The US unemployment rate is now at its highest since the pandemic, but the White House says “the best is yet to come”.

The disparity between the facts and their interpretation highlights how the 43-day shutdown of the US government, during which the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) ceased collecting data, has left the reliability of the much-anticipated and much-delayed jobs report for October and November open to question and interpretation.

The divide between the haves and have-nots in Trump’s America is seemingly widening with each data release.Credit: AP

What is undeniable, however, is that an unemployment rate that started the year at 4 per cent, when Donald Trump regained the presidency, is now at 4.6 per cent and has been creeping up in 10 basis point increments since mid-year. The US has lost more than 270,000 jobs this year.

The White House seized on an increase in private sector jobs in November, where 64,000 jobs were added, as a sign of progress, even as the unemployment rate rose to its highest level in more than four years and the number of people working part-time while wanting full-time employment rose to 8.7 per cent, a percentage point higher than at the same time last year. The unemployment rate for black Americans, at 8.3 per cent, is the highest since 2021.

The overall numbers aren’t positive for the White House or the economy because they include the delayed impact of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency’s purge of the federal workforce. In October, 162,000 federal employees who took a deferred resignation package earlier in the year, under extreme pressure from DOGE, were included in the jobs data.

Over the two months, the unemployment rate rose from 4.4 per cent in September to 4.6 per cent last month.

The actual numbers might be worse.

The BLS revised down the number of jobs........

© The Sydney Morning Herald