Lisa Cook, a professor of economics at Michigan State University and a former senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration, said that while President Donald Trump has repeatedly boasted of low unemployment numbers among Latino and Black Americans during his presidency, these numbers ignore key structural issues in the U.S. economy that were laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic. “For an economy to unravel so quickly suggests that the basis was not there,” Cook said. She said the fact that so many Americans work in jobs that pay less than minimum wage shows that low unemployment numbers may have belied structural inequities that have long persisted in America, and are more clear than ever amid the COVID-19 outbreak. “We are subsidizing a lot of people to stay home,” Cook said of the current economic crisis. “Some are making more on unemployment than they were in their jobs, but that is a critique of those jobs.”

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