Liberal democracy must solve the problems of Gen Z globally, which works a lot but stays poor, or it will perish

 Crushed by soaring rents and living costs and staring down a future where robots and AI threaten their jobs, Gen Z is unleashing a wave of protests that is rattling governments worldwide. ...

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It's completely crazy that an entry level ice cream scooper in Brooklyn, New York earns almost as much as an entry level small engine mechanic

 Fifty cents an hour less.

It's as if the weight of wealth accumulation by the top 10% has squished and compressed those beneath them into one giant, undifferentiated blob scooping ice cream alongside this woman.

31-year-old scoops ice cream on the side for $16.50/hour to make ends meet in this job market: ‘There is zero shame in it’

... When I started working at Lady Moo Moo in Bed-Stuy, I found myself surrounded by people who, like me, had already built careers and are now navigating an unpredictable job market. Some had been laid off just as I had. Others, like my colleague who is a sex educator and public health advocate, lost funding in their fields. A few are juggling multiple part-time roles to stay afloat.  ... Every shift, I met people who never imagined they would be picking up part-time work: artists, teachers, nonprofit workers, tech employees, museum curators, and neighbors doing their best to make life work in a difficult economy. ...

 

 

 

Because we can't build them ourselves

 

Hanwha Ocean shares jump 10% after Trump says South Korean firm to build warships for U.S. Navy

 

Manufacturing capacity utilization was down in November, a pale reflection of its former self before globalization.

 

Same with manufacturing employment.

 

Manufacturing production was barely up in November and is effectively flat since the Great Recession, before which it was still rising.

 

Trump stupidly thinks tariffs can reverse all this, when you're supposed to use tariffs to protect what you have, not what you don't.

 

 

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 gaslights America about affordability in last night's speech, says it only became an issue during the Biden administration

 I've been talking about affordability until I'm blue in the face right here ever since the Great Recession wrecked America and Obama did nothing about it.

There's even a label for it, with over 120 posts about it going all the way back to the beginning.

Affordability has become an even bigger problem because of the recent episode of inflation, no question about it.  

For example in 2025 the average sales price of a single family home in my county has been $433k, 87% higher than it was in 2019.

For that to be affordable, an income of $166.5k is necessary (2.6x = 433,000), but 94% of individual wage earners didn't make that much in 2023.

But in Trump's America in 2019, when the average sales price of a single family home in my county was only $232k, 85% couldn't afford it because they didn't make the necessary $89.2k a year.

Same shit, different day. Illegal aliens weren't to blame in 2019 any more than they are in 2025. 

Millions of Americans lost their jobs in 2009 and never got them back. Many of them lost their homes, too, and much else. Zero interest rate policy for a subsequent decade is what made housing unaffordable then, and Trump is calling for more of the same now.

People like me voted for Trump in 2016 because we thought that finally we had someone who meant business about stuff like that, but his failure to prioritize illegal immigration in 2017, his signature campaign issue, indicated that he wasn't a serious person, and the rest of his tenure proved it.

And he still isn't serious. 

He's wasting billions of dollars rounding up illegals whom he now laughably says number 25 million when he should be rounding up their employers and passing legislation which puts the screws to THEM instead of to some grandma with a sign at a protest rally.

He's also wasting billions going after Venezuela, which hasn't paid ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips about $10 billion for expropriating their oil assets in 2007. Fighting this small potatoes matter is also costing us a fortune.

He also wasted $9-$12 billion in the Red Sea trying to stop the Houthis, but cut and ran when it got too expensive, leaving shipping the sitting duck it was in the first place, so it still goes around Africa instead. Transits through the Suez are down 50% and tonnage is down 66% compared with 2023.

America is no longer the guarantor of freedom of navigation on the seas. It doesn't care about freedom in Ukraine, and it certainly doesn't care about economic freedom at home. If it did it wouldn't spend the country into oblivion, and would tax the bejeebers out of the billionaires and leave the rest of us alone. 

We do not have a serious president.

It's all theatre.  

The unemployment level is up almost 1 million since January under Donald Trump

 982k to be exact.

 

Manufacturing jobs have contracted by 58k under Trump

 

Federal employment is now down 271k since January, almost 9% vs. the 75% promised by Elon Musk

Employment by state governments is down 47k through November.

Employment by local governments is up 130k.

That means employment by government at all levels is down 188k net . . . to 23.4 million nationwide lol. 

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!

 

White House Press Secretary Komrade Karoline lies about foreign born employment, says foreigners took 100% of the jobs under Biden

 Foreign born employment increased 6.5 million under Joe Biden, Jan 2021-Jan 2025.

Native born employment increased 7.5 million.

That's 46.4% for the foreign born, not 100%.

No one asks who hired them.

No one asks why we aren't going after those employers.

No Republican repudiates this obvious lying.

 

 

Not the Golden Age AT ALL: The percentage of Americans working full time in November 2025 collapsed to 48.82%

 Eight Novembers under Bush 43 saw 51.6% working full-time on average, and under Bill Clinton 52.0% which today would mean 8.7 million more working full time than do.

 

Speaking of not doing enough, the lazy bums in the Trump administration aren't producing October data because of their ridiculous government shutdown, giving us chart crimes like the one below . . .

 . . . in which full time employment falls 1.606 million from 135.708 million in September 2025 to 134.102 million in November 2025.

What a bunch of complete losers.

 

Gold is back above $4,300 this morning and silver made a new record $64.65 on Friday

 CNBC here.

This was a plausible excuse for the latest Fed rate cut

 But what it really does is get the meddlesome Trump off their backs, whether jobs are flagging or not. Jobless claims have averaged a very, very low sub-227k in 2025.

The case for more Fed rate cuts could rest on a ‘systematic overcount’ of jobs numbers

 

Meanwhile Powell & Co. did an end-run around Trump by confirming all the regional bank presidents two months early, before Trump could meddle with that, too, which was a fear.

 

Which is very amusing. 

 

Fed votes to reappoint all of its regional bank presidents 

 

Long term yields have not believed in the rate cuts.

 

They have risen, risen indeed!, since the Fed started cutting in the face of persistent inflation in September 2024, and remain higher today.

 

You can run, but you can't hide from the Hound of Heaven. 

 

 

  

Trump's Golden Age of ADP Payroll losses: Biden had only one month of losses, but Trump already has four! MAGA!

 

Michigan's Pete Hoekstra, a phony baloney plastic banana good time libertarian free trader, now touts tariffs as Trump's ambassador to Canada which kill jobs in his congressional district

 

In Congress, He Said Tariffs Were Bad for Business. As Trump’s Ambassador to Canada, He’s Reversed Course. 

 

Women not in labor force still outnumber men not in labor force 1.4:1 in 3Q2025

 

Donald Trump's Dumb Ass Unemployment Rate for September 2025 was 37.56%, higher than his first term average when he averaged 96.4 million eating but not working

 The Trump I Dumb Ass Unemployment Rate averaged 37.35% 2017-2020 inclusive.

Through three quarters of 2025 an average of 102.67 million are eating but not working. 

I don't make the rules. Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump made the rule. 

 

 

Elon Musk's DOGE was all sound and fury, signifying nothing: Federal employment in Sep 2025 is down just 97,000 from January

 

Not the greatest economy ever, not by a long shot: Full time jobs in Sep 2025 moved sideways with just 49.48% of the population working at one

 The data was delayed by the federal government shutdown.

The current level is little better than Sep 2016 at 49.08%.