The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that the awful news is surprisingly good.

James Taranto observes:

One minuscule compensation for an awful economy is that, with a Democrat in the White House, it makes for some rather amusing journalism as putatively objective reporters try to put the best face on bad news. This Associated Press headline, previewing tomorrow's unemployment numbers, is a classic of the genre: "Layoffs of Census Workers Will Distort Jobs Data."


"The census began hiring more workers last year," the AP notes. "It added about 500,000 this spring." The census is wrapping up, leaving many of those workers back on the unemployment rolls. Take the headline literally, and the AP is promising that things will get back to normal in the spring of 2020, when the government hires hundreds of thousands of temps for the next census. Until then, the employment stats will look worse than they actually are.

It's all a matter of perspective, though. Who's to say that the 3 months out of 120 when the census is going on is "normal" and other 117 months are "distorted"? You could even make a case that the hiring of census workers distorted the job numbers, making them look better than they actually are.