"It's a mixed bag," Wolff, speaking on the US jobs report, told Radio Sputnik's By Any Means Necessary on Friday. "The numbers for the American economy, if you're serious and not a political hustler, are always a mixture of good and bad, and therefore you have to kind of look at what numbers point up and what numbers point down."
The April 2019 data on hiring and unemployment released by the Labor Department on Friday showed that the US added 263,000 jobs last month, and that the jobless rate fell to 3.6 percent — the lowest in the last 50 years, according to the New York Times. It also showed that average hourly earnings saw an increase of 0.2 percent.
But despite mainstream media hailing the report as a sign that all is well in the US, economically speaking, Wolff told hosts Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon that it's just not accurate to say that everything is swell.
"An honest appraisal of the economic conditions of the United States, in my judgement, would have to conclude that we are in a period of extreme difficulty that is marked, interestingly, by low unemployment, but a greater degree of economic squeeze on the mass of people coupled with a greater degree of inequality that should make any balanced appraisal of the American economy be very, very inclined to conclude what our politics shows us: we're a society in trouble," he said.
Wolff went on to note that mainstream media has cast the report in a rosy light because "there's this hope driving many headline writers that maybe we're coming out of this bad situation [where Americans are buried in debt and struggling to make enough money to keep their heads above water]."
"A bit of good news… is inclined to be hyped," he said.