The Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that the unemployment rate is down because 2.5 million more people were working in May.

I’ll bet that very few of those people were hired for new created jobs. Most of them were rehired or recalled to an old job that was put terminated because of the Wuhan virus shutdown. I suspect that there will be a fairly rapid recall of employees to businesses that were able to withstand the shutdown. The unemployment rate is now around 13 or 14 percent, and I’m guessing that it will drop to 7 or 8 percent by Labor Day. At that point, we’ll need to be creating new businesses to replace those killed off by the pandemic shutdown in order to create the new jobs necessary to restore the 2021 economy to a level comparable to 2019’s.

It’s going to be easier to rebuild in those places where the residents haven’t trashed their communities’ physical and moral resources.

A substantial number of communities will now have to make hard choices. The cost of rebuilding housing, businesses, and public facilities and the cost of restoring standards of public behavior will undoubtedly make some previously fashionable luxury opinions untenable. It will be interesting to see who engages in what sort of bitter clinging.