Peak Baby Boom 1957 reaching full retirement age in 2023 is driving a new exodus from the labor force making 2023 the biggest single year rate spike in new Social Security enrollments since 2009

 New Social Security retirement enrollments experienced a significant +5.01% spike in 2023, marking the largest single-year growth rate since the conclusion of the recession wave in 2009. 

Peak Baby Boom started in 1957 and ended in 1961, with an average of 4.3 million births in each of the five years.

If you were born in January 1957, you reached full retirement age in July 2023 and were eligible for your first payment in August 2023. A person born in December 1961 is eligible for their first payment in December 2028. 

This means the new exodus out of the labor force and into retirement and into the not-in-labor-force category will last from mid-2023 into 2029, a tsunami crashing out of the economy as these individuals become 66+ and 67 years old in their turn. Full retirement age is 66+6 months for 1957 (2023+), 66+8 months for 1958 (2024+), 66+10 months for 1959 (2025+), and 67 years for 1960 and 1961 (2027, 2028).

This exodus will combine with AI to incentivize reductions in force in corporate America, and we're already witnessing it.

For 2024-26 to date, layoffs have been running ~766k/yr on average annualized ahead of the average 20 million layoffs per year. Announced corporate job cuts late 2024-25 were ~720k, the highest in 15 years.

Trump reductions in force for the federal government at ~250k net contribute but are a sideshow by comparison.

Perhaps fortunately, the Baby Bust of 1973-1976, when annual births crashed to multi-decade lows of 3.1 million per year, means fewer people in their fifties exist to be victimized by AI like Baby Boomers were victimized by the Great Recession in 2009.

But the shrinking talent pool snaking its way through the economy may also be a reason driving AI in the first place.

The problem of unintended consequences is inescapable.

One thing we could fix though is "disabled workers". The Dot Com Bust and The Great Recession didn't suddenly disable anybody, but that's what the data shows.

They exploited a chink in the armor of the Social Security system, and are one big reason the system is teetering.

The Bush and Obama administrations both let it happen because they wouldn't, or couldn't, address the consequences of job loss in a straightforward manner, so they burdened the system instead with a wink, a nod, and an averting of the gaze.

Well, just look at the damn thing. ↓ 

  

Rush Limbaugh's 106.189 million eating, but not working, a new high, in Trump's America!

Middle East outbound oil flows through both Straits are back down in the range of 6 million barrels per day if Bab-el-Mandeb is now indeed a return to the pre-war level

 It appears that there is nothing extra coming out of the Red Sea anymore, diverted by Saudi Arabia west to Yanbu.

UAE moved 0.95 mbpd through Hormuz in July 2026, but 2.28 mbpd out of Fujairah which doesn't go through Hormuz, which would be in addition to the now ~6 million through Hormuz, yielding 8.28 mbpd approximately, as we speak.

That's 62% off the pre-war level of ~22 mbpd out of the Middle East.

Trump not vanquishing the Houthis in 2025 is America's chickens comin' home to roost.

 

Middle East tanker transits in JMIC Update 081 for July 30-August 5, 2026: Strait of Hormuz 2.1/day, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait 7.9/day

 Agust. It's hot out there.

The collapse in full time jobs continues in July 2026

 Full time employment as a percentage of civilian noninstitutional population has collapsed from 54.67% working full time in July 2000 to 48.97% in July 2026.

Just adding one full percentage point working full time in July 2026, effectively getting us to 50%, would mean 2.75 million more people working full time.

Where are they? At the movies making Christopher Nolan rich? 

When it comes to all employment, both full and part time, as a percentage of population, July 2026 might as well be the summer of 1969, with just 59.13% working at any job.

And don't @me with the multiple jobholding bs.

5.4% of the employed worked multiple jobs in July 2026, 8.69 million.

2.16 million had two part time jobs.

4.77 million full timers also worked a part time job.

Just 0.473 million full time go-getters took away a second full time job from someone else. 

It is just staggering how much this country is not working up to its potential.

 

OMG, Grindr to improve back-end tools

 Grindr’s AI spend is paying off and its pricey new tier has had some surprises, CEO says

LGBTQ-focused dating platform Grindr is using AI to develop new premium subscription products and improve back-end tools. ...

The Trump administration specializes in inflating everything

 GAO finds Elon Musk’s DOGE inflated claims of $110 billion in savings for federal government

Chairman Tucker unveils his propaganda slogans

 Tucker Carlson unveils 10-point manifesto amid third-party speculation

 

Fair!

Sovereign!

Productive!

Beautiful!

Healthy!

Honest!

Optimistic!

Wise!

Decent!

United!

 

Hm. Now where'd he get all that?

 

 

In the Democrat primary to run against incumbent Republican John Moolenaar, Ben Ambrose narrowly beat Jamie Hill who ran on a return to normalcy lol

 

Trump: Our socialism goooood, their socialism baaaaad

House Republican Rips Trump Admin Taking Stakes In 30 Private Companies: ‘Not the Conservative Position’

 

... In the clip Bacon shared, Lincicome fumed, “The reality is that, since last June, we’ve gone from the government owning zero shares in zero private companies to now owning equity stakes in 30 different companies. In some cases, the government is now the largest shareholder.” ...

 

It's pretty hard to run against Abdul's proposal for a 50% federal ownership stake in AI companies with a 50%+1 federal presence on their boards of directors when you do the same thing, which is probably why no one is talking about Abdul's proposal. 

These were dogwhistles from Abdul El-Sayed to his base which thinks Jews and their money drive war with Iran, genocide in Gaza, and apartheid in Israel

 It's all so Michigan, amirite?

The U.S. Senate seat from Michigan is beside the point. It's merely a stepping stone.

He's running for president, on the Obama model, but with a higher purpose in mind.

It's a Jihad to remove America as Israel's protector. 

 

Man, this was clearly a homosexual slur from Abdul, a dogwhistle to his base of support, he just left out the butt in butt-boy

 

A true believer will often transition seamlessly from one extreme cause to another because the psychological need for blind faith remains identical

 

Why do Jews in America need protection . . . from this man?

 

Private payrolls: The trend for additions has been flat to only slightly down since the November 2024 election

 

The four week moving average of initial claims for unemployment hasn't been lower since October 2022

198,750 August 1, 2026

197,500 October 1, 2022

See previous post.

 😏 

 

Initial claims for unemployment are the lowest since October 2022 at 171,246

But go off about how bad everything is.

Good morning to everyone except the bourgeoisie, which cheated to get through college and is going to vote for Abdul

 

Why bother when Trump's doing that all by himself in 2026?

 Joe Kent: Massie, MTG, and I Tried to Draft Tucker Carlson to End the American Empire in 2028

The current political moment was brought to you by Barack Hussein Obama and his esteemed pastor

 

Votes are like dollars to Bernie Sanders: He doesn't care how dirty they are

 

The guy in the suit, who now wears one because it gives him more credibility: America deserved 911

 

OK they've called it for El-Sayed

 

Stevens v El-Sayed still not called, polling in this race was . . . EXTREMELY MISLEADING

Was that on purpose?

Did half of Gen Z lie again?

Or are the pollsters simply incompetent like most of the people seeking to govern us?

 

 

 

Middle East tanker transits July 28-August 3, 2026: Strait of Hormuz 2.3/day, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait 10.0/day

 BAM dropped off to just 6.75/day after July 30 from 14.3/day before.

 

Pete Buttigieg wants fewer, bigger congressional districts, when what we need is more, smaller districts

 His idea is 1920s Republicanism on steroids.

Those guys fixed representation in the House at 435 so that it wouldn't grow any more with population as the founders intended. That automatically increased the power of the Congress over time.

It's why no one feels represented anymore.

Pete would just make that a LOT worse, concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands.

Big NO!

We need more representation, not less, with power diluted in many hands. 

We could eliminate gerrymandering at a stroke simply by electing one representative from each existing county, or group of counties in less densely populated areas.

Maximum representation would grow to 3,244. That averages to one representative per 106,000 people instead of the one per 788,000 we have now. 

 

Seen here: 

- Proportional representation in the House of Representatives, with fewer and larger districts and a ban on Gerrymandering -

"For school board or city council, sometimes you get more than one vote and more than one person wins -- we could do that for Congress. The people who get the top three votes, not just one, get to go to Congress," he explained. "You’d have bigger districts, fewer districts and it would be harder to gerrymander." 

So I guess this means we're finally going all the way to Moscow and nuking the Chicoms

 

The lunatic whom Democrats want to be governor in Wisconsin, Executive Chef (!) Francesca Hong of the Madison chapter of DSA, wants to cancel "colonialist" Thanksgiving lol

But she has canceled the tweet instead lol.

Chef Francesca oddly finds Culvers acceptable fare, except when there are too many old white people in there.

If she sounds a little crazy, she admits she was diagnosed bipolar in 2006-2007 when she was 18.

She went to the university but dropped out in 2009 and got a job as a dishwasher. 

She rose from dishwasher to "executive chef" at the restaurant with lightning speed, between 2009 and 2011, and was so good at it that that restaurant closed in 2016.

She and her husband then started their own restaurant. 

But evidently she found it easier to succeed as a radical politician from Madison from 2020 than in the restaurant business and in marriage.

Apparently both their restaurant and their marriage were casualties of the pandemic.

Just think of the conflagration she can make out of Wisconsin. 

 

Because some of them are communists, including Abdul El-Sayed

 Why Michigan voters are hearing ‘communist’ as they vote Tuesday

... Democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who took down Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., in a Democratic primary in June, maintained a since-deleted Twitter account on the platform now known as X. There she included calls to “seize the means of production” and a quip that the now-candidate wiped her hands on an American flag. Trump seized on the latter tweet in a recent interview with CNBC.

Chevalier has since told MS NOW that she is not a communist. She called the focus on her past commentary a “distraction.” ...

This story fails to mention Abdul El-Sayed's proposal for the federal government to take a 50+1 stake in AI.

Most of the coverage of El-Sayed instead emphasizes that he says he's not technically a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, just as Chevalier insists she's not a commie.

 

Pete Buttigieg wants to go back to 1876

 

 

Pete Buttigieg's Case Against ‘Return to Normal’

Jonathan Martin, Politico

... There’s a risk that there’s an unspoken Democratic assumption that we’re trying to take us back to … I don’t know what, is it 2012, is it 1992, is it 2021? Whatever it is, we can’t go there. We shouldn’t try, we shouldn’t want to. What I really worry about is if we win — or when we win in November, which I’m working hard to make sure I support — is there this kind of muscle memory in the party? This powerful inertia that immediately puts us in the mode of “reverse the damage”? And I’m trying to purge my vocabulary of anything with the prefix of re- in it, anything with the word “back” in it. I don’t think now is the time to be talking about Build Back Better. Build Better — I don’t want to even talk about “back.” ...

 

This idiot Scott McKay calls Haley Stevens Heather, doesn't call on Michigan Republicans even at the last hour to vote for her in the Democrat primary to save Democrats from themselves

That's the only way this works, unless you just want to rest on the platitude that you can vote yourself into socialism but you’ve got to shoot your way out, which apparently he does.

Today is election day. These people have been silent until now.

The socialists are serious. No one else is.

If you can't bring yourself to vote for Stevens, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that you would ever pull a trigger. 

 You Simply Cannot Give Power to Lunatics

... [Hasan] Piker is also stumping for Abdul El-Sayed, who is now as much as a 15-point favorite over the more establishmentarian Heather Stevens in the Michigan Senate race. El-Sayed comes from an accomplished academic background and has apparently made a lot of money based on the properties he and his wife own, but we don’t know how he managed it. He’s an avowed DSA socialist whose speeches and pronouncements contain open rejections of the American founding and way of life, and it doesn’t seem to bother Michigan Democrat voters in the least. 

Because Michigan Democrats, like Wisconsin Democrats, are now made up of a majority of lunatics who think that abandoning American culture, economics, and politics and putting people like Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed, not to mention Darieliza Avila Chevalier and Zohran Mamdani, in positions of power will create something better. ... 

Ezra Klein is just another trickster, a stand-in for the Democratic Socialists of America

 Christopher Nolan's Trojan Horse

... Now we need those who would remake this world. 

Trump made a new high disapproval yesterday at 58.8% in the Real Clear Politics average, a new low approval today at 39.1%

 

Abdul El-Sayed is liar from the pit of hell: There aren't over 50 Muslim nations in the world because of an Islamic Holocaust

 Abdul El-Sayed: "The Jewish People Are a Light Unto The World"—"Antisemitism and Islamophobia Are One and The Same"

Global crude oil production is down 12.1% from 4Q2025 in 2Q2026, and the United States cannot close the gap created in OPEC+

 

Jonah is still ticked off that the Jews were expelled from ancient Rome three times

Meanwhile, there are about 100 towns named Troy in America, and the Christian American heartland had no problem loving Rome and Athens and hating slavery at the same time.

 

Suez Canal Transits 2Q2026 vs. 2Q2023 are still down almost 48% for vessels and 60% for tonnage because of the Houthi threat in the Red Sea

 

2Q2026

Number of vessels 3580 (down 47.8%)

Net Ton 163,899,000 (down 59.7%)

 

Number of Tankers 1526 (down 31.7%)

Net Ton 77,558,000 (down 27.9%)

Tankers per day 16.8 

 

2Q2023

 

Number of vessels 6856

Net Ton 407,119,000 

 

Number of Tankers 2235

Net Ton 107,592,000

Tankers per day 24.6 

 

Middle East tanker transits July 26-August 1, 2026: Strait of Hormuz 2.0/day, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait 10.7/day

SoH normal 2022: 70.0/day

BAM normal 2022: 30.0/day

Recipe for more gridlock: Capehart advises victorious Democrats to waste their time on retribution just like Republicans

 Capehart: 2028 Democrats Need To Share "Their Ideas For Holding People Accountable Who Wrecked Everything"

Disaster canceled again as Trump decides to have a late night TACO

 

Bibi calls on Spain to exercise restraint over Ceuta invasion by Moroccan youts and implement a two-state solution lol

 

Do Michigan auto workers know that the UAW, which has endorsed Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, also endorsed anti-auto Democratic Socialist Claire Valdez in NY-7?

 How the UAW abandoned auto-workers to back radicals 

... The UAW is no longer all about building cars. The union, desperate to build its shrinking ranks, has been adding members in all kinds of professions and trades, including signing up some 100,000 people who work in higher education. That group, which includes post-doctoral researchers and adjunct faculty members, now constitutes more than 25 percent of UAW membership, according to the Detroit Press, and has led, not surprisingly, to a significantly more progressive and activist union profile.

This is why the union’s 2022 changes to its election process, intended to “give a greater voice to rank-and-file members,” has instead empowered an ever-more radical constituency of university teaching assistants. UAW’s resulting leftward lurch made headlines recently in New York’s Democratic primary contests, where democratic socialist Claire Valdez won her race to represent New York’s District 7 in Congress. Valdez had previously worked at Columbia University as a program assistant in the visual arts department, where she joined the UAW. The union boasted, “UAW Region 9A mobilized thousands of members across NY-07 to help deliver a victory for New York’s working class.” 

Here is what we know about Valdez: she went to the exclusive School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where tuition runs about $60,000 per year. Also, she hates cars. Her campaign embraced the normal lefty litany: abolishing ICE, Medicare for all, universal rent control and so forth. But one distinctive item was her promise to “fight to redirect federal dollars toward public transportation, walking, and biking” and “reverse the proliferation of surface highways.”

Do UAW workers on Detroit’s assembly lines know that their union’s favored candidate hates automobiles and wants to shut down federal highway spending? Is that in their best interests? ... 

Naples, Italy quake is the largest in 40 years

... The quake – which had a depth of 3km and was felt across Naples and the island of Ischia, and as far away as the Sorrento peninsula – was part of an ongoing seismic swarm, Italy’s national institute of geophysics and volcanology said. 

... The heaviest damage was reported in Pozzuoli, near the epicentre of the quake, where a building partially collapsed and large chunks of rubble crushed parked cars but caused no injuries. ...

More.

 

AAA fuel price average to start August 2026: $4.10/gallon

 

Trump approval in the Real Clear Politics average retests May low at 39.5%