Even Larry Kudlow recognizes that GDP hasn't been good since 1984

... The last time real GDP hit 5 percent for the entire year was Ronald Reagan’s 1984, where the number was 5.6 percent for that whole year. ...

Here.

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?

George Washington wouldn't kneel even in church.

I'm with that guy. 

The unemployment rate at 4.6% in November 2025 can't be right

 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.

They risk reigniting inflation. 

 

 

 

Trump says inflation has stopped in last night's speech, but what stopped was their collection of the inflation data

 Do you remember when COVID hit and Trump said we should just stop testing to make it go away?

Trump on coronavirus: ‘If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any’

 

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. ...

More here. 

 

 

The Trump-Limbaugh dumb ass unemployment rate holds at 37.56% in November 2025

 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.

Poof!

 

COVID-19 in wastewater analysis is currently at a very low 1.48 nationally on Nov 15 but was just above 7 in early September, which is high

CDC is updating the chart again after the long government shutdown.

 

The rotten apple doesn't fall far from the Alcee Hastings tree, Democrat representing majority-black precincts of Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach under investigation since at least May 2024 finally charged

 

House Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick charged with stealing $5M in Covid aid funds

 

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. ...

 

 

Owner-occupied housing is in short supply, in part because of pandemic-related panic-buying by 5.4 million in 2020, not because of a post-pandemic illegal alien surge under Joe Biden

 ... 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. ...

-- The ever-ridiculous J. D. Vance, here

Hysteria is everywhere on this issue.

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.

Sad! 

 

The COVID-19 hysteria notwithstanding, the share of the world that's crazy is quite low and stable over time

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%.

 

 

It's an American tradition: Peggy Noonan loses her head

Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Feels Like a Hinge Point: What a disaster for the young. It will forever shape their understanding of politics in America, Peggy Noonan, WSJ Opinion, September 11, 2025

... We are in big trouble.

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, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men. 

-- I Corinthians 14:20 

Core producer prices, not seasonally adjusted, were up 2.827% year over year in today's report for August 2025

 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.

 

 

 

Nope, it's already peaked

 Every other surge made it into high or very high range, but not this one.

That's good news.

 

 COVID CASES SPIKING... AGAIN...

 

Population adjusted vehicle miles traveled in the first half of 2025 is lower than at the bottom of the Obama travel depression in 1H2014

Ain't got no where to go, I guess, with all that new delivery availability spawned by the pandemic.

 

 

They never stop

 COVID-19 Is Rising Again. Here’s What to Know

As much as we want to put it behind us, COVID-19 isn’t going away. Cases are currently rising across the country in a summer surge. ...

I got ur summer surge right here lol:

 

 

 

 

COVID-19 jabs prevented 2.5 million deaths worldwide according to Stanford study, not 14.4 million in year one alone according to WHO, billions of doses wasted on the young

 

 Covid vaccines ‘saved far fewer lives than first thought’: New study suggests true figure ‘substantially more conservative’ than WHO’s 14.4 million global estimate

... 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.

 

Lying whopper from Newsweek, says Fort Detrick was created and built by DHS as a federal response to anthrax letter attacks in 2001

 I mean, holy crap.

The 2001 anthrax letter attacks CAME from anthrax STORED at Fort Detrick, which was the government's bioweapons research facility from way back in 1943 during WWII, until it became politically suicidal to say that and they snapped their fingers and presto!, it became a biodefense research facility.

The researcher there responsible for the anthrax attacks committed suicide as investigators finally got close to him.

James Comey and Robert Mueller infamously tried to frame the wrong guy for the crime. You know those guys, the guys who relentlessly went after Donald Trump. 

DHS didn't even exist until March 2003.

I mean, c'mon Newsweek.

Fort Detrick is also suspiciously close to the location of a facility where elderly people came down with an unknown respiratory illness and died in summer 2019, which I think might have been a precursor to COVID-19. Most people now believe the Chicom lab at Wuhan was the lab from which coronavirus leaked, but I think Fort Detrick and Wuhan were cooperating at the time because bioweapons research was technically forbidden in the USA but they farmed it out to Wuhan on the sly, perhaps through Peter Daszak and Ecohealth-Alliance which got grants connected with Anthony Fauci. I speculate something leaked into the USA in summer 2019 from Fort Detrick.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence from people in America and abroad that there was a very severe flu-like illness already on the loose in the second half of 2019 which they commonly describe as the worst flu they ever had. 

Meanwhile Fort Detrick has been perennially notorious for failing inventory protocols for the HAZMAT stored there, for shoddy maintenance and record keeping, and for leaking waste water into the local environment.

That ICE Barbie fell ill after a visit to Fort Detrick is really one hell of a coincidence. 

 

Kristi Noem Visited Biohazard Lab Day Before Allergic Reaction

Nearly 50,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in 2023 according to the CDC, and ABC News thinks 300 a week is a headline in 2025

 Why are more than 300 people in the US still dying from COVID every week?

The 350 a week rate from April is the equivalent of 18,200 annually. 

Slow news day.

Wastewater analysis shows infection levels near their all-time lows.

 

 

If ivermectin ever made a difference to COVID-19 outcomes in Africa, it sure didn't in Latin and South America

Wide distribution of ivermectin in Africa to combat river blindness does not appear to have had anything to do whatsoever with low death rates from COVID-19 in places like Angola (62 deaths per million of population), Kenya (120), and Nigeria (16).

It turns out that ivermectin was widely distributed in eight Latin and South American countries from June, August, and December 2020, but all of them had steeply higher death rates from the disease:

Peru 6,945

Brazil 3,396

Mexico 2,654

Panama 2,089

Bolivia 1,974

Guatemala 1,222

Honduras 1,165

El Salvador 652.

 

Exposure to fresh air and full spectrum sunlight with its infrared and ultraviolet radiation has been shown to speed recovery from the disease:

 

 

Trump's tariffs will bankrupt thousands of American businesses and millions will be unemployed as a result

 So says Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, in The Wall Street Journal, here:

... If the tariffs on Chinese goods continue at this rate, he says, thousands of American companies will fail and millions of employees will lose their jobs. ...

When the pandemic clogged up supply chains, he rented a boat so he could tour the Port of Long Beach, Calif., and see the bottlenecks for himself.

When he’s not cruising around ports for information, he’s getting it directly from his company’s 13,000 customers. They are companies that sell electronics, furniture, clothing, toys, diapers, pet feeders—basically everything. He makes it a priority to talk with as many of them as he possibly can. ...

This past week, he traveled from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., where he spent two days meeting with government officials to make the case that tariffs pose an existential threat to his customers. ...

Core pce inflation numbers were finally updated in this chart by the BEA at 147pm EDT showing revisions but the same old story: No core inflation progress in a year

Core inflation in Mar 2025 year over year is 2.64%, still ahead of the lowest reading in the last year at 2.63% in Jun 2024.

Core inflation has been sideways for a year and more, and nowhere near 2% or below as in the pre-pandemic era.

The revised 2.96% for Feb 2025 is equivalent to the 2.97% reading in Mar 2024.

That Feb spike helps explain why the 1Q2025 reading was up 3.5% from 4Q2024.

Fareed Zakaria: Trump uses an unprecedented eight national emergency declarations for his own end run around the constitution, the Congress, and the courts

 ... Trump has declared eight national emergencies in his first 100 days, more than any other president. ...

Invoking an emergency has come to mean that the president can bypass Congress, intimidate courts, and run roughshod over normal procedures, even civil liberties. And while the current number is striking, it’s not a Trumpian innovation. Presidents have become addicted to emergency powers, unlike many other countries. The U.S. Constitution says nothing about how to declare or end an emergency. This has allowed presidents to organically assume a wide range of powers. This usually happened during wartime. ...

Today, Americans are living under dozens of ongoing national emergencies, mostly tied to foreign policy like sanctions. The oldest standing one, targeting Iran, dates back to the Carter administration. Others come from the post-9/11 era, when Congress granted the executive branch sweeping new powers, all in the name of national security. Both parties have used emergency powers to serve their broader agendas. In 2022, President Joe Biden attempted to forgive student loan debt by using an emergency authority related to the COVID-19 pandemic. ...

More.

Like failing to establish a formula for the continued growth of representation, thus unwittingly concentrating power in an oligarchic Congress by default, the constitution's silence about emergencies is yet one more example of the founders' inability to imagine every which way one branch might try to exploit it, which is an increasingly pressing problem in our increasingly illiberal society.