Tag: unemployment

Gavin Newsom Blames Trump for California’s Unemployment Rate – That Is One Point Lower than It Was a Year Ago when Joe Biden Was President

California Governor Gavin Newsom attempted to blame President Trump for the unemployment rate today in the once Golden State.

The latest numbers show that California has an unemployment rate of 4.4%.

Newsome wrote on X: “The unemployment rate has increased to 4.3% This is the highest unemployment rate since the pandemic. Donald Trump is wrecking our economy.”

Of course, this is another Newsom lie.

According to the St. Louis Fed, the unemployment rate one year ago in September, 2024 under Joe Biden was 5.5%, higher than it is today.

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Washington D.C. Has The Highest Unemployment Rate In The Nation

The U.S. labor market remains resilient in 2025, but unemployment figures vary widely by state.

While the national unemployment rate stood at 4.1% in June, some regions are experiencing far higher (or far lower) joblessness.

This visualization, via Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte, highlights the unemployment rate by state using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for June 2025.

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As Newsom Campaigns, California Has Highest Unemployment Rate in U.S.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has already started his 2028 presidential campaign — but his state has the highest unemployment rate in the United States.

As Breitbart News reported earlier this month, Newsom left California in the midst of over a dozen wildfires to travel to rural South Carolina, testing the waters for a presidential run in the state Democrats have promoted to the first in the list of primary contests.

However, while Newsom has led Democrats in criticizing President Donald Trump and other Republicans, his performance in office is a drag on his prospects. Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, the state had the highest unemployment rate in the nation:

California’s unemployment rate rose slightly, by 0.1 percentage point, to 5.4% in June, tying Nevada for the highest rate in the U.S., according to new federal data released Friday.

The state lost a net 6,100 jobs, including 9,900 layoffs in business and professional services. Health care and government saw job gains, but other sectors all shrunk.

…

California’s May jobs gains were also revised downwards to a 11,700 increase, down 6,000 jobs compared to a preliminary estimate of 17,700.

5.4% is not historically high; it is below the 5.5% that economists once believed was the “Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment” (NAIRU), the lowest rate possible before inflation would begin to rise.

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Elon Musk Reveals DOGE Discovered 100,000 Active Federal Employees Who Were Also Collecting Unemployment Insurance!

Elon Musk joined Lara Trump on her show “My View”  last Saturday night on FOX News.

During their conversation, Elon revealed that the DOGE Team found 100,000 active federal employees, who also collected unemployment insurance benefits, while they were still at work.

Collecting insurance benefits while still working is considered unemployment insurance fraud. Many states classify unemployment fraud as a misdemeanor or felony.

Jail time is a significant risk and can range from several months to several years.

Elon Musk says 100,000 government employees have committed this dishonest and fraudulent act.

Elon Musk:  We’ve actually found there’s a lot of people who are federal government employees. They’re active employees who nonetheless applied for and have received unemployment insurance. While they’re federal employees? Yes. Wow. And this appears to be at least 100,000 people.

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IN CONFIDENTIAL MEMO, TREASURY SECRETARY JANET YELLEN CELEBRATED UNEMPLOYMENT AS A “WORKER-DISCIPLINE DEVICE”

Yellen wanted this to be the best of all possible worlds, but the best world she could conceive of was terrible.

In June 1996, Janet Yellen — then a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, later chair of the Fed herself, and currently secretary of the Treasury — wrote an extraordinary memo to then-Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. Anyone who wants to understand how the world works should read it, and thank Tim Barker, a historian who obtained it via the Freedom of Information Act.

What makes the memo so telling is threefold.

First, while expressed in abstruse technical language, it shares a perspective with the most radical left-wing critiques of capitalism. Yellen goes 90 percent of the way to proclaiming, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Second, Yellen is not, of course, calling for a proletarian revolution. Rather, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “vulgar Marxist rhetoric is not untypical of internal documents in the government,” just “with values reversed.” In Yellen’s case, she is making the case for, as she writes, the positive “impact of heightened job insecurity.” A rise in worker insecurity in the mid-1990s meant everyone was too scared to ask for raises, which meant businesses wouldn’t need to hike prices, which meant even with the falling unemployment at the time, the Fed didn’t need to raise interest rates to slow the economy and throw people out of work.

Third, Yellen is not a monster. Indeed, from the perspective of regular Americans, she’s about as good as it gets at the summit of power. The problem, for those of us down here on the ground, is her overall worldview. She might personally want things to be nicer but is certain the science of economics places incredibly sharp limits on the possible, and all we can do is try to make small improvements within those limits.

The memo is titled “Job Insecurity, the Natural Rate of Unemployment, and the Phillips Curve.” Barker learned of it from references in the books “Maestro” by Bob Woodward and “Empathy Economics” by Owen Ullmann. Greenspan distributed the memo to the entire Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC — the group that decides interest rates — and it worked. As Ullmann puts it, “Yellen rescued Greenspan from his tight spot.”

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Some people who refuse to get vaccinated may not be eligible to receive unemployment benefits

KHOU’s Mia Salenetri says that generally speaking, people fired for refusing required vaccines — including the new COVID-19 vaccine — can be denied unemployment benefits in some cases.

“Some who refuse [shots] may be looking forward to the support of unemployment benefits while they look for a new job that doesn’t require vaccines. But for many of them, that might not be an option,” Salenetri writes.

“Major corporations like Disney and Walmart say they will require COVID-19 vaccines for some employees,” Salenetri writes. “In general, those fired for refusing can’t get unemployment.”

According to representatives at The Seltzer Law Firm and The Employment Law Group, in most areas of the country, if you are fired for breaking company policy — in the cases of Disney, Walmart, Google, and more refusing to provide proof of required vaccines — you are not eligible for unemployment payments.

Employment Attorney John T. Harrington told Salenetri that “[e]ven something as simple as a dress code” violation is considered company insubordination.

“It’s misconduct, and it would likely disqualify you from receiving unemployment benefits,” Harrington warned, and pointed out that in some cases, the only way to get around it is to provide a valid medical or religious exemption, which are determined with employers only on a case-by-case basis.

“We have received numerous inquiries from clients and potential clients about how courts are likely to view these situations,” he added. “We’ve been advising them that if you have one of these two valid reasons to believe that you should be exempt from a vaccination requirement, you should assert them. But otherwise, companies are entitled to require that employees be vaccinated.”

The report notes that if a company’s vaccination policy is made clear to employees — as well as the repercussions of flouting the policy — and the employee still refuses, “the disqualification [for UC benefits] is the same as if they had broken any other company rule.”

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Half Of Pandemic Unemployment Funds May Have Been Stolen

As much as half of the unemployment benefits paid by the US government over the past year may have been stolen through fraud, with the bulk ultimately ending up outside the country – likely into the hands of foreign crime syndicates in China, Nigeria, Russia and elsewhere, according to Axios‘ Felix Salmon.

According to some estimates, unemployment fraud during the pandemic could ‘easily reach $400 billion,’ as states weren’t prepared for the unprecedented wave of unemployment claims.

States knew that fraud was inevitable, but opted to rush money out to people with minimal oversight, as opposed to laboriously vetting each application.

According to Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me – a fraud prevention service, America has lost over $400 billion to fraudulent claims, with as much as 50% of all unemployment payments possibly being stolen.

Of that, up to 70% of the money stolen by impostors ultimately left the country according to Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, who ways “These groups are definitely backed by the state.”

The rest of the money was likely stolen by street gangs domestically, who have made up a greater share of the fraud in recent months.

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Vast Stretches Of America Have Now Descended Into A State Of Deep Economic Hopelessness

The federal government gives us doctored numbers that show that the national unemployment rate is low, but in small towns all across the country it seems like almost everyone is either unemployed or working extremely low paying jobs.  Earlier this month, one such town was profiled by USA Today.  Even before the COVID pandemic came along, the little town of Ogdensburg, New York was deeply struggling, but now economic conditions have become extremely dire…

Ogdensburg is tiny and desperately poor, so it experiences these national trends in concentrated form. The median house in this city of 10,000 people sells for $68,000, according to the U.S. Census. The average family earns $42,000 a year, and 2,300 residents live below the federal poverty line, giving Ogdensburg a poverty rate 75% higher than the rest of New York State.

Then the economy closed. The governments of Canada and the United States tried to limit the spread of COVID-19 by shutting the international border, including the curvy suspension bridge between Ogdensburg and Prescott, Ontario. In the small industrial park east of town, the few remaining warehouses and Canadian-owned factories shut down. The hospital in Ogdensburg furloughed 174 people. Most restaurants and grocery stores stayed open, primarily by firing every person they could.

Like millions of other Americans, most people living in Ogdensburg are just trying to find some way to survive month after month.

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