US consumers, that’s all of you, are being hammered with taxes on imported goods most of which can’t realistically be produced in the US anyway, to solve a problem you don’t have.
A commitment like this takes years to plan. It can’t possibly be a response to tariffs announced weeks ago. This is all optics.
And I don't trust unemployment in this gig economy. I'm technically not unemployed, but I haven't had a full time job in nearly 2 years.
But nothing Trump is doing is going to fix your situation.
In fact he (or rather Elon/doge) is very actively making things worse for you with the massive government layoffs, flooding the market with even more people to compete with you for jobs making finding work more difficult and also eventually dropping all of our wages.
I'm aware. I'm sure he's responsible for at least 3 job freezes I ran into mid-interview this year. He's literally costing me job opportunities because no one can budget around this chaotic government.
In February 2020 it was 63.3% and in January 2025 it was 62.6%, for a difference of 0.7%. Also note the steady decline post-2008 and the multi-year plateau that jitters around 63%.
Having the plateau change from ~63% to ~62.5% isn't an unreasonable scenario.
That's because Americans got /richer/ and retired. You want to look at the prime-age rate, which the boomers have moved out of.
If you look at the prime-age employment rate, we're almost up to the record high levels: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300060
A lot of fake employment and low productivity jobs are in the government/NGO sector, paper pushers, DEI jobs, law/compliance type jobs - that should have been manufacturing jobs instead.
USA has no shipyards and infrastructure is crumbling precisely because of misallocation of resources and labor
That's because of the Jones Act and other poorly designed protectionism.
Heck, the _whole_ Federal government workforce is less than 2% of the total workforce.
> USA has no shipyards and infrastructure is crumbling precisely because of misallocation of resources and labor
Yes, and you have tariffs to thank for this. The Jones Act requires US-built ships for any ship traffic within the US waters.
So the shipbuilders were insulated from competition and just degraded into Defense contract moochers.
Jones Act is the reason US has at least some form of domestic shipbuilding
For example, the Washington state needs new ferries, and their cost is literally almost 10x than the cost for the similar ferries produced in Turkey for the nearby Vancouver, BC. With this kind of cost gap, there is simply nobody who would buy the US ships unless they _have_ to.
Without the Jones Act, the shipbuilders would have adapted long ago to produce high-margin high-tech components for the ships for the international market. And likely in larger quantities than they do currently.
So it's up to the gig workers if they think they're employed or not. Presumably this depends on how often they do it.