If Larry were completely honest he'd recognize that real GDP growth has been in steady decline in the entire post-war.
The percent change peaks are plain as day, unless you're an ideologue.
We've gone from 8.69% in 1950, to 7.23% in 1984, to 6.15 in 2021 (COVID panic spending), and the dozen or so routine percent change years above 5% between 1950 and 1984 when the economy was still holding its own have disappeared.
click to expand
The Reagan Revolution didn't do one thing to stem the decline, the Trump Gimmickry even less. In fact, the Reagan Revolution made it worse.
The answer why is paradoxical.
The debt-based economy of the United States ran out of gas under Reagan because he cut the taxes which paid for that debt, too much and on the wrong people. It's still a debt-based economy, but we don't want to pay for it anymore.
This is the infantile cry of libertarianism.
We all think the growth of debt has been the problem when paying for that growth has been the problem. We threw a tantrum and decided to stop paying for it, and its growth naturally contracted, and along with it GDP, in self-defense so to speak.
Growth of TCMDO, the total universe of debt, which steadily climbed the ladder in the post-war, plunged after 1985, from percent change 15.36% to 11.11% in 2004 to 9.51% in 2020 (COVID panic spending).
Debt draws future prosperity into the present, but what you get if you don't pay for it sufficiently is less prosperity when you reach the future from which you borrowed.
And as you pay less, you then borrow even more less so to speak, and get even more less. Rinse and repeat.
Welcome to the future.
It's really that simple.
Taxes have been much too low on the rich, and for a long time, and reversing that is the sober reflection of an age which realizes it made a mistake, starting long before Reagan with JFK, the libertarian cad who bedded more women in the White House than the rest of them combined. His Revenue Act of 1964 passed under LBJ cut the top income tax bracket from 91% to 70%.
The question we have to ask ourselves now is, are we ready to give our system another try and tax everyone, but progressively, and practice fiscal and moral restraint for a change . . .
or are we going to say yes to the billionaires who were made by all this obscene excess and who want to impose an un-American system of feudalism with themselves at the top and the rest of us their humble serfs?
The unemployment rate at 4.6% in November 2025 can't be right with Initial Claims for Unemployment so low, averaging 223k.
The January to September averages were 4.2% unemployment with 222k initial claims.
Compare:
2024: 4.0% at 221k
2023: 3.6% at 221k
2022: 3.6% at 215k
2019: 3.7% at 217k
2018: 3.9% at 220k.
Household Survey response rates, from which we get the unemployment rate, have plunged since the pandemic, from above 80% before COVID to below 70% now.
As a consequence 2025 and 2024 look suspiciously higher than they probably are when compared with prior years.
Initial claims for unemployment is more certain as a measurement because the data is aggregated from state unemployment agencies which pay actual people who make actual claims, not people who answer (or don't answer) a poll.
With claims still historically low, the Fed is making a big mistake in reducing interest rates because it thinks employment is softening based on the Household Survey.
So fast forward to today where we get another chart crime, this one for the consumer price index which omits the month of October, and another dose of skepticism about the Trump Regime's honesty about government data.
They warned us they would do this, too, even though during the first Trump Regime they collected both the employment and the inflation data during the 2018-2019 government shutdown.
This is all deliberate obfuscation.
... Because the October CPI was canceled, Thursday’s report did not have
all the usual data points of a typical CPI release. The BLS said it was
unable to retroactively collect the October data, but did use some
“nonsurvey data sources” to make the index calculations.
Economists
may be hesitant to read too much into this report as the start of a
downward trend in inflation because of the lack of October comparison
data in the release. ...
103.165 million were eating but not working in November 2025.
Many of these people were over 65 and under 20, but I don't make the rules criticizing the lazy people of the United States. Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump made that rule before the 2016 election. It is a dumb rule because elites like them screwed this economy for working people but they blame the people for giving up. The rule deserves to be trumpeted because those miserable hypocrites stopped talking about it as soon as Trump became president the first time. It continues to demonstrate how they have never understood what the hell they were talking about.
In Realville, the official unemployment rate rose to 4.6% from the recent low at 3.4% in April 2023 under Joe Biden, an historic low not seen since 1969. Rising unemployment off the lows like this is widely taken for a recession indicator, but initial claims for unemployment have averaged just 213k weekly in 2H2025, which is historically very, very low.
On the other hand, people not in the labor force but who want a job now has spiked, excluding the COVID episode, to levels last seen in 2016 during the long painful unwind of the Obama unemployment of the Great Recession, a level which before that was a rare outlier. That's an indicator of stress in the economy right now, which supports the view that we are building to a recession.
Meanwhile the country overall remains chronically underemployed with just 48.82% with a full time job, when as many as 9 million more full time jobs could easily exist if this economy were truly booming as it has in the past.
The shock of the November jobs report is that all of the full time jobs added since January, some 2.1 million, plus some, have simply evaporated, most of them in October and November.
But the damn fools will cut DFF again no doubt, despite the fact that recent cuts averaging 1.44 have done nothing to reduce inflation, or increase it.
The inflation rate has been going sideways the whole time in the high 2s since April 2024.
The metric averaged 1.61% 2016-2020 inclusive.
At 1.61% inflation your money is worth half what it was in 45 years, at 2.86% just 25 years.
A federal grand jury charged U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., with stealing $5 million in Covid-19 disaster funds — a chunk of which was then illegally contributed to her 2021 congressional campaign, the Department of Justice said Wednesday. ...
Cherfilus-McCormick joined the House in 2022 after winning a special election that January to fill late Rep. Alcee Hastings’ seat representing Florida’s 20th Congressional District. ...
Cherfilus-McCormick has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, the panel revealed in late May.
The Office of Congressional Conduct sent a referral
to that committee in May 2024, laying out a number of possible
violations. Cherfilus-McCormick “may have requested community project
funding that would be directed to a for-profit entity,” the office said
in that referral. ...
... we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens ... Under the Biden administration, the price of a new home literally doubled in four years. ...
Owner-occupied housing is hardly higher today than it was at the 2020 peak.
Buyers became hysterical in 2020, seeking isolation. Vance is hysterical in 2025, playing immigration politics. The Fed went hysterical in 2008 slashing interest rates, and it took fourteen years and pandemic-related inflation just to get them to snap out of it.
The Fed's ZIRP after the Great Recession drove down mortgage interest rates to sub-five percent, averaging less than three by 2021.
As everyone knows, when you lower the long term price of a mortgage, you can "buy more house".
That's the major culprit driving prices higher, making housing more expensive, that and the 2-year rule. It took more than a decade of zero interest rate policy to bring us to this pass. It has not been and will not be remedied overnight, especially by its new cheerleaders in the Trump administration.
Cutting interest rates will only make housing more expensive.
New housing is indeed soaring, but people need to get a grip. The median sales price of all housing in the United States is up 30% since 2020, not 50% like it was in the five or six years right after 2008.
A better government tax policy on housing is called for. The biggest problem is that the mere 2-year owner-occupancy requirement for capital gains tax exclusion has turned housing into a commodity since 1997. It was a big mistake to make housing so fungible. The answer lies in applying the brakes to that, so that the emphasis is on housing as a home as opposed to as a speculative investment driving prices for all types of homes irrationally higher.
The old policy allowed the exclusion only once in a lifetime. You sold your house when you retired and enjoyed life living off the proceeds mostly tax-free, usually in a down-sized arrangement or as a renter. Otherwise during your working life, when you had to sell to move, you had to purchase at least sideways, or up in price so that your gains went into the new place, not into your pocket. That's how housing became such a tempting source of pent-up capital in the first place. There was an incentive to maintain a ladder of housing values upon which people could move more freely, mostly up but also down.
We need to go back to some form of that arrangement.
But our leaders seem to have no imagination for it. They can't see that what we did in 1997 was a revolution. A bad revolution.
... The 2020 population count was rigged ... We’re just supposed to believe it was a coincidence that Mr. Biden’s allies were the beneficiaries in almost every instance ... The Constitution requires an “actual enumeration” ... not a guestimate maximizing the
inclusion of illegal aliens that the prior administration let into the
country by the millions. ...
Ah, hello, whose prior administration? Trump's? Which did nothing about illegal immigration for four years? That prior administration?
About 1 million foreign born actually left the country during 2019 and 2020 because the country shut down for the pandemic, after Trump I let in about 1.75 million from 2016.
The flood of millions into the country started in late 2021, a year after the census had already been completed.
This has to be one of the top 10 stupidest editorials I have ever read.
And we're supposed to believe that Trump will get it right if he does another census, which will be outside the constitution?
That you can hear about the crazy things crazy people do almost instantaneously now is what contributes to our perception that there's been a drastic change in behavior, but the share of the world that is crazy has been quite low and stable until the pandemic.
The craziest place in the world in 2021 appears to have been Portugal at 21%, followed by Iran at 20.7%, Lebanon at 19.9%, Greenland at 19.5%, Brazil at 19.4%, Greece at 19.1%, and Australia and Tunisia tied at 19%. No country scored below 9.2% in 2021. The world averaged 13.9%.
In 2011 the top eight list was Portugal at 19.8%, Iran, Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, Spain, Greenland, and Greece at 17.7%. The rear was brought up by Mali at 8.7%, and Mauritania at 9.1%. The world averaged 12.8%.
We all know this. We don’t even know what to do with what we know. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk
feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is
going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful
thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of
something bad. Michael Smerconish said on CNN Thursday afternoon that
normally after such an event the temperature goes down a little, but not
in this case, and he’s right. There are the heartbroken and the
indifferent and they are irreconcilable. X, formerly Twitter, was from
the moment of the shooting overrun with anguish and rage: It’s on now. Bluesky, where supposedly gentler folk fled Elon Musk, was gleefully violent: Too bad, live by the gun, die by the gun.
But what a disaster all this is for the young. ...
No, we are not in big trouble.
We are simply in the same trouble we've always been in, but that doesn't sell newspapers or drive clicks.
But surrendering to hysteria will misguide us, as surely as Tyler Robinson's feelings misguided him when he pulled that trigger, allegedly.
Didn't the country just get over surrendering its mind to its feelings?
Or are we, left, right, and in between, going to do this all over again?
Fear of death made 270 million Americans trust a completely novel vaccine in 2021, only for over 20 million new infections in early 2022 to rip the mask off the whole thing.
We found out that we were not going to die.
We found out that the experts oversold the threat and the vaccine, ka-ching ka-ching, that after taking it "the virus didn't stop with me". We got sick anyway, and we continued to spread it. The adults knew that the virus was mutating to spread at the cost of its deadliness, but the adults were not in charge. We ended up learning the hard way.
The virus of violence is endemic to the world. Woke is a counterfeit. Summer 2020 was not a summer of love. Christianity is Uberwoke and explains that hate lives in us all.
The spectrum of hate's evidence is wide: By intentional homicide rate, Canada ranks 111th in the world in 2023. Mexico ranks 18th, and the United States ranks 66th.
But in 1975 the intentional homicide rate in the United States was 9.6 per 100,000. 9.6 is 43rd in 2023, Iraq-like. In 2023 the United States is 5.8. The rate is down 40%.
We have become far less violent, not more, in the last fifty years, even as religious faith supposedly has declined.
Maybe we should rethink that. Or maybe for starters we should just think.
Brethren,benotchildrenin understanding:howbeitin malicebe ye children,butin understandingbemen.
The climb-down from last month's report for July 2025 at 3.655% year over year was YUGE.
The numbers have been quite volatile for the last four months.
In today's release, the yoy numbers for Nov 2024 through Mar 2025 remain unchanged from last month's report. The five month average of these for the yoy increase in core wholesale prices has been 3.711%.
Last month the average for April through July came in lower, at 3.144% year over year, but that has now been revised even lower in this month's report, by 2%, to 3.081% yoy.
Combined with the fresh August reading at 2.827% yoy, clearly the trend for the rate increases has been lower overall.
But these levels are far higher than the average 1.629% which prevailed 2012-2020 inclusive. Our new lower August reading is a rate still nearly 74% higher than that.
The wholesale price environment remains highly inflationary compared with the pre-pandemic era.
This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.
China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.
We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.
The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.
Former PresidentJoe Bidenwent further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that,$8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)
Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would takea 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.
Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.
In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” authorDan Wangwrites: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)
There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.
Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems.Barry Naughtonof the University of California, San Diego has documented howChina’s rapid growth since 1979has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leaderXi Jinpinghas reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.
State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.
State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020,Alibabaco-founderJack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulatorscanceled the initial public offeringof Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventuallyfined it $2.8 billionfor anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.
Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.
In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.
Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.
Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.
American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.
... John
Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the
study’s first author, said: “I think early estimates were based on many
parameters having values that are incompatible with our current
understanding.
“In
principle, targeting the populations who would get the vast majority of
the benefit and letting alone those with questionable risk-benefit and
cost-benefit makes a lot of sense.
“Aggressive mandates and the zealotry to vaccinate everyone at all cost were probably a bad idea.”
More than 13 billion Covid vaccine doses have been administered since 2021. But there have been mounting concerns that vaccines could be harmful
for some people, particularly the young, and that the risk was not
worth the benefit for a population at little risk from Covid. ...
The
over-70s made up nearly 70 per cent of the lives saved, while those
aged 60 to 70 accounted for a further 20 per cent. In contrast,
under-20s made up just 0.01 per cent of lives saved, and 20 to 30s were
0.07 per cent. ...
The new research was published in Jama Health Forum.
There's no new tax cut. The Trump tax reform from his first term simply continues. There's no injection of new money on a permanent basis involving tax bracket changes, nothing substantively different for the average taxpayer.
There are short-term gimmicks for seniors, earners of tip income, earners of overtime pay, car-buyers, etc., but most of these are scattershot and most importantly, most of them expire in 2028.
The incremental adjustments which occur naturally to standard deduction amounts would occur anyway.
More above average income filers will be able to itemize than previously, but only until 2030.
