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. 

 

 

Congress has authorized no such expenditure by the president and they've already left town for the Christmas holiday

 

Trump announces ‘warrior dividend’ of $1,776 to every U.S. soldier in primetime speech

 

... “And the checks are already in the mail,” he said. ... 

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

 982k to be exact.

 

Trump keeps boasting that trillions of dollars are coming into the country to rebuild manufacturing, but the data show big declines in constructing spending on manufacturing

 

Manufacturing jobs have contracted by 58k under Trump

 

Shiller pe ratio above 40 for the first time since 1999-2000

 

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.

 

 

Mad King Ludwig is literally suffering from hysteria, where everything he doesn't like becomes terrorism and fentanyl becomes a weapon of mass destruction

 

 Executive Order Labels Fentanyl "Weapon of Mass Destruction"

Palmer Luckey and all his fellow billionaires have to be taxed punitively on their foreign investments and their ordinary income in order to reindustrialize America

Make sure you tell him when he complains that he has to stop measuring such things in dollars.

 

Palmer Luckey: Reindustrializing The U.S. Is About Realizing Your Destiny Can't Be Measured In Dollars

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.

 

This article in liberal VOX is a great defense of the metric called Gross Domestic Product

 The only number that really matters

 ... GDP tells you how much resource-generating capacity you have by looking at how much you are doing right now. ...

 

And as you know if you read posts here labeled GDP, we aren't doing enough.

GDP today would be DOUBLE what it is if the compound annual growth rate of GDP from the Great Depression to 1984 had simply continued on its trajectory after 1984, but it didn't.

Meanwhile, the steady decline in capacity utilization in the post-war tells you why.

Reagan administration policy prescriptions were only temporarily successful at staving off the trend lower. 

Among its biggest mistakes was lowering ordinary income tax rates because those punitive rates had forced the wealthy to invest their money in American productive capacity in order to get preferential long term capital gains tax rewards from those investments.

Instead like FOOLS we gave them low tax bills on ordinary income, and they promptly took the surplus gains and invested them in low labor cost foreign lands.

Middle classes were created abroad in the millions where there were none before, at the expense of ours here in America.

Ronald Reagan wanted us to believe that it's our money and we know best what to do with it.

WE DON'T.

 

 

The initial reporting on Rob Reiner's murder is like Pravda

 

Rob Reiner, Actor Who Went on to Direct Classic Films, Dies at 78

Rob Reiner, son of a comedy giant who became one in turn, dies at 78 

 

Rob Reiner, director of modern American classics, dies at 78

 

Rob Reiner death: When Harry Met Sally director and son of comedy legend, dies aged 78

 

Rob Reiner, Jewish comedy giant behind slew of iconic Hollywood films, dies at 78

 

Rob Reiner, Iconic Director & Political Activist, Dead at 78

Christie D'Zurilla, LA Times

Mad King Ludwig: Everything has to be about me

 

Trump slams Rob Reiner after killing; director’s son Nick in custody

Stroke victim John Fetterman continues to be the clearest thinker about a two-state solution for Israel

 

Fetterman: Calling For Palestinian State, Two-State Solution "An Absolute Betrayal" Of Israel And Jews Worldwide

Trump has attacked the Houthis, Iran, and is assembling an armada against Venezuela as we speak, but fantasy world dweller Scott Greer says the future of the GOP isn't about foreign policy

The Old Guard Is Not the Right’s Future

  ... Republicans are less likely now to back NATO and other international commitments. Republicans are not as greatly concerned with foreign affairs as think tankers are. It was ranked near the bottom of issues that 2024 voters cared about. ... Obsessing over fiscal policy, advocating for more foreign interventions, and being willing to capitulate on immigration is not a winning formula either in the GOP primaries or for a general electorate. ... [David] French, unlike other Never Trumpers, has given up on the GOP entirely. He thinks it’s Trump’s party now and for the foreseeable future.

He’s obviously right. Only an America First candidate, not a Paul Ryan type, can hold the coalition together. ...

 

The alt-right fringe is now acceptable at The American Conservative, and in the line-up at Real Clear Politics, all of which have become completely incoherent, including on the primacy of fiscal policy, which is the cause of, and the solution to, all the ills now afflicting the young people Greer would speak for.

 

Reagan authored those ills, and Trump has double-downed on them.

 

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

 CNBC here.

This is just awful

 Rob Reiner, wife dead in homicide at Brentwood home; police interview family member

... A source who was not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation but had knowledge of the investigation confirmed that there was no sign of forced entry into the home. The source also said that the Reiners had injuries consistent with being stabbed.

The sources said that some time after the attack, one of the couple’s children found them and law enforcement was called. ...

 

You just knew this would be the response in Australia

 Australia to tighten gun laws after Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre

The Muslim father and son alleged shooters reportedly owned six firearms legally under the already severely restricted laws since 1996 which have reduced firearm ownership in Australia to 25% of households.

The shooters' rampage went on for many minutes before police arrived to engage and stop them, in widely shared video on the site formerly known as Twitter.

AI says about 813k Muslims live in Australia, where over four million legal, registered firearms are owned by civilians in the country of 27.5 million. 

Australia plans tougher gun laws after police say father and son killed 15 at Bondi Beach

 ... The incident has raised questions whether Australia’s gun laws, among the toughest in the world, need overhaul, with police saying the older suspect had held a firearms license since 2015, along with six registered weapons. ... 

Two flags of militant group Islamic State were found in the gunmen’s vehicle, ABC News said, without citing a source. ...

Jews number about 150,000 of Australia’s population of 27 million, with about a third estimated to live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, including Bondi.

 

The United States and Russia are already obligated to respect Ukraine's sovereignty under the Budapest Memorandum and they're not doing it, so executing another piece of paper without NATO membership will be meaningless

The US under Trump is demanding pieces of Ukraine's economy, and Russia has already taken pieces of its land.

This whole business is a dirty joke, rewarding Russia for its aggression and turning a blind eye to its myriad war crimes.

 

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy ditches ambition to join NATO ahead of peace talks

 

... “From the very beginning, Ukraine’s desire was to join NATO, these are real security guarantees. Some partners from the US and Europe did not support this direction,” he said in answer to questions from reporters in a WhatsApp chat.

“Thus, today, bilateral security guarantees between Ukraine and the US, Article 5-like guarantees for us from the US, and security guarantees from European colleagues, as well as other countries — Canada, Japan — are an opportunity to prevent another Russian invasion,” Zelenskyy said.

“And it is already a compromise from our part,” he said, adding that the security guarantees should be legally binding. ...

My God, The American Conservative is a joke of a magazine

The NSS Is the Strategy We Have Waited For

 ... The NSS finally says out loud what many of us have argued quietly: proximity shapes power. If the United States wants to compete with China—economically, technologically, militarily—it must simultaneously secure the space in which its own republic exists. A great power does not project strength globally while hemorrhaging authority regionally. China seems to get this instinctively. It does not confront nuclear competitors while tolerating cartel rule on its own doorstep. ...

China is the principal global source for the world's fentanyl and methamphetamine precursors which fuel the cartels in Mexico and in China's own backyard in Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand, which also supply China with its own heroin and opium.

Illegal drugs are a key weapon China deploys against the West, but Trump's new, awful, stupid National Security Strategy couldn't care less.

And Trump is about to prove it again next week when he reclassifies gateway drug marijuana as Schedule III instead of Schedule I. 

The Uniparty wants one central source of approval, and that fool Ted Cruz is down for the cause

 

Putin said he had Kupiansk surrounded at the end of October, today Zelenskyy appeared there lol

 

Trump's FY2026 deficit through November is $457 billion but he thinks he has tariff revenue to play around with to bailout the farmers his own tariffs screwed

The National Debt these deficits increase stands at $38.35 trillion.

And people accuse Wall Street of short-term thinking. 

 

Current taxpayer-funded liar calls previous taxpayer-funded liar a liar

 

Leavitt vs. CNN's Collins: Psaki Used This Podium To Lie, And You Just Believed Her

 

More executive overreach from Trump on AI regulation after Congress balked

Republicans in Congress knew that they would be blamed in Blue states and lose even bigger next November. 

Expect this executive overreach to be challenged in court. 

Trump signs executive order for single national AI regulation standard, limiting power of states

 

... A proposed 10-year ban on states regulating AI was initially included in the Republican spending bill but was cut out before Trump signed it in July. ... 

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. 

 

 

  

Another new nominal record high for silver today

 $64.31

-- CNBC 

It is obvious to everyone except Republicans that the Reagan Revolution of tax cuts for the rich has failed to produce the economic growth America was accustomed to before he became president

We had a few dozen billionaires in the Reagan era. Now we have hundreds.

Growth of GDP, percent change, annual, rolled over after 1984, inaugurating a new period of lower trendline growth in the economy.

You're not wrong to feel poorer. 

Just look at the trend lines for the data in this chart from before 1984 and after 1984. The change is glaring. The money which used to go into the economy to grow it has gone straight into the pockets of the rich.

Meanwhile Trump had one year in 2018 at 5.32% and he thinks he's God's gift to humanity, when Bush 43 did better in 2004-2006 at 6.64, 6.72, and 5.95.

Doddering old Joe Biden comes along and averages 8.22 for four years and what do Democrats do but throw him under the bus.

It's enough to make you scream. 

Real Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a Russia-loving loser like Trump

 

The loser to the Houthis says Zelensky should surrender

 Trump Says Zelensky Has To Start "Accepting Things": "He's Losing"

Yeah, I remember when Churchill betrayed England and pretended he could still win after Dunkirk

We shall never surrender.

 

Europe Betraying Ukraine By Pretending It Can Still Win

Daniel DePetris, Telegraph

It never occurs to stupid people that yesterday's conservative parents of four child families gave birth to the '60s liberals and radicals

 

Liberals Aren't Having Kids, Conservatives Are. That Matters

Ingrid Jacques, USAT

Trump takes tariff money from a broad, and she doesn't even know it

 

Pete Hegseth's March and April 2016 NeverTrump comments about issuing illegal orders to the military make him look like an early member of the six Democrat panel he now criticizes

Link.

Link. 

Link. 

Link. 

Pete is nothing if not a shapeshifter like most of the people around Trump who were against him before they were for him. 

Who employs the illegal aliens, and who buys the illegal drugs?

 

Meanwhile Batshit-crazy Ungar-Sargon wants you to know that illegal drugs are Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction justifying you know what lol

 That's another OMG, and it's not even lunch yet on this snow-packed 4-degree F second Monday of December.

 

 

Erick Erickson wants you to know that the GOP's anti-semitism could be a real liability in the 2028 election lol

"We'd better get rid of it . . . by then".

OMG.

And you thought Nick Fuentes was the turd in the Republican punchbowl.

 

 

Nobody should be fooled by Bush 41's military attack on CIA asset Manuel Noriega in 1989 like Senators Lindsey Grahamnesty and Tom Cotton: Cocaine flows through the Panama Canal today like the water

Oh, please Allah

The rising star tipped to end Hegseth's chaotic reign at Pentagon... 

 

NOEM ON CHOPPING BLOCK

 

 

Hegseth should never have been confirmed to SECDEF, Inspector General's report finds his use of Signal in March jeopardized troop safety against the Houthis

 Hegseth risked ‘potential harm to US pilots’ in using Signal to discuss strikes: Report

... “The Secretary sent nonpublic DoD information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes,” the report states.

“Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives.” ...

“Although the Secretary wrote in his July 25 statement to the DoD OIG that ‘there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission,’ if this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes,” the report concluded.

“Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.” ...

 

 

The Uniparty's military kills civilians in righteous strikes

 Days of Infamy, and all that.

The US Navy is obeying illegal orders to delete video evidence of the October 17 boat strike survivors

 

Ronald Reagan July 3, 1983: Don't let anyone tell us that America's best days are behind her (but they are)

 The speech is here.

Unfortunately the numbers don't lie. Shortly after that speech, economic growth rolled over definitively. I think Reagan said what he said because serious people around him were telling him we were in big trouble (1982) and he didn't want to believe it. It was a denial of reality, similar to the denial of reality so typical today from Donald Trump.

 

Michael W. Green (@profplum99) describes in a recent essay in great detail many of the ways in which we are indeed poorer, especially people who have to live in New Jersey and work in New York, in his "My Life is a Lie" here.

The essay resonates mostly with people in the top 20%, which certainly doesn't include YT. But I found it very interesting, however, for how it starts off resting on the mistaken assumption that we have "healthy GDP growth". It is Green's unquestioned and fatal premise, no different than Reagan's or Trump's before him.

We do not have healthy GDP growth now, nor have we had it for a long time, at least not commensurate with a population which has grown by 106 million since 1984.

The compound annual growth rate for GDP from 1929 to 1984 was 6.869%, but through 2024 has fallen 26% to 5.079%.

"Well, that doesn't sound so bad", you say.

Well, the 5.079% rate has given us GDP of $29.3 trillion through 2024.

But at the 6.869% rate we would have GDP of $60.4 trillion, $31.1 trillion more than we do, more than twice as much again.

We have multiple new generations who expected the 1984 fairy tale who are now on the receiving end of 50% less than what might have been.

Solving this growth problem has been the number one aspiration of many on the right year in and year out, but no one has delivered on it.  The current pack are not conservatives. They've given up. They are simply hyenas, feasting off the flesh of the wounded, of whom there are more than ever.

The roll over of GDPA CAGR in 1981 was retested in 1984 (black line)

 

Another new record high silver price: Silver rose 2.6% to $58.59 an ounce, up 4% for the week, after touching a record $59.32 earlier

 CNBC.

Pro-Trump anarchist confessed to planting pipe bombs at DNC and RNC on January 5, 2021

 Sure, sure, a pro-Trump anarchist.

I'm glad we got that cleared up. 

Pipe bomb suspect Brian Cole confessed, said he supports Trump and has anarchist views: MS NOW

 ... While in custody, Cole confessed to planting the pipe bombs, which did not detonate, two sources familiar with his interview with the FBI told MS NOW. ...

Core pce inflation ticked down to 2.82% year over year in September from 2.90% in August 2025, but for 3Q2025 it ticked up to 2.86% yoy, which is elevated 78% above pre-pandemic experience

 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. 

 

 

Unless of course Drudge taught his bots to misspell, for example Android lol

NEW DRUDGE REPORT APP 2026!
FIRST ALERTS, SPEED, CLASSIC VIEW AND COLUMN ZOOM... 

ALWAYS EDITED BY HUMAN BEING...

IPHONE/IPAD...
ANDRIOD SOON... 

 

 

Senator Tom Cotton calling the September 2nd drug boat strikes righteous is utterly contemptible: The US military waited an hour to kill the shipwrecked survivors

 US airstrike survivors clung to boat wreckage for an hour before second deadly attack, video shows: Footage seen by US senators shows two unarmed, shirtless men struggling to stay afloat before they were killed, sources say

Two men who survived a US airstrike on a suspected drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean clung to the wreckage for an hour before they were killed in a second attack, according to a video of the episode shown to senators in Washington.

The men were shirtless, unarmed and carried no visible radio or other communications equipment. They also appeared to have no idea what had just hit them, or that the US military was weighing whether to finish them off, two sources familiar with the recording told Reuters.

The pair desperately tried to turn a severed section of the hull upright before they died. “The video follows them for about an hour as they tried to flip the boat back over. They couldn’t do it,” one source said. ...

The US Department of Defense’s Law of War manual forbids attacks on combatants who are incapacitated, unconscious or shipwrecked, so long as they abstain from hostilities and do not attempt to escape. The manual cites firing upon shipwreck survivors as an example of a “clearly illegal” order that should be refused. ...           

 

These aren't even combatants. The military has no business in any of this. That's why we have a Coast Guard in the first place.  

But they did kill them all, including the survivors which is a war crime, and they're murderers because the drug runners are noncombatants

If the US military is allowed this completely novel idea that it can kill noncombatants, THEY CAN KILL YOU.

 They're also conspirators who tried to cover up their crime.

Admiral says there was no 'kill them all' order in boat attack, but video alarms lawmakers...  

After the September 2nd debacle, they changed their policy about survivors, which shows they knew all along that they were wrong to kill the survivors on September 2nd.

There were survivors of the sixth attack, on October 16th. Those survivors they recovered and repatriated.

That incident was reported as the first known case of survivors because they covered up that there were survivors on September 2nd.

These people know they committed murder on September 2nd and they tried to hide it. Now they're madly spinning.

What Trump is doing is wildly illegal, wildly un-American. 

U.S. military detains survivors of latest boat strike near Venezuela: The operation is the sixth known attack on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean, and the first known to have left some people alive.  

U.S. repatriating survivors of alleged drug boat strike to Colombia, Ecuador

Samuel Johnson doesn't have our meaning of the word, but it does appear right after faeces in his dictionary lol

 

Gay slur having cultural renaissance...

 

That's the spirit lol

 Travelers wear pajamas to airports in protest of government request...

Don't tell me what to do . . .

 

Trump's base is not happy: Strong disapproval of Trump hits new high 46% in Rasmussen Reports Poll, strong approval hits new low 27% for a second day

Trump's total disapproval score remains at a record high 55% for a second day.

His strong approval score is now a record low 27%, lower than his April 9th tariff low of 29%, his only sub-30 score until the last two weeks.

Trump has had a string of eleven sub-30 strong approval scores since November 11th.

Trump kicked off the period on November 11th stating that we needed H-1B workers because we didn't have enough talent in America. The longest federal government shutdown in history ended on Wednesday the 12th. Around the 15th he reversed his tariffs on coffee and other food items which had contributed to their record high prices in the first place. The same day brought the news that he had also stabbed Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia in the back over her criticism of the GOP's refusal to extend the Obamacare premium tax credits. The Epstein files saga came to a head on the 18th requiring their release, but will we ever see them? TikTok was supposed to be sold or shut down by act of Congress, too, and it has not been. On the 19th Trump was kissing the ass of the Saudi killer of Khashoggi, MBS, in the Oval Office. On the 20th Trump's secret 28-point plan with Russia to carve up Ukraine came to light. On the 22nd Democrats went on camera talking darkly about illegal orders being given to the military in the Caribbean. A National Guard soldier was executed on the streets of DC on the 26th by an Afghan refugee let into America by Biden but given residency by Trump. By the 29th we learned that survivors of a Trump drug boat attack in the Caribbean on September 2 were executed in a subsequent strike by the US military, which they obviously hoped no one would ever find out about. They spent the whole time since making up shit about this being a war justifying military engagement when everyone knows it's not a war and killing people for running drugs in the first place is wrong, otherwise the job we give the Coast Guard to do year in and year out has been simply a pointless exercise.

Trump's base is not happy. Pick your reason(s). 

 

 

Trump cuts vehicle fuel economy goal to 34 mpg by 2031 from 50 mpg by 2031 under Biden

 CNBC.

AI says the current US light duty vehicle fleet gets about 26 mpg.

New silver high: $58.98

 CNBC.