When the nation’s labor secretary flubs arithmetic while struggling to defend poor employment data, there’s a problem.
In mid-February, as Donald Trump’s State of the Union address neared, Peter Navarro, a leading White House voice on trade and economic policy, told Fox News that the U.S. economy was “perfect.” A week later, during JD Vance’s latest Fox News appearance, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom” in the economy.
Soon after, the American public learned that economic growth during the first year of the president’s second term reached a nine-year low (excluding the pandemic). Late last week, the latest job numbers were even worse: The U.S. economy lost 90,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate inched higher.
Indeed, the closer one looked at the data, the worse the figures appeared. Trump has been in the White House for 14 months, and during that time the cumulative total is 150,000 jobs. In the last 14 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, by contrast, the American economy added 1.74 million jobs.
Normally running a large deficit acts as a stimulus for the economy, but Trump’s reverse Midas touch is just too strong.
Depends on what the money is being spent on.
If you buy a house, that’s money generally well spent. If you buy hookers and blow, that’s not.
And if you spend it on military grade fireworks, it’s literally watching that money go up in smoke.
As a small business owner, I can tell everyone that the other shoe hasn’t dropped yet. January and February were the worst they’ve been in years, far worse than last year, which was one of my best starts ever. This has been my worst start ever. March is usually a great month for me, and it’s looking really slow as well. And talking to others, I’m not alone.
Economic indicators lag by a few months, so in a couple of months, when the numbers for the first quarter are released, we’re going to see that they were much worse than expected, and that was mostly BEFORE the Iran War.
We are already in a recession, and headed for a Depression. I can’t wait for the election, because no matter what MAGA does, there is going to be change, one way or another.
Thanks Trump.
The worse part is how MAGA will find a way to not blame themselves.
They don’t even blame anymore. They just completely ignore it and say “BEST BIGLY JOB NUMBERS EVER!!1” and don’t even acknowledge there was a problem to begin with.
Republicans have had complete control of Texas for 30 years and they still successfully drum up their base by blaming problems on the Democratic party.
They never do. If it requires someone to create a fake movement and a fake party for them like the teabaggers, they will surely do it.
Just watch: many of them will pretend they never even heard of this Donald guy for a while, then go right back to voting R to put everything in reverse again at the very next election. Just like they did with W and the “tea party” thing. Weird how all those people that were for the “tea party” were and are Republicans…
Of course this is obviously Obama’s fault by way of Biden.
I believe the US economy is entering a zombie state, buoyed by corruption and inertia it’s going to continue becoming less and less competitive until something chops the head off.
Like, you can actually pay the administration to blacklist your competitors now. You can pay for favourable laws, or pardons, or exemptions.
There’s going to be no real R&D anymore, and why bother when you don’t need to innovate, the government will just tariff your competition or ban them, or, force them to be “sold” like TikTok.
So why should companies hire staff? Why not lay them all off and save money? You’re not going to get beat by real competition anyways.
There’s going to be no real R&D anymore
I mean US scientists are starting to leave the country. The brain drain is only going to get worse.
I know tech workers leaving too.
I mean US corporations are never one to squander an opportunity to gouge the customer.
Remember the washing machine tariffs that Trump first administration put out? Not only did it raise prices “foreign” washing machines AND dryers, the US companies didn’t bother to update their machines to compete with features or reliability, they ended up cutting factory jobs and RAISING their prices for US made washing machines and dryers to match the tariffed completion.
I mean why let a good opportunity to gouge the customer with your inferior product if the government is backing you?
This is how all tariffs will always work every time. With how evenly globalized our supply chain is, any tariff will simply raise the price floor, not promote domestic manufacturing.
This was told to them by Reagan, would heed it if a Democrat did it but this time, THIS TIME it will work how we want
Make the recession great again
It’s just the economics of late stage capitalism. Companies are mandated to increase profits year over year. In the beginning stages of capitalism this can be achieved by cornering new markets by out competing/taking over your competition. Once the market is cornered you can do things like innovate and streamline. Once this is tapped out the only real way to continue the profits is to conglomerate, monopolize, and racketeer.
We are pretty much past all of these options, or at the final stages, so the only option on the table is to reduce cost, and the largest cost of just about any company is labor. This is why all the mega corps are sinking their hopes into ai, it’s their last way to squeeze as much money out of their organization as possible.
The economy not only shed jobs in February, it also lost jobs in two of the last three months, three of the last five months and five of the last nine months. (During Biden’s term, there were literally zero months in which the economy lost jobs.)
And this is all before the imminent corrections when the AI bubble pops, which will take us from accelerating tumble to free fall. An astounding feat, given what this administration was served up.
Yeah, good luck polishing that turd, asshole. You were handed an economy that was the envy of the world, brazenly lied about it, and then proceeded to fuck it all up, just as Republicans almost always do.
Trump isn’t struggling with anything. He’s thriving and there’s nothing anyone is willing to do about it.
Convincing people to give him money while having felonies and being known of doing nasty things in the Epstein files and Maga isn’t doing anything lol. Fucking wild timeline.
That’s what I’m saying! To pretend that he is struggling doing anything political is delusional. It looks like he’s physically struggling to exist, but I hope that ends soon. Painfully too.
it’s so sweet when they think the current admin is worried about the country’s direction and not actively taking it where it’s going…
