Watch above via Fox News.

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