It's Friday, August 14th. I'm a Heila Hughes.

And I'm Gideon Resneck and this is what today, the only podcast that is always delivered

even in snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night.

Yeah, so Trump's probably going to try to defund us, unfortunately, but if you got in early,

you can still listen.

Yeah, we hate to break the news to you this way, but we feel we have to.

On today's show, Congress hits the road and Trump rages about vote by mail, then some headlines.

But first, the latest, another week, another set of job numbers.

And this week, the numbers of Americans filing for unemployment was below one million for the

first time since March. Yay. Was it far below, by the way?

It was around 963,000 people. So looking at this in the context of a pandemic that seemingly

has no end, what is the takeaway?

Yeah, I mean, well, like you said, this is marginally good in the sense that it's less than a million

for the first time in quite some time, but it is obviously not great.

It's important to remember that before COVID-19 shuttered the economy in the spring,

the highest weekly total had been around 695,000 back in 1982.

And separately, in this week's numbers, there were another 488,000 claims for

pandemic unemployment assistance, which is reserved for people like gig workers and independent contractors.

Now, per the post, though, there are still more than 28 million people who are getting some form of unemployment

towards the end of July. So a lot of people still out of the workplace.

And there are major concerns about how slowly re-hierings are happening.

The longer the pandemic stretches on in the United States, the higher likelihood that these losses become permanent

...