America is in a serious jobs slump | Hacker News Reader

America is in a serious jobs slump

cnn.com

122 pointspaulpauper132 comments

I haven't read anything comprehensive about how much damage the tarriffs have done to businesses, especially those that rely on procurement contracts that suffered compounded price increases.

But a sudden drop in jobs would be a pretty good indicator of the collapse of those businesses.

From what I know from friends in a few different industries, it's fucking brutal right now. Raw materials/parts costs from China have all increased and not by a bit, but by huge amounts. Finished product prices all have to go up to compensate which means sales of... everything not completely essential are falling. All the lost jobs also means less money to go around for consumers, which of course means even fewer sales which means more layoffs. And that's not even going into sectors that are dependent on migrant labor and all the downstream industries from THEM.

Truly just masterstrokes of policy from the current administration. Well maybe people will finally start paying attention when what's left of American manufacturing eats shit. You'll have to forgive me if I'm skeptical though. Huge swathes of the American public are so utterly underwater in propaganda that they've lost the ability to reason entirely.

We have create a massive cult at the national level. There is no reasoning with them. There is nothing that this administration can do to offend them or shake their confidence.

> Huge swathes of the American public are so utterly underwater in propaganda that they've lost the ability to reason entirely.

They're right here on HN as well.

And they're accusing the rest that they are the ones that are drinking the kool aid. It's a pretty weird time, tbh, I never ever thought it would get this bad. But I've seen some glimpses of it, a Dutch guy I know emigrated to the USA, got married to a woman in one of the heartland states and within a short few months he was completely on the Trump bandwagon and saying and writing stuff that his previous incarnation would be horrified at.

Yeah John Deere (who is a big manufacturer in the US) has seen material costs up ... and due to the tariff fight farmers don't want to buy new equipment. Big double whammy.

And they're they employ 30k people, many in manufacturing in the US.

Every big industrial manufacturer like them is going to be HURTING in the next several years. That double-whammy you describe can apply to basically any industrial sector that uses large vehicles/equipment.

You haven't read anything comprehensive about it because we're in a Reign of Terror where if your business says anything about the effects of the tarriffs, you can expect death threats, baseless but expensive legal investigations at the Federal level, red state AGs threatening more baseless but expensive legal investigations at the state level, etc. Nobody is going to be open and honest about it, better to suffer in silence and hope enough people suffer all at once that we get improved policy out of it.

As an avid half-pay-attention Bloomberg viewer, analysts figure Q4 is where it really starts to show up, partially because some importers were able to front run the tariffs.

Thing is, it's not even the tariffs themselves that's the issue; it's the uncertainty. Are the tariffs legal, or not? Are they just a bargaining chip or not? How can a company invest without any idea if the tariffs will be around in a year?

It's even worse than "what will this look like in a year?". If it takes 4-6 months from when you pay the money to build a product to when you have that product available to sell to a customer, and you don't know how much your parts are going to cost OR how much you're going to have to pay to the federal government when those products finally clear customs (or what legal hoops you're going to need to jump through to get that product clear), how can you operate?

To give you one idea of this: Christmas starts in January for consumer stuff. That's how long it takes and if there is any hick-up then you might miss the time slot. These tariffs are wreaking havoc with the planning of just about every major company because there are almost no players that are 100% vertically integrated that just use stuff made in the USA. Everybody is dependent on everybody else and some of those parties are abroad.

This tariff thing - to quote Dirk Gently - utterly misses the fundamental interconnectedness of everything.

> how can you operate?

It's much easier for huge, established companies to do this (easier to absorb because they already have huge teams of procurement specialists, lawyers, etc). I think that's at least part of the point in the first place.

> How can a company invest without any idea if the tariffs will be around in a year?

They can invest in methods that will lower costs in a way that will outlast tariffs, like replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation (for manufacturing work) and more AI-enhanced workflows (for white-collar work).

In the short term, it could help offset the cost of the tariffs. In the long term, it lowers the need for human labor.

Stuff like physical automation is going to require a lot of capital investment in equipment coming from outside the US. If that's going to be 15%+++ cheaper if the Supreme court rules against the tariffs, or when Trump chickens out, any sane company is going to delay that automation.

> Stuff like physical automation is going to require a lot of capital investment in equipment coming from outside the US. If that's going to be 15%+++ cheaper if the Supreme court rules against the tariffs, or when Trump chickens out, any sane company is going to delay that automation

Either way, more automation is coming sooner than later, and manufacturing workers probably aren't going to get the return of jobs that they were promised.

The US administration's epileptic tariff policies are a serious but short term problem for corporations, teaching them how to be resilient against this sort of thing in the future (i.e. by thinning payroll).

Corporations are also winning rhetorically via the administration's hamfisted bungling of tariffs (by making them so broad), giving them fuel to argue against any future administration (esp. a left-leaning one) from using tariffs at all, even if used surgically.

Let's not forget that there are effective uses of tariffs - if narrow and paired with industrial policy to build domestic capacity for strategic industries.

> Let's not forget that there are effective uses of tariffs - if narrow and paired with industrial policy to build domestic capacity for strategic industries.

Has the United States ever had an effective tariff policy though? All I’ve ever seen is a lengthy history of bumbling fuckups that make things worse for the consumer for no benefit. The Jones Act has not saved American shipbuilding from a moribund, barely-alive state; the chicken tax just makes people buy stupidly huge and overpriced trucks which can’t be exported and contribute to the international effectiveness of the US auto industry; sugar tariffs make us all unhealthier by giving bailouts to corn farmers to put HFCS in everything, and so on.

I can’t think of a single case of the United States surgically using tariffs to build a healthy domestic industry that benefits American citizens— I don’t think even competent adults could pull this off, never mind the clown circus we have now.

Maybe some better-run country could use tariffs well; when you have doofuses like ours it’s probably best to stick with the safe route of free trade and friendshoring.

> Has the United States ever had an effective tariff policy though? All I’ve ever seen is a lengthy history of bumbling fuckups that make things worse for the consumer for no benefit.

The primary point of narrowly applied tariffs coupled with industrial policy is to help critical domestic industries become domestically and internationally competitive, not to to immediately reduce consumer costs.

An example of this is the Biden Administration's 100% tariff on Chinese EVS, coupled with the industrial policy that was part of the inflation reduction act.

The goal of that tariff and the IRA was to prevent domestic auto manufacturers from being pushed to bankruptcy by the clearly superior and more cost-effective EVs from China, while making the necessary investments in domestic supply chains and manufacturing efficiency to allow domestic industry to catch up to China.

With the new administration, the EV tariffs have stayed in place, but more have been levied against the supply chains for all cars, not just EVs, and the domestic investments have stopped, all but guaranteeing higher prices and lower quality for US consumers for all cars (ICE and EV), while also all but guaranteeing and uncompetitive US auto industry globally.

Thanks to this, the world is going to be buying BYDs, not Chevys.

The issue with strategic industry building tariffs is that they need to be time limited, so industry has a clear incentive and timeline for capital investment.

The issue with politically-controlled tariffs is that politically sensitive industries (the ones that get tariffs in the first place) are happy to play chicken with politicians to keep them in place.

To wit, the Jones Act is a bit over 100 years old and the chicken (aka light truck) tax lasted for 30 years!

It'd make more sense to hand tariff policy to an independent entity.

Maybe you need an independent tariff setting body like how the federal reserve is independent. I can't think of a US example but apparently South Korea has done quite well with them.

That's supposed to be what the USTR is, but it has failed completely at that task, hence my point about "a smarter and better-run country could probably manage this; we cannot".

The high capex however needs to be paid, if tariffs are dropped, instantly imports become cheaper and they're less likely to compete. They'll probably play it safe and not make any investment at all. Wait it out.

> They'll probably play it safe and not make any investment at all. Wait it out.

Yes, but they will fire many workers in the interim to save costs, and put more load on those who remain. That's happening now across many industries, including tech. That doesn't require much capital, just a transfer of time/energy from (now fearful) workers to corporations.

We are already seeing billionaire execs extolling the virtues of 60 hr workweeks and the rise of "996" culture. Labor is getting squeezed.

> replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation

But if wages continue to fall, due to the looming recession, your automation may be more expensive than headcount.

> it's the uncertainty

Anecdotal reports from Europe (one insurance company, two banks, one systems integrator, one consulting firm; all multinational): All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.

A chancellor in Germany once proclaimed a ‘policy of steady hands’ when the opposition accused him of unsettling the economy with his many reforms.

> All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.

Very similar to what I'm coming across, including parties that are out of nowhere tasked with making everything they've got as cloud agnostic as they can with budgets available that they could not have dreamed of less than a year ago. As long as it gets done, not so that they will move out tomorrow morning but so that they could move out if they wanted to. I'd love to see some internal figures from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms, what the trend in adoption is.

> from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms

IME in Cybersecurity/Enterprise SaaS, F1000s largely eschewed serverless capabilities and control plane lock-in features (eg. Fargate, Autopilot) because they wanted to be able to reduce single vendor risks as well as negotiate better contracts.

Most firms I've dealt with that size tend to have at least 2 hyperscalers used internally, plus an on-prem footprint that is increasingly being reduced.

The firms I've seen use serverless and lock-in features the most tended to be smaller shops (eg. Mid-markets, hyper scaling startups) that simply don't have the bandwidth to invest in a large DevSecOps org but are also technical enough to not get locked into an MSSP contract.

Also, OCI is on an absolute warpath right now - a LOT of very large tech-first F500s are getting and signing OCI sweetheart deals as we speak. They've replicated GCP's GTM approach, which is ironic because Thomas Kurian is ex-Oracle and was the de facto "keeps the lights on" guy there, until Catz and Ellison pushed him out.

Interesting. So, the largest serverless installation that I'm aware of is one that has a massive number of in the field sensors posting data every five minutes, think many millions of sensors. They're in a complete panic there. And they're not exactly small, rather the opposite.

> it's the uncertainty

Worse, it's not even "honest" uncertainty, the people in charge of the policies are profiting from keeping everyone else uncertain.

Not only in the crass sense of insider-trading or market-manipulation, but also in terms of the landscape it creates.

For example, look at Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. While he goes on TV as the administration's tariff-mouthpiece, in the background, his family company [0] is going to US companies and saying: "Wow, those tariff-taxes suck, right? How about we give you a little money to keep you afloat today if you agree to give us any money the government might end up owing you back for illegal tariffs?"

It's hard to see how this will change until Republican federal legislators decide they no longer want to be accomplices [1] to the Executive branch's high crimes and misdemeanors.

[0] Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick owned ~50% and was CEO for decades before giving it to his sons.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-tariff...

In a functioning society these people would be in jail. It is worse than the worst cases of insider trading and yet they are just sitting there gleefully counting their money. Utterly disgusting, traitors to their own country.

Speaks to the disconnect between our representatives and the people they represent so many of these policies are extremely unpopular and yet they still get pushed through to terrible effect. I don't understand why 'we' can't hold them accountable. Is it due to lack of education in what is happening? A lack of understanding in our political system? Is the populate just completely disconnected?

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...

> When the authors look only at the preferences of average citizens, it appears that they do have a pretty big effect on policy change. But when they add the preferences of economic elites and interest groups to the analysis, the impact of average citizens vanishes entirely. Basically, average citizens only get what they want if economic elites or interest groups also want it.

It's tribalism. "I will hurt so that those I hate hurt also".

Or even if legal or not means anything. Lower court ruling so far is a lot of the tariffs are illegal. But the supreme court as so far ruled overwhelmingly in favor of the administration, so that is very likely to get overturned anyways. So many layers of uncertainty.

Only a few years ago, I was told on this very forum that it would be foolish for the Dems to try to pack SCOTUS.

It's pretty clear now that it was foolish of them to not have.

It's going to take a while. Most companies ordered as much inventory as they could before the tariffs hit. Companies have to work through that lower-cost inventory first, then deal with the tariffs, then have that data start to show up in later decisions.

There's also a lingering hope that the tariffs will be struck down and disappear, so companies are waiting as long as possible before taking the tariff hit on new orders.

The handwringing is so amazing here, as is the denial of what needs to be done to stabilize the US economy, which is to bring more manufacturing home, create jobs organically, and stop relying on China, who is not our friend.

That may or may not be true. But what is immediately clear is that Trump has no idea how to accomplish it. Americans are in I believe 6 months of contraction in manufacturing jobs.

To reduce dependence on China, tariffs should ONLY be on China, and not the entire world including neighbors and close allies.

To help bring manufacturing back to the US, the tariffs should have been fixed, in legislation, with 2+ years of advanced notice before implementation, to allow companies to plan for them and implement something.

The ad-hoc approach taken by the current administration ensures 100% that neither of those will happen.

To be fair China can rapidly setup factories in many countries or just use them as re-sellers. Heck many of the "Made in India" goods are just re-branded stuff from China. This is why the tariffs encompass everything, even remote deserted islands. If you don't tariff everywhere you leave a loophole open for China to potentially exploit.

(Note I am not saying I 100% agree with the near-global tariffs, but I can see why they cover so many regions.)

> To be fair China can rapidly setup factories in many countries or just use them as re-sellers.

Then China should setup factories in the USA. Problem solved.

It's idiotic to claim the tariffs on the rest of the world are because of China. CBP has real, non-idiotic ways to deal with incorrect country of origin labeling, and illegal transshipments. See: United States v. Akua Mosaics, Inc. and Kenneth Fleming

Trump's tariffs aren't any lower on countries that have already cracked down on use of their ports for illegal transshipments from China.

"bring manufacturing back to America" keeps getting thrown around and I'm genuinely curious how that would work. Let's say we do bring the bulk of manufacturing jobs back to America, what does the country look like in 10 years?

- Which manufacturing jobs? All of them? We'll have Americans sewing t-shirts and making every widget?

- How much would those jobs pay? More or less than China pays their workers now?

- If it's more, where does the extra money come from? If it's not more, who's going to do those jobs? If the answer is automation, then there aren't going to be a whole bunch of jobs created.

Also fundamentally, if American in general can work in positions higher up in the value chain. Shouldn't we be pushing for more jobs in healthcare, tech, finance etc vs low value manufacturing?

The manufacturing is necessary because if China becomes adversarial, none of those exports are getting to the US anymore. That's what they see that you don't. Why don't you answer those questions yourself? Work on it, instead of just denying it and telling us all that's it's totally impossible and we shouldn't try to right the ship.

Reducing economic dependence on China is a bipartisan issue. Biden passed plenty of large bills that aimed to bring manufacturing to America with the continuation of the Trump 1 tariffs and additional subsidies.

That's too subtle and long term for Trump. The subsidies have been torn up and the tariffs tripled. Now it'll be far more expensive to build the manufacturing capacity in America.

Color me skeptical of tariffs that include Heard and McDonald islands, which are exclusively populated by penguins and seals.

There's a fair argument to be made that surgical application of tariffs could potentially raid in restoring manufacturing jobs in the US. However, the ham-fisted manner in which Trump's tariffs were applied can at best be explained by incompetence and at worst deliberate economic sabotage.

Who would build a factory right now in the US?

Next month, those tariffs might be gone and your investment with it.

Yep, there is a lumber company near me that has filled their yard with so much product that the employees have started parking along the street recently.

One thing is that a lot of economic activity was front-loaded to the first few quarters as businesses scrambled to get inventory on board ahead of tariffs; now we're seeing companies having burned through inventory, so inflationary impacts are going to start working their way through the supply chain now in earnest, and we're going to see a concomitant slowdown in economic activity as that acts as a persistent drag across multiple sectors. In practice you're looking at something equivalent to a 3-4% federal sales tax on all purchases, but keep an eye on where it falls on relatively inelastic goods, which will have an outsize effect on consumer finances.

I think it is hard to say. With a new gamer in the BLS, maybe they are faking numbers to push a rate cut?

The Financial Times coverage is particularly terrifying, pinning almost all economic growth to "a handful of states, artificial intelligence, healthcare and the wealthy".

It also notes that health care isnt productive. It's a measure of societal overhead, basically. Yet that was by far one of the largest sources for new jobs.

https://archive.ph/2025.09.08-053701/https://www.ft.com/cont...

I posted that article yesterday on HN, but got no engagement [0].

It is absolutely worrisome, and does connect with my own personal experience visiting other states for work - there is a slowdown in most states aside from those with large diversified economies like CA, TX, NY, FL, and NC that also benefited from the IRA [1], IIJA, and CHIPS [2] act.

Those states with moderate expansion like PA, OH, IN, AZ, and SC are also those that had manufacturing industries that benefited from the IRA [0], IIJA, and CHIPS [2] act.

The states marked as "Treading Water" or "In Recession" didn't receive significant economic stimulus on a per capita basis (eg. Clean energy jobs created in GA vs IN were similar despite GA receiving double the amount of IRA funding and GA having almost 1.7x the population of Indiana) and lack diversified or semi-diversified economies

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45160699

[1] - https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/map-which-states-ar...

[2] - https://www.eiu.com/n/us-election-its-impact-on-industrial-p...

Yeah, reading the FT article, it claims “Healthcare, technology and real estate are expanding, while financial services, retail and hospitality are treading water”.

Much of real estate is also a net drag that isn't productive...

Most of the Real Estate capex over the last few years has been in manufacturing real estate such as factories, or infra spending such as data centers.

Both those have value at a macro-level, and are largely a result of IIJA, IRA, and CHIPS act era subsidies, though CHIPS act adjacent spend was "AI-washed" which helped extend adjacent industries capex.

I've previously called out this kind of AI-washing as well [0] - it reminds me of the Telecom Bubble during the 1990s-2000s.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069086

I have a strong feeling this is just the opening stages. The damage done to the US economy and to the trust image of the US abroad is still very hard to get a grip on. And with every passing day it is still getting worse.

"For the first time in more than four years, there are fewer open jobs than there are job seekers."

Americans still have it pretty good in that respect. Over here in EU my country gets to enjoy 9% unemployment rate and many times more job seekers than jobs.

Key difference being the social safety nets in place around the jobless and under-employed.

I suspect if you had to only count decent jobs, the numbers might look a bit different.

The USA is a continent-sized-country it would be better to list states vs EU countries, which have a considerable spread. Or you could compare the whole of the Eurozone or the whole of the EU with the USA. That would be a better comparison.

If I lose my job, I lose my healthcare. I only have unemployment benefits for a period of time. We have almost no social safety nets.

One thing I don't see much research into (maybe I'm wrong) is whether the US has major data quality issues with labor data.

Jobs reports just don't seem at all to square away with the vast anecdotal accounts from both employed and unemployed individuals across a swath of industries.

It's no secret that companies put up job listings they either have no intention of filling or are simply H1B fraud (impossible listings used to justify an eventual H1B hire).

This would make the "true" number of open jobs within a sector far, far worse than reported.

Comparing jobseekers to job openings is also a very imprecise approach. For certain industries, the gap is bound to be far worse than for others. And the same is true when you look at it by level, experience, etc.

The US is thus in a weird position where equity markets look OK... largely boosted by gains in a small selection of companies (in what's perhaps an AI fueled bubble) and the economy looks a tad rough but not horrible. The real impact of tariffs + broader economic policy is being underrepresented in the data.

This can only last so long. Eventually, inventories will be depleted and tariff impacts will rear their head. Eventually, the true unemployment rate will result in increased eviction rates, lower savings rates, and lower median consumption.

I think the reasoning behind why you can mostly look past the fake listings is that the numbers are treated as meaningful relative to each other, and so, the ratio of false listings should be relatively similar.

> Jobs reports just don't seem at all to square away with the vast anecdotal accounts from both employed and unemployed individuals across a swath of industries.

Agreed and on multiple fronts.

e.g. I can imagine that white collar workers may not claim unemployment due to a combination of embarrassment/"I don't need it as much as other folks" so the numbers are probably under-reported there.

I've also heard it's bad for recent grads but then a recent grad I know sent me the below:

"I’ve been hearing this a lot lately, and honestly, it’s pretty silly. Yes, tech majors are definitely over saturated, but in my opinion, you shouldn’t be able to go to school for four years, do the bare minimum the entire time, and get a great job after college. From my experience, everyone who worked really really hard and knew their stuff got to a place that they’re happy with"

The above could have been what I said back in 2002 right after the dotcom boom. In other words, it's unclear if companies are hiring fewer junior folks, junior folks were benefiting from ZIRP/boom market or a combination of both.

What you said is how the USA worked for my entire life until the H1B saturation finally reached a critical point! Young men and women would find jobs after college, it was NORMAL to have that be the case. What's going on right now is NOT normal. I got a job right out of college in 1995 with a CS degree--in fact, I had two offers, and I was nothing special. People with actual connections did really, really well back then. It was an optimistic time, and yes, Clinton was President, but he lucked out with the dot com era boom. It obviously imploded by 2001 or so.

Before our time, it was even normal for people to find jobs without a college degree.

I think publicly traded companies post employee headcounts in their public financial disclosures, so I would assume we would see a general rise in head counts starting in 2020, followed by a leveling off or decline starting in 2023. For example, Google. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...

Instead of fresh college grads, companies are hiring h1bs.

It's scary the reported number could change so much with so much else depending on it.

Optimistically, the drop could be from temporary higher employment due to folks rushing to import additional goods before the tariffs came into effect. This might dissipate as excess stock levels reduce.

How much though remains to be seen, as tariffs generally will make things tougher, unless something else compensates (unlikely).

> Employment gains were so weak in the July jobs report that President Donald Trump fired the head of the bureau charged with collecting the data, baselessly claiming it was rigged.

That first sentence really sets the tone, not just of the article, but also of the current political climate.

Well, it's not even true.

Trump did (baselessly?) fire the BLS head, but it was because of revisions that looked convenient for the last administration.

Revisions which were regular standard practice. About ~50% of the revisions made the previous administration look good, and about 50% made them look bad.

You are only half reading the news.

Yes, revisions are valid and happen. Yes, a look at historical revisions don't show any bias.

But where are you seeing that half made Trump look good?

https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm

Biden was the previous administration.

The whole of trumps first stint?

For this year's numbers there are two possible stories that come to my mind:

1. The jobs are going ~constantly downhill and any new, revised number is going to be worse than previous

2. There is a conspiracy and initially the numbers are systematically inflated and/or afterwards deflated because reasons... that are completely incomprehensible to me. I don't even understand if this conspiracy theory should be pro or against trump.

>The whole of trumps first stint?

Is it hard to imagine a world where things from 10 years ago aren't the same as today? Can you not see that politicians will do anything to win?

Biggest downward revision ever recorded this morning, by the way.

Statistics done by a statistics bureau was "revised to look bad"? There are thousands of people collecting billions of data-points all accumulated layer by layer into a summary, compared over different sources. But this year they just decided to make up the numbers instead?

US labor and economics statistics is famously most reliable in the world, going further back in time than any other statistics source. Its not only used by the government but by banks, companies, and international organisations to predict and analyze economic trends.

But surely this year when the numbers looked a bit bad, they made the numbers to intentionally look that way? Simply no. The administration firing the people collection statistics is the real concern. (and its not the first time the administration has removed historical statistics either)

(manual revisions are made in statistics to compensate for anomalies. Companies stocking up on product to escape tariffs created a false peak in GDP that does not correspond to real consumption for example. But that's how statistics work, and the US is the gold standard in proper statitics)

Not baseless--when you're so bad at your job that those huge revisions come in year after year, someone's head should roll.

You've drunk the kool-aid. BLS revisions are no fault of their own, and simply because businesses send in their data whenever they feel like it:

"many businesses do not have their payroll data ready to report by the scheduled date that BLS initially releases the data."

"BLS continues to collect outstanding reports from the businesses in the sample as it prepares a second and then a third estimate for the month. With each subsequent estimate, more businesses have provided their information."

"and occasionally the revised data produce a different picture altogether."

https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/revisions-to-jobs-numb...

"the revisions aren’t mistakes. They’re a deliberate, transparent part of a statistical process designed to balance two competing goals: providing timely economic information while ensuring the greatest possible accuracy."

https://govfacts.org/federal/labor/why-job-numbers-change-ho...

This makes no sense. The initial jobs numbers usually get much more attention than the revised ones, so posted inflated numbers that eventually get revised down helps whoever the current administration is. The recent revisions have gotten unusual attention because of how bad the overall situation is, and from Trump drawing extra attention to them by firing the BLS head and essentially calling for the numbers to be cooked.

What does the last administration even have to do with this? Job growth plummeted under the current administration. I get that Trump blames Biden for everything because he always needs a scapegoat, but am shocked that anyone still gives that any weight given that Trump has very publicly and deliberately created the current economic trouble.

I mean, that's what's being complained about.

Trump fired a statistician because the numbers reported were politically inconvenient, not because they were incorrect.

He must not have seen tweets about the latest numbers or someone would be fired again.

Time for Americans to suffer as we deserve. (I am also American, living in America.)

No Americans deserve to suffer for the greed of the few.

How about just a few Americans then.

But only the ones I disagree with.

How about only the ones that voted for exactly what is happening?

What if we didn't stop them because we were also benefitting from their greed?

Maybe I am missing something but ~1/3 of voting age Americans voted for this. Trump was very clear that tariffs were coming, and even warned that Americans should be prepared for some tough times.

And another ~1/3 were comfortable enough with this to not bother voting.

I think people deserve what they vote for.

Sorry guys.

Kinda have to agree with this.

It's a team sport.

Learned that in high school.

Fourth and one inside the two yard line? Sorry bud. Coach called a pass play, so you get to take that L with everyone else.

Shoulda had a better coach.

Benefit of democratic government is that you get exactly the government you deserve. We can recover. There will be more elections. But even then we'll get what we vote for, no more and no less.

> We can recover.

That's not a run race.

> There will be more elections.

Why are you so confident that they will be fair? Now that they got it, why would these guys ever relinquish power?

Russia has regular elections.

Can you attribute it directly to tariffs? There is more than one factor at play here.

Job numbers during Biden's presidency, and early in Trump's presidency were also wildly over-estimated.

https://www.semafor.com/article/08/21/2024/us-job-growth-wea...

Tariffs might be a factor, but there's also a wider economic downturn globally at the moment. Canada lost 66k jobs in august, UK unemployment rate rose to 4.7%, Europe as a whole has slowing growth, deflation is becoming crisis-level in China and unemployment is rising.

> Can you attribute it directly to tariffs?

All economists and financial analysts seem to say so:

“It will be difficult for the U.S. to avoid a recession if the tariffs stay at the level that’s been announced,” Claudia Sahm, chief economist at New Century Advisors.

"Fong says that could lead to changes in businesses’ cost structures, such as downsizing operations and laying off workers."

https://time.com/7275987/trump-tariffs-global-economy-recess...

"J.P.Morgan ratcheted up its odds for a U.S. and global recession to 60%, as brokerages scrambled to revise their forecast models with tariff distress threatening to sap business confidence and slow down global growth."

https://www.reuters.com/markets/jpmorgan-lifts-global-recess...

"industries impacted by tariffs have shed tens of thousands of jobs."

"Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, observed job growth in tariff-impacted sectors is negative, while those not affected by tariffs have seen slower growth but remain in positive territory."

https://fortune.com/2025/09/08/tariff-job-losses-trump-trade...

“Tariffs represent a negative supply shock, which hurts production and raises prices – a much smaller scale of what we experienced in the pandemic,” Nationwide economist Kathy Bostjancic wrote earlier this year.

https://thehill.com/business/5488614-us-economy-adds-22k-job...

That's not attribution that's just a deferral.

I am fractionally responsible for the government of the country that I live in, even if I did not vote for the parties that ended up in government.

> the greed of the few

Tens of millions of people voted for this rather exuberantly.

Donald Trump did not have a "few" votes. You deserve what you get.

I'm doubtful most Americans can (or are willing to) draw enough of a link between cause and effect to really learn a lesson from this. Half of the voters seem to either:

- Not believe the data (it's a hoax, rigged, fake news etc) or

- Blame the current issues on the previous administration or do a whataboutism justification or

- Don't really care because deporting immigrants / owning the libs / pretending trans people don't exist etc are more important

We are already in a recession. The S&P500 is propped up by a few companies, Gold is crushing stocks, job numbers are horrendous, and the private rate markets are telling us rates are going lower, fast.

Gold, a static commodity, outperforming stock indices is practically a shout from the top of a mountain that companies are doing terribly because they cannot produce returns greater than the inflation of commodity prices.

Look at how many treasuries the large banks are buying in anticipation of lower rates.

The corporate media and the Federal Reserve (of Public Relation) just want to paper over it long enough for the large players to get positioned before the rest of the market realizes it.

More likely, we're in a dual economy. Even McDonalds is noticing it: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/mcdonalds-high-pri...

For the next 50 years or so, we have to accept that the US is a housing-anchored gerontocracy, with younger people expected to be the underclass serving the elderly. There are no checks and balances against the elderly in the US government, and of course there never will be.

I hate CNN--Trump didn't fire the BLS head because the numbers were bad, he fired them because the BLS has been cooking those numbers for 35 years or more! Such HORRIBLE reporting!

> Trump didn't fire the BLS head because the numbers were bad

Yes, in fact, he did.

> he fired them because the BLS has been cooking those numbers for 35 years or more!

He fired them because the numbers were bad. He also publicly stated what he described as his “opinion” that the reason that the numbers were bad was that they were “rigged” for partisan reasons, but he has provided no evidence that that ever occurred, and I have no idea where the 35 years claim comes from.

Has been for more than two years.

That leaves us in solid stagflation territory.

Sub-3% inflation [0] and 3% annualized GDP growth [1] sure doesn’t seem like stagflation to me. Not everything is sunshine and flowers but we shouldn’t throw around terms when they don’t apply.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

> Not everything is sunshine and flowers but we shouldn’t throw around terms when they don’t apply.

It seems to apply, despite your dismissal. Inflation is an ongoing and pressing concern, as stated by the Federal Reserve. The tightening of monetary policy has contributed to unemployment. GDP is irrelevant, as stagflation is a paradox, not a goalpost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation

To whit:

> In economic theory, there are two main explanations for stagflation: supply shocks, such as a sharp increase in oil prices, and misguided government policies that hinder industrial output while expanding the money supply too rapidly.

No it hasn't. [https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/04/september-2024-us-jobs-repor...]

It seems to depend on what data you look at, and exactly how you look at it: https://i0.wp.com/mishtalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/No...

Almost all of these reports have now been revised down.

https://www.semafor.com/article/08/21/2024/us-job-growth-wea...

It's strange that CNBC here decided to use the unrevised numbers instead of the more accurate revised numbers, especially when leading into the election.

The official numbers are pure bullshit.

> Has been for more than two years.

Tech and Manufacturing have been.

* reduce liability to hire people to businesses

* eliminate taxes on employing people

* stop runaway inflation

Most of the biden job growth was:

1. From money printing

2. From the federal government employing some huge percentage of the usa population.

Any job growth numbers and conclusions about the economy need to take the above into account.

Trump is printing money faster than Biden did. How come it's not helping him?

have you seen interest rates? also, the FED prints money

Deficits print money too.

But none of that really changed. The money printer is still going ant the same pace, and will only be going faster in the coming year.

And the Federal layoffs from the DOGE nonsense haven’t even started to hurt since so many are still getting paid.

Something else is the source of this…

which money printer?

Reminder that Trump signed two (of three) Covid stimulus checks

huge percentage? https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...

need to take contractors into account

> Most of the biden job growth was: > 1. From money printing

A US president is allowed to print money? Please cite your sources that Biden printed money.

> 2. From the federal government employing some huge percentage of the usa population.

Federal govt. employee count has stayed relatively stable since the 1960s at 1.5% and 2% of the total US workforce.

Here is the share of US Federal Civilian Workforce Compensation as a Percentage of GDP (2016–2024). If you look closely you might notice that the cost of federal workforce compared to GDP actually went down in the Biden years.

Year Share of GDP (%)

2016 1.49

2017 1.49

2018 1.46

2019 1.36

2020 1.42

2021 1.42

2022 1.37

2023 1.31

2024 1.27

Furthermore, federal govt. employee count remained steady under Obama. And grew during Trump's first term. And then shrunk under Biden.

If you are voting based on your incorrectly held beliefs, you are doing us all, your fellow countrymen, a disservice.

You are missing all of the government contractors. Shows how little you know

> You are missing all of the government contractors. Shows how little you know

Are you able to show us data that supports your argument?

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