Thursday, December 18, 2025
The BLS report of CPI is missing too much data for both October and November to be a reliable estimate of inflation
The 38-page pdf is full of tables with missing data like this " - ".
... CPI data collection resumed on November 14, 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.
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