Interesting article that I think many probably missed in the news:

Tariff receipts topped $16 billion in April, a record that helped cut the budget deficit

Not sure if it's widely known, but the U.S. average tariff rate since 1790 has always been above 10% until the 1940s and used to be the primary source of federal revenue.

Meanwhile, inflation remains lower than expected:

Annual inflation rate hit 2.3% in April, less than expected and lowest since 2021

There is certainly a concern about the tariffs adding to inflation concerns, but the question is if that will be offset by things such as reduced gas prices (West Texas Crude has significantly declined YTD) and shelter costs. What few report on is that the decrease in immigration will certainly impact shelter costs. Multiple studies have shown immigration pushes up rents and housing values in destination cities.

And in other news, market is basically back-up before all this craziness started. Reminder it's best to take a deep breath and look at a longer-term view.

HKBear97! said:

---

Interesting article that I think many probably missed in the news:

Tariff receipts topped $16 billion in April, a record that helped cut the budget deficit

Meanwhile, inflation remains lower than expected:

---

Tracking.

US rakes in record $16B in customs duties in April from Trump tariffs https://t.co/4pvr3oT57e pic.twitter.com/IbobDITQHH

— New York Post (@nypost) May 12, 2025

BREAKING: April CPI inflation FALLS to 2.3%, below expectations of 2.4%.

Core CPI inflation was 2.8%, in-line with expectations of 2.8%.

This marks the 3rd straight monthly decline in headline inflation.

Inflation continues to cool down despite the trade war.

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) May 13, 2025

DiabloWags said:

---

Data has showed that the retail investor/trader bought the "dip" in APRIL while institutions and hedge-funds sold out.

The "average" tariff rate that you point out can be misleading.
And as you point out, it hasn't been double-digits since the 1940's.
(see chart in link below)

The average effective tariff rate spiked to 14.5% under Trump, its highest level since 1938.
The average rate was 2.5 in 2024.

Charted: The Average U.S. Tariff Rate (1890-2025)

---

That's not surprising. If you've worked in finance, you know the vast majority of hedge funds trade the same positions and their unwinding of those positions helped precipitate the decline we saw.

On tariffs, after spending some more time on the subject, I've gone from a position of being against tariffs to believing some minimum level is likely needed (albeit not as high as the rates Trump is pushing for). The pendulum swung too far in the 1930s and then perhaps too far in the other direction in the 1940s. Conceptually they help support domestic manufacturing, secure parts of our supply chain, help deter unfair trade practices aimed at the US and as noted, generates revenue for the U.S. Treasury. Would marginally higher tariffs coupled with more business friendly policies encourage more domestic production on the margins? I think so, although it would not be overnight.

I believe increasing domestic production of more high-tech and economic and military specific components would be welcome while textile manufacturing would not. America is sorely in need of more semi-skilled and higher paying jobs than what today's service economy offers. I've seen numerous students today that feel capitalism is evil and socialism is the answer and I think a part of that is because they simply don't have the skills to succeed in an economy that's dependent on highly skilled service industries.

HKBear97! said:

---

Certainly seems like it will take some time for this to right itself. From this NPR story, sounds like it is already in process. Why aren't Americans filling the manufacturing jobs we already have?

---

Really interesting read, thanks for sharing. A couple of lines really stood out:

"Manufacturing Institute, says that roughly half of the open positions in manufacturing require at least a bachelor's degree."
***
"These jobs are in factories that are completely different from the factories of 25 years ago," Hanson says. "They require people to know how to use pretty sophisticated machinery."


I can't imagine getting a BA then taking a manufacturing job. Flip side, college is so incredibly expensive and financial aid is such an insane racket that it is also hard for me to imagine these jobs not being filled eventually, especially as wages necessarily increase.

We should have JCs with subsidized/low tuition specializing in manufacturing and machine tooling, 2yr programs with internships, or even better, 3 yr programs that include the high school senior year. That's the German model.

HKBear97! said:

---

tequila4kapp said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

Certainly seems like it will take some time for this to right itself. From this NPR story, sounds like it is already in process. Why aren't Americans filling the manufacturing jobs we already have?

---

Really interesting read, thanks for sharing. A couple of lines really stood out:

"Manufacturing Institute, says that roughly half of the open positions in manufacturing require at least a bachelor's degree."
***
"These jobs are in factories that are completely different from the factories of 25 years ago," Hanson says. "They require people to know how to use pretty sophisticated machinery."


I can't imagine getting a BA then taking a manufacturing job. Flip side, college is so incredibly expensive and financial aid is such an insane racket that it is also hard for me to imagine these jobs not being filled eventually, especially as wages necessarily increase.

---

Yes, that stood out to me as well.

Not to change the subject, but regarding the price of college, the actual data shows it has not gone up in price as much as people think. In fact, based on actual prices paid, it's actually gone down. Trends in College Pricing: Highlights

---

Hmmm, I don't know. From very recent experience @total OOS cost of attendance
Arizona 70K
Bama 67k
UCs 82k
Colorado 69k
ASU 53k
South Carolina 55K
Utah 63

If I do current value of the tuition amount from when I attended Cal I get a much lower number than today's in state UC tuition number.

dajo9 said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

DiabloWags said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

America is sorely in need of more semi-skilled and higher paying jobs than what today's service economy offers. I've seen numerous students today that feel capitalism is evil and socialism is the answer and I think a part of that is because they simply don't have the skills to succeed in an economy that's dependent on highly skilled service industries.

---

America is sorely in need of more skilled manufacturing labor.
We don't have it.

Nearly 2.1 million manufacturing jobs are projected to go unfilled by 2030.

So even if you "reshore" manufacturing back to the United States, where is the skilled labor going to come from?

Persistent Labor Shortages are Endangering US Manufacturing Output

---

Certainly seems like it will take some time for this to right itself. From this NPR story, sounds like it is already in process. Why aren't Americans filling the manufacturing jobs we already have?

---

Crazy timeline we are in. I wonder if we will ever figure it out.

2021 - Huge issues with worker shortages in America as the world emerges from covid
2022 - Massive influx of immigration into America
2023 - America emerges with the premiere economy of the world with more jobs, more growth, less inflation than the rest of the world
2024 - American voters decide we've got it all wrong

I don't know if we'll be able to put these puzzle pieces together.

---

Still with the revisionist time lines. Okay, I will play:

2022 Massive influx of unskilled labor into the US that is not assisting in filling manufacturing jobs
2023. While the idea of a "premier" economy is subjective and impossible to define, the US continues to have the highest GDP level, but China, in particular, has experienced rapid economic growth particularly in the manufacturing. Massive influxes of unskilled labor into the US are still not filling manufacturing jobs.
2024 The Biden administration hides Biden's declining health from the public, thereby allowing Biden to stay in the Presidential election too long, and possibly costing the Democrats the election. People wonder how the Democratic candidates could outspend Trump and the GOP by so much and lose. The left is determined to make this excruciating loss about messaging, identity politics, and the inherent awfulness of voters.

HKBear97! said:

---

DiabloWags said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

America is sorely in need of more semi-skilled and higher paying jobs than what today's service economy offers. I've seen numerous students today that feel capitalism is evil and socialism is the answer and I think a part of that is because they simply don't have the skills to succeed in an economy that's dependent on highly skilled service industries.

---

America is sorely in need of more skilled manufacturing labor.
We don't have it.

Nearly 2.1 million manufacturing jobs are projected to go unfilled by 2030.

So even if you "reshore" manufacturing back to the United States, where is the skilled labor going to come from?

Persistent Labor Shortages are Endangering US Manufacturing Output

---

Certainly seems like it will take some time for this to right itself. From this NPR story, sounds like it is already in process. Why aren't Americans filling the manufacturing jobs we already have?

---

Really good article.There's clearly a mismatch between the skills required for manufacturing jobs and the skills that job seekers possess. There also seems to be a bias against occupations that simply cannot function without in-person work. While I don't see the elite schools cjhanging their curriculums, maybe we should be asking more colleges to take a greater role in preparing people/students for careers our economy produces?

dajo9 said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

DiabloWags said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

America is sorely in need of more semi-skilled and higher paying jobs than what today's service economy offers. I've seen numerous students today that feel capitalism is evil and socialism is the answer and I think a part of that is because they simply don't have the skills to succeed in an economy that's dependent on highly skilled service industries.

---

America is sorely in need of more skilled manufacturing labor.
We don't have it.

Nearly 2.1 million manufacturing jobs are projected to go unfilled by 2030.

So even if you "reshore" manufacturing back to the United States, where is the skilled labor going to come from?

Persistent Labor Shortages are Endangering US Manufacturing Output

---

Certainly seems like it will take some time for this to right itself. From this NPR story, sounds like it is already in process. Why aren't Americans filling the manufacturing jobs we already have?

---

Crazy timeline we are in. I wonder if we will ever figure it out.

2021 - Huge issues with worker shortages in America as the world emerges from covid
2022 - Massive influx of immigration into America
2023 - America emerges with the premiere economy of the world with more jobs, more growth, less inflation than the rest of the world
2024 - American voters decide we've got it all wrong

I don't know if we'll be able to put these puzzle pieces together.

---

Democrats were so committed to ignoring the massive gap between the "strong economy" and people's economic misery, they were willing to lose an election over it https://t.co/lCNWAphRaw

— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) May 15, 2025

I'm afraid you don't get to blame the Democrats being swept out of power on the voters.

First of all, you were wrong from start to finish about the economy. Working people don't care about GDP and how investors are doing, they care about their wages and the cost of goods and both sucked under Genocide Joe.

Analysis: How Democrats were tricked into believing the economy was strong, writes former U.S. Comptroller Eugene Ludwig👇 https://t.co/XMmmVB49Wp

— POLITICO (@politico) February 11, 2025

Quote:

---

Within the nation's capital, this gap in perception has had profound implications. For decades, a small cohort of federal agencies have reported many of the same economic statistics, using fundamentally the same methodology or relying on the same sources, at the same appointed times. Rarely has anyone ever asked whether the figures they release hew to reality. Given my newfound skepticism, I decided several years ago to gather a team of researchers under the rubric of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to delve deeply into some of the most frequently cited headline statistics.

What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics. Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned. But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground.

Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. Second, it does not take into account many Americans who have been so discouraged that they are no longer trying to get a job. Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual's income. Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed, and the government would still count you as "employed."

I don't believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November counted homeless people doing occasional work as "employed." But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can't find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today hardly something to celebrate.

---

Quote:

---

The picture is similarly misleading when examining the methodology used to track how much Americans are earning. The prevailing government indicator, known colloquially as "weekly earnings," tracks full-time wages to the exclusion of both the unemployed and those engaged in (typically lower-paid) part-time work. Today, as a result, those keeping track are led to believe that the median wage in the U.S. stands at roughly $61,900. But if you track everyone in the workforce that is, if you include part-time workers and unemployed job seekers the results are remarkably different. Our research reveals that the median wage is actually little more than $52,300 per year. Think of that: American workers on the median are making 16 percent less than the prevailing statistics would indicate.

---

Quote:

---

My colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase and tend to have more stable prices over time and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can't avoid. Here again, the results reveal how the challenges facing those with more modest incomes are obscured by the numbers. Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we've been led to believe.

---

Quote:

---

Which brings us to the question of gross domestic product, a figure that stands perhaps as the most important single economic indicator because it is commonly viewed as a proxy for prosperity writ large. There is, to be sure, real value in tracking the sheer volume of domestic production, though GDP is an imperfect measure even of that. But as useful as the figure may be in the sense that it purports to track generalized national wealth, it is hampered by a profound flaw: It reveals almost nothing about how the attendant prosperity is shared. That is, if a small slice of the population is awarded the great bulk of the bounty from economic growth while everyone else remains unenriched, GDP would rise nevertheless. And that, to a crucial degree, is exactly what has happened.

---

Now, it's not that this wasn't all explained to you in advance of the election for four years. You just refused to hear it.

Second of all, and most importantly, voter blaming is what losers do. The Democrats couldn't sell anything because they ran two unpopular wars while people's standard of living was plummeting. They took it out on the politicians at the ballot box. Therefore, it's not voters who are stupid. It's you that is stupid.

Stop pretending you understand the economy and start listening to your betters, aka...

https://hips.hearstapps.com/autoweek/assets/s3fs-public/130929890-2.jpg

https://media.giphy.com/media/5tojx1LzP3mMA1J1CE/giphy.gif

Happy Roevember said:

---

dajo9 said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

DiabloWags said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

America is sorely in need of more semi-skilled and higher paying jobs than what today's service economy offers. I've seen numerous students today that feel capitalism is evil and socialism is the answer and I think a part of that is because they simply don't have the skills to succeed in an economy that's dependent on highly skilled service industries.

---

America is sorely in need of more skilled manufacturing labor.
We don't have it.

Nearly 2.1 million manufacturing jobs are projected to go unfilled by 2030.

So even if you "reshore" manufacturing back to the United States, where is the skilled labor going to come from?

Persistent Labor Shortages are Endangering US Manufacturing Output

---

Certainly seems like it will take some time for this to right itself. From this NPR story, sounds like it is already in process. Why aren't Americans filling the manufacturing jobs we already have?

---

Crazy timeline we are in. I wonder if we will ever figure it out.

2021 - Huge issues with worker shortages in America as the world emerges from covid
2022 - Massive influx of immigration into America
2023 - America emerges with the premiere economy of the world with more jobs, more growth, less inflation than the rest of the world
2024 - American voters decide we've got it all wrong

I don't know if we'll be able to put these puzzle pieces together.

---

Democrats were so committed to ignoring the massive gap between the "strong economy" and people's economic misery, they were willing to lose an election over it https://t.co/lCNWAphRaw

— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) May 15, 2025

I'm afraid you don't get to blame the Democrats being swept out of power on the voters.

First of all, you were wrong from start to finish about the economy. Working people don't care about GDP and how investors are doing, they care about their wages and the cost of goods and both sucked under Genocide Joe.

Analysis: How Democrats were tricked into believing the economy was strong, writes former U.S. Comptroller Eugene Ludwig👇 https://t.co/XMmmVB49Wp

— POLITICO (@politico) February 11, 2025

Quote:

---

Within the nation's capital, this gap in perception has had profound implications. For decades, a small cohort of federal agencies have reported many of the same economic statistics, using fundamentally the same methodology or relying on the same sources, at the same appointed times. Rarely has anyone ever asked whether the figures they release hew to reality. Given my newfound skepticism, I decided several years ago to gather a team of researchers under the rubric of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to delve deeply into some of the most frequently cited headline statistics.

What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics. Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned. But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground.

Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. Second, it does not take into account many Americans who have been so discouraged that they are no longer trying to get a job. Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual's income. Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed, and the government would still count you as "employed."

I don't believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November counted homeless people doing occasional work as "employed." But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can't find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today hardly something to celebrate.

---

Quote:

---

The picture is similarly misleading when examining the methodology used to track how much Americans are earning. The prevailing government indicator, known colloquially as "weekly earnings," tracks full-time wages to the exclusion of both the unemployed and those engaged in (typically lower-paid) part-time work. Today, as a result, those keeping track are led to believe that the median wage in the U.S. stands at roughly $61,900. But if you track everyone in the workforce that is, if you include part-time workers and unemployed job seekers the results are remarkably different. Our research reveals that the median wage is actually little more than $52,300 per year. Think of that: American workers on the median are making 16 percent less than the prevailing statistics would indicate.

---

Quote:

---

My colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase and tend to have more stable prices over time and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can't avoid. Here again, the results reveal how the challenges facing those with more modest incomes are obscured by the numbers. Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we've been led to believe.

---

Quote:

---

Which brings us to the question of gross domestic product, a figure that stands perhaps as the most important single economic indicator because it is commonly viewed as a proxy for prosperity writ large. There is, to be sure, real value in tracking the sheer volume of domestic production, though GDP is an imperfect measure even of that. But as useful as the figure may be in the sense that it purports to track generalized national wealth, it is hampered by a profound flaw: It reveals almost nothing about how the attendant prosperity is shared. That is, if a small slice of the population is awarded the great bulk of the bounty from economic growth while everyone else remains unenriched, GDP would rise nevertheless. And that, to a crucial degree, is exactly what has happened.

---

Now, it's not that this wasn't all explained to you in advance of the election for four years. You just refused to hear it.

Second of all, and most importantly, voter blaming is what losers do. The Democrats couldn't sell anything because they ran two unpopular wars while people's standard of living was plummeting. They took it out on the politicians at the ballot box. Therefore, it's not voters who are stupid. It's you that is stupid.

Stop pretending you understand the economy and start listening to your betters, aka...

---

Good article.

Happy Roevember said:

---

dajo9 said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

DiabloWags said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

America is sorely in need of more semi-skilled and higher paying jobs than what today's service economy offers. I've seen numerous students today that feel capitalism is evil and socialism is the answer and I think a part of that is because they simply don't have the skills to succeed in an economy that's dependent on highly skilled service industries.

---

America is sorely in need of more skilled manufacturing labor.
We don't have it.

Nearly 2.1 million manufacturing jobs are projected to go unfilled by 2030.

So even if you "reshore" manufacturing back to the United States, where is the skilled labor going to come from?

Persistent Labor Shortages are Endangering US Manufacturing Output

---

Certainly seems like it will take some time for this to right itself. From this NPR story, sounds like it is already in process. Why aren't Americans filling the manufacturing jobs we already have?

---

Crazy timeline we are in. I wonder if we will ever figure it out.

2021 - Huge issues with worker shortages in America as the world emerges from covid
2022 - Massive influx of immigration into America
2023 - America emerges with the premiere economy of the world with more jobs, more growth, less inflation than the rest of the world
2024 - American voters decide we've got it all wrong

I don't know if we'll be able to put these puzzle pieces together.

---

Democrats were so committed to ignoring the massive gap between the "strong economy" and people's economic misery, they were willing to lose an election over it https://t.co/lCNWAphRaw

— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) May 15, 2025

I'm afraid you don't get to blame the Democrats being swept out of power on the voters.

First of all, you were wrong from start to finish about the economy. Working people don't care about GDP and how investors are doing, they care about their wages and the cost of goods and both sucked under Genocide Joe.

Analysis: How Democrats were tricked into believing the economy was strong, writes former U.S. Comptroller Eugene Ludwig👇 https://t.co/XMmmVB49Wp

— POLITICO (@politico) February 11, 2025

Quote:

---

Within the nation's capital, this gap in perception has had profound implications. For decades, a small cohort of federal agencies have reported many of the same economic statistics, using fundamentally the same methodology or relying on the same sources, at the same appointed times. Rarely has anyone ever asked whether the figures they release hew to reality. Given my newfound skepticism, I decided several years ago to gather a team of researchers under the rubric of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to delve deeply into some of the most frequently cited headline statistics.

What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics. Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned. But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground.

Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. Second, it does not take into account many Americans who have been so discouraged that they are no longer trying to get a job. Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual's income. Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed, and the government would still count you as "employed."

I don't believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November counted homeless people doing occasional work as "employed." But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can't find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today hardly something to celebrate.

---

Quote:

---

The picture is similarly misleading when examining the methodology used to track how much Americans are earning. The prevailing government indicator, known colloquially as "weekly earnings," tracks full-time wages to the exclusion of both the unemployed and those engaged in (typically lower-paid) part-time work. Today, as a result, those keeping track are led to believe that the median wage in the U.S. stands at roughly $61,900. But if you track everyone in the workforce that is, if you include part-time workers and unemployed job seekers the results are remarkably different. Our research reveals that the median wage is actually little more than $52,300 per year. Think of that: American workers on the median are making 16 percent less than the prevailing statistics would indicate.

---

Quote:

---

My colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase and tend to have more stable prices over time and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can't avoid. Here again, the results reveal how the challenges facing those with more modest incomes are obscured by the numbers. Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we've been led to believe.

---

Quote:

---

Which brings us to the question of gross domestic product, a figure that stands perhaps as the most important single economic indicator because it is commonly viewed as a proxy for prosperity writ large. There is, to be sure, real value in tracking the sheer volume of domestic production, though GDP is an imperfect measure even of that. But as useful as the figure may be in the sense that it purports to track generalized national wealth, it is hampered by a profound flaw: It reveals almost nothing about how the attendant prosperity is shared. That is, if a small slice of the population is awarded the great bulk of the bounty from economic growth while everyone else remains unenriched, GDP would rise nevertheless. And that, to a crucial degree, is exactly what has happened.

---

Now, it's not that this wasn't all explained to you in advance of the election for four years. You just refused to hear it.

Second of all, and most importantly, voter blaming is what losers do. The Democrats couldn't sell anything because they ran two unpopular wars while people's standard of living was plummeting. They took it out on the politicians at the ballot box. Therefore, it's not voters who are stupid. It's you that is stupid.

Stop pretending you understand the economy and start listening to your betters, aka...

---

These numbers have time and again suggested to many in Washington that unemployment is low, that wages are growing for middle America and that, to a greater or lesser degree, economic growth is lifting all boats year upon year. But when traveling the country, I've encountered something very different. Cities that appeared increasingly seedy. Regions that seemed derelict. Driving into the office each day in Washington, I noted a homeless encampment fixed outside the Federal Reserve itself. And then I began to detect a second pattern inside and outside D.C. alike. Democrats, on the whole, seemed much more inclined to believe what the economic indicators reported. Republicans, by contrast, seemed more inclined to believe what they were seeing with their own two eyes.

The Democrats and media during the BIden admin were all guilty of gaslighting the people. Jennifer Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre were the mouthpieces of this brainwashing operation since Biden hardly took any questions.

Wasn't it Obama's first term where they changed how unemployed were counted and essentially stopped counting people who stopped looking for jobs after 6 months. Since then the numbers have been a total lie. It's all been made up garbage to sell to the people (notice republicans didn't bother changing it back either) while they sold you all out. I think they don't want to put out the real number anymore because it would scare the heck out of the public and tank the stock markets.

MinotStateBeav said:

---

Wasn't it Obama's first term where they changed how unemployed were counted and essentially stopped counting people who stopped looking for jobs after 6 months. Since then the numbers have been a total lie. It's all been made up garbage to sell to the people (notice republicans didn't bother changing it back either) while they sold you all out. I think they don't want to put out the real number anymore because it would scare the heck out of the public and tank the stock markets.

---

No.
Once again you're terribly mistaken and uninformed.

The Bureau of Labor Department's unemployment numbers come from the Current Population Survey, a monthly, nationwide assessment. It has been conducted under the same parameters, every month since 1940.

The agency classifies people as "unemployed" if they do not have a job, are ready to take a job and have actively looked for a job in the four weeks preceding the survey.

If you did not take any active steps to find a job in the 4 weeks preceding the labor market survey, you are not counted as "unemployed".

Most other rich countries use the same or very similar definition of who is "unemployed"

Looks like you got duped by conservative "Gateway Pundit again.
Shocker.

MinotStateBeav said:

---

Wasn't it Obama's first term where they changed how unemployed were counted and essentially stopped counting people who stopped looking for jobs after 6 months. Since then the numbers have been a total lie. It's all been made up garbage to sell to the people (notice republicans didn't bother changing it back either) while they sold you all out. I think they don't want to put out the real number anymore because it would scare the heck out of the public and tank the stock markets.

---

You are mostly correct here. Wags is once again terribly uninformed, and it is SAD. The calculation was actually changed when Clinton was president such that those who had been looking for employment for more than a year were automatically no longer considered as looking for work and calculated in the labor force participation rate. This further compounded when covid knocked a large portion out of the work force for more than a year as covid lockdowns shut down the economy. When the economy reopened, albeit late under Biden, those who found a job were counted as employed. Those who did not find a job were not counted as unemployed because they had been looking for more than a year. His numbers were fudged to his benefit, but it does appear to have been malicious, although he did lie about the numbers several times to make them seem much better than they actually were.

Looks like Wags got duped by his pompousness and failing memory. He is about as uneducated as they come. These are just FACTS that people with low IQ's sadly can't comprehend. He is just not very bright. Shocker.

It's sad just how pathetically poor the reading comprehension is of the typical Trump "Kool-Aid" drinkers.

Notice that these people that question the Unemployment number have conveniently left out the fact that they are talking about the measure of unemployment called U-6 and not U-3.

Notice that Oski didn't even bother to make the distinction.
It's because he's just plain ignorant of basic economic data.

This pretty much tells you that the typical Trumpanzee has no comprehension of the tweets or memes that they read from right-wing media hacks like Tom Fitton at Judicial Watch.

U-3 is the official unemployment rate.
U-3 is the total number of unemployed as a percent of the civilian labor force.

U-6 is the total number of unemployed, plus all people marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part-time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian work force plus all people marginally attached to the labor force.

This is similar to when Bearscat was yapping about the massive revision in the jobs number, without having a clue that the Bureau of Labor makes an annual revision.



It's too bad that people like Oski have such a poor understanding of basic economic statistics.
He probably never had Econ.1 with Professor Sutch in Wheeler Auditorium like I did.
Probably never went to Cal either.

Richard Sutch
RIP 2019, Kensington, Ca



Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization - 2025 M04 Results

DiabloWags said:

---

It's sad just how pathetically poor the reading comprehension is of the typical Trump "Kool-Aid" drinkers.

Notice that these people that question the Unemployment number have conveniently left out the fact that they are talking about the measure of unemployment called U-6 and not U-3.

Notice that Oski didn't even bother to make the distinction.
It's because he's just plain ignorant of basic economic data.

This pretty much tells you that the typical Trumpanzee has no comprehension of the tweets or memes that they read from right-wing media hacks like Tom Fitton at Judicial Watch.

U-3 is the official unemployment rate.
U-3 is the total number of unemployed as a percent of the civilian labor force.

U-6 is the total number of unemployed, plus all people marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part-time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian work force plus all people marginally attached to the labor force.

This is similar to when Bearscat was yapping about the massive revision in the jobs number, without having a clue that the Bureau of Labor makes an annual revision.



It's too bad that people like Oski have such a poor understanding of basic economic statistics.
He probably never had Econ.1 with Professor Sutch in Wheeler Auditorium like I did.
Probably never went to Cal either.

Richard Sutch
RIP 2019, Kensington, Ca



Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization - 2025 M04 Results

---

If you want to restrict this conversation to the U3, which was introduced as the official unemployment number during Clinton's term, you should acknowledge it counts part-time workers as fully employed and excludes anyone who hasn't actively been looking for jobs in the last 4 weeks. Again, this calculation also largely favored Biden in the reopening of the economy post-pandemic. Many folks, such as the Biden administration, touted the U6 number. They also generally lie about the unemployment numbers.

"They also generally lies about the unemployment numbers."

The Trump Administration consistently lies about everything.

Fact check: Debunking 100 Trump false claims from his first 100 days | CNN Politics


https://www.cnn.com/politics/fact-check-trump-false-claims-debunked