Manufacturing jobs went sideways in April 2026, economic boom nowhere in sight

 

Big 3 salaried labor cuts of 19% return levels to pre-pandemic era

 Detroit automakers have cut more than 20,000 U.S. salaried jobs as AI threat looms

 

 

US economic growth peaked during the Reagan administration because America is a debt-based economy and we turned our backs on the formula during it

 The trend for the growth of the total universe of US debt, TCMDO or total credit market debt outstanding, rolled over after 1985, one year after GDP did.

TCMDO is the real money, almost $108 trillion at the end of 2025. In 1985 it was $9 trillion.

M2 was merely $22 trillion at the end of 2025. 

TCMDO is the sum total of debt expansion throughout the sectors of the economy.

Historically, most people have experienced it this way.

You get a full time job, which itself was created by a business selling debt in the form of stocks and bonds in order to expand its operations and future profits, and you go buy a house, putting down $100k on a $500k property. The bank loans you the $400k through fractional reserve lending on a small portion of its reserves but secured by the house. That new money is created out of thin air but is actually represented by the "guaranteed" future income stream of your job for 30 years, because you're a smart, reliable guy who never misses a day of work. TCMDO expands, and expands some more each time this happens.

When the conditions disappear for full time job creation, the process slows down. You can see the decline in the growth of the economy in the decline of the growth of the debt. Yes, everything is still growing, but not as vigorously.

Full time as a percent of population peaked 26 years ago, in 2000, at 53.55%, but retested the 1975 low of 46.74% in 2010 and 2011 at 46.97%, back-to-back years in the Late Great Recession.

Housing strength persisted in the immediate post-Reagan period on the illusory basis of windfalls from massive ordinary income tax cuts combined with the demographic peaking of the 1957 Baby Boom turning 40 in 1997 driving demand, but the hollowing out of the economy had already begun with the move of 20,000 manufacturers abroad after the 1986 tax reform.

Early warning signs began flashing already during the Clinton era.

Clinton immediately raised taxes in 1993 after he promised not to raise them in 1992, began a long series of cuts to federal government employment, and gutted the US Navy.

Americans were already struggling at the time and ominously tapped housing equity to sustain their middle class standard of living. Owners' Equity in Real Estate averaged 70% 1982-1986 inclusive, but plunged ten points within a decade to 60% 1996-1999 inclusive.

Homes had become piggy banks, preparing the way for 1997, the year Clinton and the Republicans went further still and turned homes into mere commodities, which in turn prepared the way for the housing catastrophe of 2008. From 1997 a flood of 70,000 more manufacturers began moving out as globalization kicked into high gear and China gained admission to the WTO in 2001.

Almost no one today wants to say out loud how unpatriotic this whole business was. 

Reagan tried to convince us that we know best what to do with our own money, and we promptly turned around and staked our fortunes on foreign investment, not domestic.

Libertarianism is a lie.  

Today you will be hard-pressed to identify a major manufacturing concern with 100% of its operations in the US. Tesla is a standout (heavily subsidized by the federal government!), but other than that most of the businesses which remain patriotically committed to the American idea are pretty small beer compared with how it used to be. 

The formerly domestic debt expansion was exported abroad, creating middle classes where none existed before, especially in East Asia, and doing so cost businesses A LOT less, the key attraction for them.

As a result, enormous profits accrued to the owners of capital while wage earners here struggled to maintain the American dream. Wealth inequality soared, and now our children are 40 before they buy their first home.   

TCMDO grew at a compound annual rate of 8.355% 1945-1985, but at only 6.398% 1985-2025. The change from optimism to pessimism can be traced in the trend lines.

Continued growth of TCMDO at the former rate but after 1985 would have yielded TCMDO at the end of 2025 of $223 trillion, or 106% more "money" than we actually have.

$115 trillion is "missing", or at least something like that. We will never know for sure, but some of us can still imagine because we watched the great betrayal actually happen.

This is why I say socialism is the future, not because I want it or because I think it will work.

People are going to figure this out eventually, get angry, and do the wrong thing, just like we did during the Reagan administration. 

 

 

Elusive full-time jobs which fell off a cliff in the Great Recession hold back couple from having the children they want

52% had a full time job on average in 2007, just 49% in 2025

 

 ... Clare Zakowski, a 28-year-old who works part time as a manager at a therapy practice, says she would welcome a federal paid family leave program, not that Congress is offering. She has always loved children; as a high schooler in Green Bay, Wis., she babysat and ran the activities for a summer camp. “I love their naïveté and innocence,” she told me. “I just think kids rock.” Ms. Zakowski has been with her boyfriend for over seven years, and children have been part of the discussion since the two first got together. But lately, she has been appalled by the manosphere, and worries about how A.I. will affect society. “The news every day is crazy, and it’s been that way for a while,” she said. “It just feels like we’re living in a really, really weird time.” Beyond paid leave (or universal health insurance, for that matter), she yearns for something deeper: a sense of security, something that she has yet to experience in America in her adult lifetime. “I feel like there’d have to be, I want to say a revolution, but basically big political change, like a moral awakening from everyone,” she said.

She had been looking for a full-time, higher-paying job to set herself up for parenthood, but found the search to be so stressful that she gave up. “I know there can be negatives to not planning ahead,” she told me, but “who even knows what the future holds?” ...

More. 

 

CNBC: AI has destroyed 342,000 information services jobs since the advent of ChatGPT in November 2022

... information services lost 13,000, part of a continuing trend that has seen the category down 342,000 jobs since November 2022, coinciding with the rise of artificial intelligence. That has equated to a loss of 11% of jobs during the period. ...

More. 

At 24.13%, foreign born employment as a percent of native born employment is still far higher in April 2026 under Trump II than it ever was under Trump I

 

The 3-year trend for the unemployment level in April 2026 is a rising trend

 

Trump's Dumbass Unemployment Rate climbs to 38.33% in April 2026

 

A new record 105.4 million eating but not working in Donald Trump's April 2026 America

 

48.67% had a full time job in April 2026

 Trump's economic boom isn't.

 

Trump makes America 2015 again

 48.66% had a full time job in March 2026.

48.65% had one in May 2015.

 

Ha, taxes coerce behavior whether you like it or not, so you'd better decide what behavior you want because you're going to get it good and hard either way

 Tax Power Not Designed To Coerce Behavior - Gary Abernathy, RCEnergy

... the Fifth Circuit’s ruling is a welcome nod to the fact that the federal government cannot take tax laws intended to increase revenue and twist them merely to regulate business activities. ...

I mean, do these people not remember Ronald Reagan?

“If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.” 

But Ronald Reagan ignorantly reduced high marginal ordinary income tax rates, destroying the need for the owners of capital to make the arbitrage decision going forward between either choosing low long term capital gains tax rates or the high ordinary income tax rates. 

The owners of capital had been no dummies and had picked the low rates for years. That drove domestic investment throughout the post-war because it had to, and produced the good paying full time jobs and GDP which too few even remember now. But faced with an easier path to low taxes, they took it.

The tax windfall set the conditions for the hollowing-out of the U.S. economy when those billions of dollars met the opening to China in 2001, where they worked for pennies on the dollar and regulations were practically non-existent.

20,000 domestic manufacturing establishments alone were lost in the wake of the 1986 tax reform, and 70,000 more after 1997. Millions of manufacturing jobs went with them, and with them the American middle class and the American dream.

All because Ronald Reagan, the liberal, thought rich people knew best what to do with their own money.

In the mid-1980s we had maybe 35 billionaires and people in their 20s routinely married and bought their first home. Today we have 1,135 billionaires and people are nearly 40 before they can afford to buy their first home. And we have Ph.D.s all over the place who can't spell in their own language let alone in a foreign one.  

Put a random set of 100 people in a room and the fact is only 25% of them are college material, but the rest need and deserve good jobs the same as they do, and they aren't going to be "knowledge" jobs.

I can still remember my company's HR head telling my truck-driving employees in the 1990s that they had to start thinking of themselves as "knowledge workers" instead of as what they were. I got the hell out of there. By 2003 most of those new "knowledge workers" of mine had lost their jobs driving truck when the company had to "restructure". Just one tale in tens of thousands of such tales.

America will not begin to be great again without tax policy which favors the American people over some eggheaded libertarian's idea of a principle which favors only the rich. 

Although the trend for continued claims for unemployment is slightly up since Nov 1, 2021, the overall trend for initial claims remains down since then

The average weekly figure for initial claims in 2025 was historically very low at 224,490, and for 1Q2026 it's up only 3.7% from that, to 232,826.

The average weekly figure for continued claims in 2025 was 1,923,140, and for 1Q2026 it's 2,140,439, up 11.3%.

      

Post-Reagan GDP underperformed the immediate post-war by over 26%, Trump-era GDP underperforms it by almost 32%

Ronald Reagan didn't make America great again, and neither has Trump.

The watershed tax changes throwing away the threat of high ordinary income taxation under Reagan in 1986 and Trump in 2018 have got to go.

The country needs genuinely domestic, long-term investment to bring back economic growth. Reward that with low tax incentives and penalize everything else.

Rich people OBVIOUSLY haven't demonstrated that they know best what to do with their own money, otherwise they would have done it already.

We watched helplessly year after year, especially after 2000, as one business after another moved its production abroad seeking lower labor and regulatory costs to make themselves rich, not us.

We have to make them reverse it, because they aren't going to do it otherwise. Tax the shit out of them until they do the right thing, and keep the threat of taxes hanging over their heads to keep them doing the right thing. 

Real GDP Compound Annual Growth Rates

GDPCA 9 April 2026

1947-1984: 3.638%

1984-2017: 2.679%

2017-2025: 2.476%

 

Both foreign born population and foreign born employment ticked up again in March 2026

 

Employment with government at all levels remains very high in March 2026 at 23.3 million

 

Federal employment in March 2026 is at levels last seen in 1966

 

38.11% eating but not working in March 2026

 

48.66% worked full time in March 2026

 When does the Golden Age start?

 

 

So Lori Chavez-Deremer at the Department of Labor had a good long lie-in past NOON today and didn't get the initial claims numbers to FRED until 4:16PM EDT

 These numbers are routinely updated not long after the 8:30am press release in previous administrations.