You can't win: State and local government employment is up 175k since January, which more than offsets federal employment down 69k

 The swamp is everywhere lol.

down 69k

up 119k

up 56k

Donald Trump has managed to fire a measly 69,000 federal employees since January, state government employees up 56,000 lol

Looks like a lot of federal workers found new jobs lol. 

We had a record average number who were eating but not working in the United States in 1H2025, not seasonally adjusted: 102.65 million

 The seasonally adjusted figure is also a record high: 102.50 million in 1H2025.

 

The Rush Limbaugh/Donald Trump dumb ass unemployment rate was 37.58% in the first half of 2025

 

Trump's own government says he has 103.2 million eating but not working in June 2025

I don't make the rules.

Rush Limbaugh makes the rules.

 

Full time employment in June 2025 rises to 49.83%, first half of 2025 falls to 49.30%, as bad as 2021 or 2017

 

Full time was 49.83% of civilian population in June 2025

Full time was 49.30% of civilian population in 1H2025

Jobs going bye-bye in the news

 

Microsoft laying off about 9,000 employees in latest round of cuts

 

The private sector lost 33,000 jobs in June, badly missing expectations for a 100,000 increase, ADP says

Every major bank passes stress test from the US Federal Reserve

507 banks failed in the United States 2008-2014 inclusive, costing the Deposit Insurance Fund nearly $90 billion. Many millions of homes went into completed foreclosure.

 

Big banks all pass the Federal Reserve’s less vigorous stress tests

 

... All 22 banks tested this year would have remained solvent and above the minimum thresholds to continue to operate, the Fed said, despite absorbing roughly $550 billion in theoretical losses. ...

 

Under this year’s hypothetical scenario, a major global recession would have caused a 30% decline in commercial real estate prices and a 33% decline in housing prices. The unemployment rate would rise to 10% and stock prices would fall 50%. In 2024, the hypothetical scenario was a 40% decline in commercial real estate prices, a 55% decline in stock prices and a 36% decline in housing prices. ...      

 

The 2024 benchmarks are a mixture.

 

Commercial real estate prices year over year fell more than 11% in 4Q2008, and more than 30% in 4Q2009. Planning for a future 40% decline seems appropriate.

 

The 2007 shock to the median price of houses sold was only 19% 1Q2007-1Q2009, with prices not recovering until 1Q2013. But since the median price of houses sold has jumped by about 31% just since 2020, planning for a future 36% decline is more than appropriate.

 

Unemployment peaked at 10% in October 2009. The civilian employment level contracted by almost 7 million 2007-2010 on an average basis, and did not recover until 2014, seven long years later. Pandemic unemployment peaked at 14.8% in April 2020. We got as high as 10.8% in November and December 1982. Great Depression unemployment peaked at 25.59% in May 1933. This one is a crap-shoot. 

 

The average price of the S&P 500 fell 50.8% between October 2007 and March 2009, but in 2007 the S&P 500 was valued about 26% above the long term mean, not 130% as in 2024.

 

That's the datum that worries me. Just to get to its historical median value of 81, the S&P 500 today would have to fall 61%, to about 2425.

 

Imagine the howls. 

 

 

 

  

 

Initial claims for unemployment in June 2025 were last higher in June 2023, but yikes continued claims were last higher in Dec 2021

4-week moving averages, initial claims monthly average, continued claims biweekly average:

 

The more things change, the more the fascist U.S. system of corporate welfare does not

 

In race to attract data centers, states forfeit hundreds of millions in tax revenue to tech firms

 

... In the race to attract large data centers, states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to a CNBC analysis. Among the beneficiaries of these exemptions are tech giants such as Amazon, Meta and Google, which all have market caps of over $1 trillion. 

Tax breaks have long been a tool states use to compete for businesses. However, watchdog groups said that for data centers the tradeoffs are iffy, because the facilities don’t tend to create large numbers of jobs, while the amount of electricity required can be immense. 

The growing number of tax breaks has sparked a debate about whether massive corporations should be receiving these generous incentives. ...

Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research group that tracks corporate subsidies and advocates for transparency and accountability in economic development, has spent more than a decade examining the impact of exemptions nationwide. He said the clear winners are the Big Tech companies.

“There was a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders,” LeRoy told CNBC. “Some states, like Virginia, are headed toward billion-dollar annual losses.” ...

LeRoy calls it a losing proposition for taxpayers.  

“When tax breaks don’t pay for themselves, only two things can happen: Either public services are reduced in quality, or everybody’s taxes go up in other ways if you’re going to try to keep things the same in terms of quality of public services,” he said. ...

 

Meanwhile, known corporate welfare, in the form of tax abatements and subsidies by states and localities to attract businesses to come and bring jobs, is presently estimated at in excess of $417 billion. The real total is probably far higher given that local data is poor relative to state disclosures.

 

The data, incomplete as it may be, shows just ten states where we're talking about only "hundreds of millions" in lost tax revenue and tax loss expenditures. In the rest we're talking about billions, even tens of billions.    

The 4-week moving average of continued claims for unemployment also popped to the highest level since November 2021

 

The 4-week moving average of initial claims for unemployment popped close to 250k again, as in the summer of 2023

 

TACO Trump chickens out on more than just tariffs, calls off the ICE raids on agriculture, restaurant, and hotel jobs to quell heartland rebellion

Stephen Miller most hurt.

On Wednesday morning, President Trump took a call from Brooke Rollins, his secretary of agriculture, who relayed a growing sense of alarm from the heartland.

Farmers and agriculture groups, she said, were increasingly uneasy about his immigration crackdown. Federal agents had begun to aggressively target work sites in recent weeks, with the goal of sharply bolstering the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants. ... 

 

Inside the West Wing, top White House officials were caught off guard — and furious at Ms. Rollins. ... 

But the decision had been made. Later on Thursday, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tatum King, sent an email to regional leaders at the agency informing them of new guidance. Agents were to “hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” ...

More. 

Observe again how quickly Trump is to turn on a dime. The policy changed in less than 48 hours. The last person he talked to can be the most influential, which is not what you want from the leader of the free world. Sometimes he stumbles into the right decision, to be sure, but he can always stumble the wrong way. The tyrant's soul resembles the state which he rules, full of chaos and conflicting desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy.

Yeah, but half of employers pretend to pay

 Half of Your Employees May Be Pretending to Work, According to a New Survey

It’s called ‘ghostworking,’ and a recent poll of workers shows that it’s more prevalent than you think. 

... Fully 23 percent of people (nearly 1 in 4 workers) admitted to walking around the office with a notebook so that they look purposeful and busy, while 22 percent have typed away at their keyboard entering nonsense. Though it’s rarer, 15 percent have faked being on a phone call so they appear busy, and 12 percent scheduled nonexistent meetings so they had an excuse to not do real tasks. ... 47 percent of employees said they waste more time working from home, while 37 percent said they waste more time in the office. ...

An AI-induced economic collapse is coming in one to five years on the heels of millions losing their jobs to AI and on the spending of those millions drying up

 The silent bloodbath that's tearing through the middle-class and rapidly flipping the US economy on its head

... This time, it's not blue-collar and factory workers getting whacked — it's college graduates with white-collar jobs in tech, finance, law, and consulting.

Entry-level jobs are vanishing the fastest — stoking fears of recession and a generation of disillusioned graduates left stranded with CVs no one wants.

College grads are now much more likely to be unemployed than others, official data show.

Chatbots have already taken over data entry and customer service jobs. Next-generation 'agentic' AI can solve problems, adapt, and work independently. ...

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, one of the world's most powerful AI firms, says we're at the start of a storm.

AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20 percent in the next one to five years, he told Axios. ...

Critics say universities are churning out graduates into a market that simply doesn't need them.

A growing number of young professionals say they feel betrayed — promised opportunity, but handed a future of 'AI-enhanced' redundancy. ...

 

Well, if spending collapses those blue-collar and factory workers won't have anything to do either, now will they?

Prices for everything might very well reset much lower in a deflationary spiral.

Imagining being in charge of addressing all that.

Trump has cut only 59k federal jobs since January, through May lol

 

The Donald Trump/Rush Limbaugh Dumb Ass Unemployment Rate in May 2025 climbed for a second consecutive month to 37.7%

 103.2 million eating, but not working.

 

Just 49.35% had a full time job in May 2025

 

The decline of worker hours in America

 In 1966 all the hours worked by all the full time and part time workers divided by the civilian employment level peaked at about 35.35 hours per worker per week. That's full time level work. That's prosperity.

The flood of Baby Boomers, especially Baby Boomer women under the influence of feminism and the social revolution of the 1960s, and also foreign born workers after the Immigration Act of 1965, into the labor markets after the mid-1960s reduced hours per week per worker by almost 11%, not forming a new stable bottom until the 1980s at about 31.5 hours per week.

Increased labor supply = fewer hours to go around = less prosperity.

By 1999, when peak Baby Boom had passed 40 years of age, hours per week had risen as high as 32.68 per worker per week. That was the end result of the good times kick-started by Ronald Reagan twenty years prior, which hit in four waves: 1984-85, 1989, 1995, and 1999.

But the whole subsequent period 2003-2019 inclusive fell apart.

Many, many troubles reduced hours worked per worker by almost 7% between 1999 and 2009, not the least of which were admission of China to the World Trade Organization in 2001, and the Great Recession.

Hours per week per worker have risen again as of 2022, but only to the old bottom, at around 31.57 per week.

Median real earnings per week are up just $38 since 1979.

Will that be As Good As It Gets?

 

 

 

Federal employment is 1.1% of civilian population in April 2025: This is the swamp billionaires want to drain

 The worst it ever got was 2.4% in December 1952 while Truman was still president.

The leisure class of state capitalism has to have something to complain about.