Youngkin fiddling while the Virginia economy is going down in flames

Our MAGA governor, Glenn Youngkin, wants you to believe the Virginia economy is “roaring,” as the unemployment rate is starting to tick up, and new and continued federal jobless claims are at uncomfortable levels.

“Virginia is competing to win, and we aren’t going to stop until the final buzzer sounds,” said Youngkin, who scored 82 points in four seasons as a scholarship basketball player at Rice from 1985-1989.

That’s 82 points more than I scored as a constitutional-law major and five-nights-a-week pick-up player at UVA from 1990-1994, for those keeping score.

I bet I could take him today.

I know I’d outshoot him.

Come on, Governor, let’s go, you and me – you win, I shut up about how weak and ineffectual you are; I win, you develop a spine and stand up to Trump.

As I’m tying the laces on my Chucks, Democrats are pointing out the uncomfortable truth related to the spike in jobless claims for the week ending March 8, which saw 4,036 new unemployment insurance claims filed, an increase of 40 percent week-to-week.

The Virginia Employment Commission, at Youngkin’s behest, is trying to write that increase off as being a function of a short-term layoff at an unnamed Northern Virginia manufacturing facility.

The steep federal job reductions being rolled out by the Trump/Musk administration to date have only impacted 1,116 Virginia residents who were either federal employees or employees of federal contractors, according to data from the VEC.

These numbers seem way low – layoffs.fyi, which is tracking reports of the Trump/Musk job cuts, says more than 113,000 federal employees have been let go since Jan. 20, with a second round of cuts set to begin next month that we know will impact 50,000 to 60,000 civilian workers in the Department of Defense.

Youngkin is touting a supposed 270,000 open jobs in Virginia, but there’s little overlap between those openings and the skillsets of the federal employees and employees of contractors who have already been laid off or are about to be.

“At best, it was maybe a 30 percent overlap,” Terry Clower, director of the Center for Regional Analysis and a public policy professor at George Mason University, told VPM in an interview from earlier this month.

Youngkin’s answer to this: update your resumes.

“We want Virginians to know that they have access to the support and resources they need. Our team, alongside our partner agency Virginia Works, is fully committed to helping those impacted by job loss transition quickly into one of the thousands of career opportunities currently available in the Commonwealth,” VEC Commissioner Mitch Melis said in a statement in a Youngkin administration press release that went out on Thursday.

We’re headed toward a crippling recession, and Youngkin’s answer is, in addition to updating your resume, a helpful Resource Guide and a brief video walking folks losing their jobs through eligibility requirements for unemployment benefits and the application process.

Great.