The 38-page pdf is full of tables with missing data like this " - ".
... CPI data collection resumed on November 14, 2025. ...
Thursday, December 18, 2025
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.
Trump's energy price fantasies last night: Gasoline is $2.50 in much of the country, other energy prices will fall dramatically
Gasoline averages $3.22, and average prices for electricity and natural gas rose in November from September.
The Trump Regime wants you to believe that core cpi inflation dropped from 3.01% year over year in September to 2.63% in November, lower than April's 2.77% and lower than at any point since 2021
October 2025 is missing.
The BLS remains in the hands of an acting commissioner since Trump fired McEntarfer in August.
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?
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.
Wednesday, December 17, 2025
Congress has authorized no such expenditure by the president and they've already left town for the Christmas holiday
... “And the checks are already in the mail,” he said. ...
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!
Tuesday, December 16, 2025
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.
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.
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.
Monday, December 15, 2025
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.
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.
... 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.
Sunday, December 14, 2025
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.
... “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. ...
Saturday, December 13, 2025
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.
Friday, December 12, 2025
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
Thursday, December 11, 2025
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.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
Monday, December 8, 2025
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.
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.
Sunday, December 7, 2025
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.” ...
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