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While discussing whether the U.S. economy might recover this fall after the coronavirus downturn, a Trump economic advisor referred to the American worker as “human capital stock.”

Senior White House Economic Adviser Kevin Hassett made the wildly insensitive remark, first flagged by Aaron Rupar on Twitter, on Sunday after CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether unemployment numbers would remain in double digits come November.

“Our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed, our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, and so there are lots of reasons...

“It is scary to go to work,” White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said while discussing admiration staff members testing positive for coronavirus.

Hassett made the admission during an appearance on CBS News’ Face the Nation. Host Margaret Brennan asked President Trump’s economic adviser about wearing a mask at the White House now that two members of the staff — Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary Katie Miller and one of the president’s personal valets — tested positive for the virus.

“I’ve got a mask right here. And...

The unemployment rate reached 14.7% in April, as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the job market.

The Labor Department said that 20.5 million jobs were lost, in the first full month of figures since the coronavirus crisis shut down much of the U.S. economy. That is the greatest net loss of jobs on record.

Employment in arts, entertainment and recreation fell by 1.3 million, the Labor Department said. The biggest hit was to the leisure and hospitality industry, where jobs fell by 7.7 million. The bulk of that was in food services and drinking places, which shed 5.5 million jobs, and the retail sector also took a big hit, declining by 2.1 million.

President Donald Trump was on the phone with Fox & Friends as the figures were announced. He said that the numbers were “totally expected.” “Even the Democrats are not blaming me for that,” he said.

“Those jobs will all be back and they will all be back very soon,...

While Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was painting a somewhat rosy picture as to where the U.S. economy is heading, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett used harrowing terms like “grave situation,” “negative shock that our economy has ever seen” and “Great Depression” to describe the situation. Both administration officials shared their differing messages on separate Sunday morning news programs.

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked the secretary about the president’s claim that the economy will rebound “faster than people think.”

Mnuchin replied, “I think as...

There’s no end in sight for the longest government shutdown in American history. President Trump and congressional Democrats have dug in to the point that some senior Republicans close to the White House have said the only way it’s ending is through some sort of external disaster, like Tsa employees refusing to come to work. As Trump continues to clamor for border wall funding — he tried to make his case Wednesday morning by tweeting a Lou Dobbs statistic about how 800 miles of wall have been built in Europe...

Eight-hundred-thousand federal workers weren’t paid on Friday because President Trump says he needs a wall to protect us. His case for continuing the partial government shutdown, repeated once more in his Oval Office fundraising speech last week, is that migrants from Mexico and Central America are poisoning our country with their terrorism, drugs and propensity for rape. It is actually a more anodyne version of the argument that Pat Buchanan made in a syndicated column Sunday, one that Trump celebrated on Twitter for its citation of phony White House statistics about immigrant crime.

President Trump doesn’t have many tentpole accomplishments to tout as his presidency enters its third year. He does have the economy, though, which has boomed since he assumed office back in January 2017. He might not have it much longer. On Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook warned that the company wasn’t going to earn as much as expected in the coming financial quarter. “While we anticipated some challenges in key emerging markets, we did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China,” he wrote in a letter to investors.