(edit - see for instance Aug 2024: https://seekingalpha.com/news/4142722-why-was-there-such-a-b... )
It would be good for everyone if the BLS figures were trusted.
Even "not professional economists" might lose trust in figures which are regularly revised downwards ... months after being published.
Because these numbers are so important- to journalists, to the Fed, to financial markets, etc. they wanted a few million dollars extra, over a few year period, to run the new methodology and the old methodology side-by-side for a significant portion of a business cycle, to understand the differences before they switched, and to gain confidence in the system. Because an important part of this particular data set is what it signals to those others, it is important not to move quickly with this data set, but to give time for everyone to understand all the nuances. It's things like, how the market views the meaning of corrections would be different under a different system, and so they want time so that they themselves and all those other people whose jobs depend on understanding it to be fully aware.
Basically, they wanted to run a blue-green deployment strategy for their updates, but couldn't get the budget for it- and their budget has instead been cut so far. So they have prioritized continuing the system that everyone understands rather than experimenting with new things that no one understands. Because these are smart, well educated people who spend their entire lives thinking about these problems, and understand how the data is used, this is something they have thought about a lot and want to do the best job they can.
However, it's extremely common in forecasting to revise the forecast once actuals come in. In the case of the BLS, it's the documented approach for a very long time.
Every month the numbers are adjusted and annually. All of the notes as to why, the method, etc are in the actual reports*.
*I don't recommend reading them or the footnotes unless you have insomnia. :)
** Also, if the source data is inaccurate, corrupted, etc; if the models are non-transparently adjusted, that would be horrible and cause for alarm. At the moment, we don't know if that is the case. Yet.
Though honestly, I wish the terminology were changed to "forecasted" and "actual" to be clearer.
A few notes from an interview on the Odd Lots podcast, interviewing Bill Beach, former head of the BLS:
* Response rates among surveyed employees are roughly:
Month 1 68%
Month 2 83%
Month 3 93-94%
* Large employers tend to respond sooner, and are staffed to handle these requests better.
--------
April 2025 interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...
August 2025 interview (after BLS head statistician was fired): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bill-beach-on-how-trum...
Some notes and a transcript: https://www.crisesnotes.com/bloomberg-odd-lots-podcast-trans...
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trumps-jobs-data-denialism-wont...
The monthly revisions are historically all over the place, up and down. My 2024 count says six months were revised up and six were revised down.
I think we created a new status for Uber/Deliveroo and other workers to put them out of the category three years ago and it fixed a lot of our employment data issues.
These are two separate metrics, they measure different things, and the figures often differ (unsurprisingly).
The BLS "establishment" survey (aka Current Employment Statistics, CES) surveys 120k+ businesses and government agencies, it measures jobs (not people), counting the number of payroll positions. This is "non-farm payroll employment", excluding the self-employed, farm workers, and private household workers.
The BLS "household" survey (aka Current Population Survey, CPS) surveys ~60k households, measuring individuals, whether they are employed, unemployed, or not in the labour force. These data are used to calculate the unemployment rate and labour force participation. This includes farm workers, the self-employed, and domestic workers.
You assume the data gatherers were at fault... <chuckle>
These data gatherers work for their government. How do you ensure they're happy to gather and publish data which is essentially critical of that very government?
Such simple statistics and data gathering should be simple for a federal organization.
Simple?! "Sweet summer child..."
On a more serious note, how would one ensure that a government department be sufficiently independent that it can publish data (implicitly) critical of its own political leaders without fear of retribution?
Answers on a postcard, please...
The BLS (USA) does adjust the numbers every month (for two months after the initial release) and annually. Regardless if the numbers go up or down, this is fairly common with statistics and forecasting in general. When actuals come in, the forecast is adjusted closer to reality.
Anecdotally: It gets lost in the mix of headlines when those adjustments show that the initial projections were on trend, or "close enough the talking heads don't care enough". However, it gets "interesting" when it's off-trend; or confirms prior notable good/bad news. In this case, it confirms* what was suspected, mostly confirms what was reported. As actuals came in, the reality was worse than projected.
*"Confirms" use case here: job growth is poop right now.
The data covers the period from March 2024 to March 2025 and trims the average monthly jobs gains seen during this period (roughly the last 10 months of Joe Biden's presidency and the first two months of Trump's) from a monthly average of 147,000 to about 71,000.
50% error. This is more or less consistent. How can a department have this error % and still have their job. I understand the data collection mechanism is not the most sophisticated, but even accounting for that, this consistent error % is not to be overlooked.
I wonder why there is such lack of accountability from firms whose data pretty much feeds the world's economy.
My null hypothesis might be that the BLS works for the government, so how can they not be under (implicit) pressure to goal-seek their figures.
Once the figure has been published, and widely reported, it can be revised downwards months later, few will care. The system may be broken by design.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
Q: Why would one trust initial BLS jobs figures under this - or indeed any other - administration?
> This is dressing your conscious biases in sciensism
BLS figures being revised downward month after month after month is data, not bias.
Actual data would be measuring predictions vs accuracy over several decades.
The quarterly numbers come from better data sources (tax withholding, unemployment insurance payments, etc)
The worst case is that both the statistics orgs and the users are adjusting the numbers for a bias and overshooting.
This means there's a certain inertia: it can be better to handle the interim reports the same, even if they've been biased one way for several years, than to introduce a change that makes the numbers not comparable to history.
> 50% error.
It's not a 50% error; it's a 50% error in the magnitude of the change.
That's like saying that my room increased from 71.4 to 71.6 degrees, but my thermometer only saw an increase from 71.4 to 71.5; therefore, my thermostat has a 50% error.
This is a very interesting point. So if BLS suddenly became more accurate, all the agencies have to re-tune their own biases and corrections => Could lead to short term discrepancies.
What one sees as inefficiency is actually efficient from a totally different lens.
Over time they get better numbers relating to previous quarters and they revise their numbers.
Also employers can report revised numbers for a quarter, to make corrections.
Revisions and surprises are routine. Data comes in gradually, but estimates are useful even before all data has arrived. Early data is based on business reporting and businesses that report on-time aren't necessarily representative of all businesses. Those people who use this data know this, and prepare for revisions.
I hope this helps and you understand better. Anyone here who still thinks this is still incompetence or corruption because surveys come late?
>I wonder why there is such lack of accountability from firms whose data pretty much feeds the world's economy.
Create punishment system? Unless compaies report data back to BLS very fast, they pay big fee or are taxed higher. Small shops would hate it.
Or incentivize companies to report accurate data pretty fast. Payroll management systems can be plugged in real time, but that costs money and yeah small businesses are not going to be happy. So incentivization works better than punishment I think.
Calling this a 50% error rate is simply wrong. If an earlier report said a single job had been created and that was later revised to two jobs, that would be super humanly accurate and yet you would be calling for everyone to be fired over the 100% error rate.
I get it and yeah my tone is very exaggerated. I don't think anyone in BLS should be fired and whoever is suggesting that does not understand how public institutions work.
I am just curious why there is so much of a discrepancy. This has been pretty much the status quo in BLS for a long time. They issue numbers and then they revise them later. However, you'd expect the revision to be moderately within an error %age.
Also how will this retroactive change help everyone involved. Ok, the new job numbers reflect a gloomier past (or a more vibrant past) how is that even helping everyone who is so focused on 'what's going to happen tomorrow'.
I retract my stance about BLS being intentionally corrupt - that's uncalled for.
I advise you to do a little reading on how these reports are corrected. People relying on them understand how they work. People freaking out about them don't.
A high-level is that 80% of the economy is very easy to track b/c it's not very volatile (teachers, for example).
What we have seen is a huge surge in unpredictability in the most volatile 20% of jobs (mining, manufacturing, retail, etc.). The BLS can't really change their methods to catch up with this change for classic backwards compatibility and tech debt reasons.
Part of the reason 'being a quant' is so hot right now is that we truly are in weird times where volatility is much higher than most people realize across sectors of the economy (i.e. AI is changing formerly rock-solid SWE employment trends, tariffs/electricity are quickly and randomly changing domestic manufacturing profitability, etc.). This means that if you can build systems that track data better than the old official systems, you can make some decent money investing against your knowledge.
I think this is a bad state of affairs, but I don't have a good solution. Any private company won't release their data b/c it's too valuable and I am reluctant to encourage the BLS to rip up their methods when backwards compatibility is a feature worth saving.
Manufacturing and mining are becoming much less correlated to the overall jobs market.
This is despite being a relatively flat % of employment since 2010 (after a long period of decline).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mc3I
As mentioned, there is also the weirdness of SWE's going from 'better than the overall market' to 'worse than the overall market'.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mc4f
Those are just the examples I can think of with no research, I'm sure there are others.
The lag is because it is based on employer submissions that are quarterly or annual.
Parsing tax or SSI payments for what a "job" is would be a logistical nightmare, because that's not what the system is designed for (unlike the BLS's system, which is designed to count jobs).
I came across this claim last week regarding recent US jobs figures:
> "All jobs gains were part time. Full-time jobs: -357K. Part-time jobs: +597K"
If this claim is true, and I have no means to tell if it is, then - regardless of one's view on whoever is in power right now - do we really expect any elected representatives to be brave enough to say that out loud at a press conference?
I don't :/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation
I sure hope not, because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themselves unable to raise prices further and consumers find themselves unable to demand greater pay at work.
Raising rates to put stress on businesses and consumers is the only method known to work for ending self-reinforcing high inflation. It's what Paul Volcker did at the Federal Reserve in response to the stagflation that started in the early 1970's in the US and other countries, after OPEC raised oil prices. Volcker raised the federal funds rate in fits and starts to a high of 20% in 1981:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Chairman_of_the_F...
It worked. Volcker's actions are widely credited with ending self-reinforcing high inflation. His actions also triggered a recession.
Stagflation itself triggered a stock market crash in 1973-1974. It took over 20 years, until 1993, for the US stock market to recover:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973%E2%80%931974_stock_market...
Like I said, it would be extremely unpleasant, for everyone. I hope we don't end up with stagflation.
Politicians of course tried to take control of the Fed. They also tried to fire him. At one point he needed Secret Service protection. Here's an article from the 1980's about it:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-04-05-fi-492-st...
I knew that, but my puny little brain somehow didn't catch it as I was writing my comment.
What's the mechanism? People are distracted by the amount of cotton production, which is the perfect time to falsify an earnings report?
I'm not saying publishing of statistics is what caused this shit to happen dingus. I'm saying focusing on it exclusively is dumb and it is wiser to look at a granular level. We can't look at this level because once you have a 150 node supply chain how trustworthy are the receipts?
What if your body had a metric as dumb as our high level economic metrics. We'd all be doing our best to get fat as fuck.
Worse is when fundamentals are [effectively] meaningless and everyone is a betting and hoping to pass it on to the greatest fool, even worse when that greater fool is the general public who are too with their own lives to fixate on the intractable nuances of the effects that Algerian hornet slayers are having on the price of tangerines which is buoying banana prices in Rwanada because legislation was passed last week in Kentucky.
Paradoxically, scale and complexity, but also psuedocomplexity (read:obscurantism) drive us towards these heuristics and effectively incentivise deeper cycles of Goodhart derangement. I expect this is a peculiar aspect of America's largess, though. The American cultural diaspora is actually pretty diverse from my experience.
This is what they did in Weimar Germany, Erdogan’s Turkey and Argentina. You’re describing massive deficit spending and inflation.
> If bids are won but they go and fuck all the money away send them to jail
Add in Ba’athist Iraq.
Also, guess what you do to fuck over your competitors in this system? You sabotage their supply chains. The politically connected wind up with all the tenders because they’re the only ones who can build.
> This is how stuff worked before people became obsessed with metrics
Literally never how it has worked in any functioning society. When you see this sort of strong arming, it describes a society in decline. The Late Roman Empire. The British in Suez. The French in Indochine. The Russians in Ukraine.
https://fortune.com/article/buffett-how-inflation-swindles-t...
Does it get better?
Hint: What time period do you think he's talking about?
[EDIT] If you think we're in for a long period (decades) in which nobody will do what's needed to break out of stagflation and we're going to head the way of various inflationary South American economies over the past century, I guess look at Europe? IDK, it'll be bad everywhere if that happens.
Depends on the type of debt, of course. If it's a fixed term loan, and you'll definitely never need to refinance it, sure.
So the solution historically has been stable goods. Gold is the historic standard, but probably Bitcoin now as well. Possibly foreign stocks/currencies. But since everything is so interlinked now with pensions and 401ks that the financial world is far different place than the 70s. If you really want a safe bet, it's that there will be a fair bit of volatility and every asset class will have more risk with spikes up and down. All of this depends heavily on how the U.S. responds along the way.
https://www.amazon.com/Investing-Amid-Low-Expected-Returns/d...
Deciding that stagflation is coming and changing you asset allocation based on a solicitation of opinions from random people is probably a bad idea.
If nothing else you should look for academic papers on ways to estimate expected inflation instead of asking for opinions here.
If you’re aggressive, issue long-term, fixed rate debt and buy whatever you think everyone else will view as personally meaningful or currently-productive, provided someone didn’t beat you to it.
Arguably we’re 40 years into the “cash is trash” trade so everyone is in a little bit of suspense what happens next.
In the case of inflation/stagflation it would be physical assets that increase in value under such circumstances. Gold/Silver meet this, as do many other assets. Under such environments counterparty-risk must be carefully evaluated.
All of your mentioned standard strategies have opaque and significant banking counter-party risk. There are also details such as the YTM loophole where the assets you hold may not have been marked to market (when interest rates go up).
This is particularly true of any bonds, or bond backed securities, and the leverage involved in many such markets is next to impossible to discern, and as a result the average advice of passive investment breaks down towards losses in the near term but not long-term.
None of this is financial advice, just reiterating things people should already know about. The stock market's synthetic share problem coupled with dark pools, and the commodity market's (COMEX) fail to delivers and failure to loadout (physical delivery), are things to know about. Unspecified risk from bad actors.
Its all paper with substantial counter-party risk until you hold it in your hands.
Also, not enough people talk about housing prices in high interest rate environments. Mortgage payments are the thing that tether housing prices, and act as a lever. We see it today with just an extra 4% with low housing volume and people reluctant to sell, because then they’d need a new mortgage at the new rate. People who would like to downsize don’t since their mortgage payments often ends up similar.
If we were to also raise broad based taxes, it would allow the Fed to cut interest rates, stoking long term investment, loosen up the housing market (which would allow more people to move), lower the Federal deficit, and improve the trade balance (as if that actually mattered).
If democrats don't retake congress we are cooked. This means people are okay with whatever is happening.
We’ve already lost export market share. China, Russia and India have already begun building a trade bloc. FDI has already been trashed.
We’re already in for a world of hurt. And personally, I’m eager to ensure it lands disproportionately on his voters and donors.
That would certainly be nice, but we're all in the boat together. There is no safe haven when idiots are in charge.
But you see, dogs and cats were being eaten, and the other lady cackled too much...
I fear you're right, but hope you're not.
Yes, this is wishful thinking on my part.
I don't want to wish ill on anyone.
The horse has bolted, you can't ctrl-z this.
I have some bad news. It's already some 8 months too late for "rapid".
> Not enough time has really passed for things to change _that_ much
Here in Brazil we are in a mini economic boom because every single country is willing to pay a premium on anything that didn't come from the US. The EU is shutting up internal racist and protectionist dissidents (strong on their 2 largest economies) so that they can diversify from you. Most of the world is discussing independent payment systems... Nato countries are organizing to defend against the US and China and Russia are promising military protection to Latin America.
I wonder if things changed that fast when WWI started, but it absolutely never changed that fast in my lifetime.
Probably more importantly, the US has lost trust.
Our closest allies do not see us as a reliable partner anymore.
That's not going to change for quite some time, AFTER we ever start moving in a direction amenable to them again.
We are still swimming violently against the currents of our allies.
Trump's inconsistent tariff and policy flip flopping means no one trusts the US to behave rationally and predictably.
The fact that the US population elected him a second time means that the US as a whole can't be trusted to behave like rational adults.
Decades or centuries of reputation has been thrown away. That can't be changed just by a new face saying "sorry we want to take it back".
It's amazing how few people seem to understand this. Countries are oil tankers, they take years to turn even a little - and that's a good thing. In 2000 the world broadly knew what was going to happen, Gore and BushII would implement pretty much the same policies. Same thing in 2008 when it was McCain and Obama.
Sure you get some minor tweaks to policies which don't really affect much in aggregate.
Even in 2016 Trump was unable to make massive changes, because the state is built to prevent that from happening. The US does not elect a monarch. Things take forever by design, and it's really frustrating when you want it, but it also means one person or one administration can't make a major impact, it takes a generation of pushing the overton window in the direction.
Once you break that, you have a jetski zipping around, then you can't rely on stability, it becomes riskier to invest than investing in a country with a dictator.
It is a constitutional monarchy with an elected, time-limited king.
Monarchies generally have (and had) lots of checks on the king's power. Not necessarily the kinds of checks we would like, of course. The rights of the nobility were well-protected, the rights of landless commoners were not.
Executive orders are memos, not laws. The President has no power for legislation or budget or tariffing. We're supposed to require legislative review of any emergency actions, like using the military.
No, that's the guy that got elected. The one very smart at nuclear
What I'm saying is that these types of systems have "inertia" and can be exceptionally long lived in their 'bad' state, regardless of the policies used to try to get them out of that state.
That's how we get Boomers going on rampant climate change denialism.
Since I tend to be interested in systems, especially emergent ones, this is something I find interesting but recognize that the world generally considers economists more boring than accountants :-). When one discusses the 'graph going up' or 'growth' is that prices? GDP? Employment? Opportunity? I've been in conversations where several different definitions of 'growth' were being used that got confusing because there wasn't an agreement on what the y axis was measuring.
I think one danger for western countries is having governments that just move from one bad policy of one kind to a bad policy from the other end of the political spectrum. Look at what’s happened recently with resignations at the highest levels of government in multiple countries. And in America, if Trump gets replaced by someone who is put forth as a reaction to him, are they going to really do any good? Even if they had great policies, they’d be in danger of being undone a few years later. There isn’t the same guarantee of consistent forward progress that a country of China seems to be enjoying.
And obeying the Constitution
And a lot of other things that are never going to happen
It will take a decade to dig out of this hole
And then there will be 11 million people "disappeared" from labor market
They are on a crime-spree, you don't do this much damage without malice
Look at what they are doing to the WhiteHouse Oval Office, Rose Garden, ballroom, look at the BILLION dollars stolen from nuclear missile maintenance for a personal jumbo jet, etc. etc.
Speaking as someone roughly 10 years from retirement, who for a variety of stupid reasons is woefully underprepared for it, I think I'd be very lucky if it takes only 10 years.
I think we're never going to fully recover, and my eventual retirement is more fiction than reality.
Tariffs affect households unevenly [0], but I think it would be fair to characterize them as broad based taxes.
[0] Some good info here: https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-septemb...
Tariffs are broad based regressive taxes, falling predominantly on the lower deciles of the income distribution.
The OP seems to be proposing broad based progressive taxes. However the place to start first, politically speaking, is raising taxes the 10th decile.
When has it not been? It's how we actually determine the allocation of resources
Wasn't a news story then, but is now b/c trump.
At least, this allows Europe to rise, again.
Last administration cooked the books on BLS numbers for nearly 2 years
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trumps-jobs-data-denialism-wont...
"You elected an idiot president...", the choices were Communism, or Fascism; which is recoverable and better for people. Certainly not the former, but to be clear neither are a real choice when you vote for democracy, and not voting is a vote for both fascism/communism at the same time.
Such was a similar failure and rise of demagogues that ruined Rome.
First-passed-the-post voting is fundamentally flawed, and so is ranked choice...
No, they weren’t. The choices were center-right neoliberal capitalism or fascism.
What voting system so you think is best? None are perfect but IMO ranked choice is the best as it keeps the good attributes of FPTP without suffering from the spoiler effect
There are much better systems: approval (for simplicity, at the expense of more accurate preference information) and Condorcet (for accuracy, at the expense of making it more difficult to explain tie-breaker corner cases to the average person).
Funny how all the people who would traditionally trot out that phrase immediately forgot it as soon as the other team had the conservative candidate.
Which was which? I see both right now.
It's not "the government does stuff and I don't like it"
Now, I would like to hear your specific recommendations for alternatives to FPTP or ranked choice voting. Approval? Multimember?
There are a number of subjects now where its almost to the point where any discussion is fruitless because anyone talking is getting punished by third-parties, and moderation aint doing a thing about them.
Your right it will be real bad, much worse than before because most of the Volcker recovery was on the back of the global adoption of the petrodollar. The situation is the exact opposite today where you not only have petrodollar pools of money coming back domestically but also runaway government spending.
If you compare our modern economics with that of Argentina over the past 100 years, we seem to be following the same policy pitfalls. These things largely only happen because of excessive money-printing under fiat, certain government policy and regulation can cause it as well.
Markets currently don't expect significantly higher inflation in the long term, as the "10 year breakeven inflation rate" ("The latest value implies what market participants expect inflation to be in the next 10 years, on average.") is fairly stable: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE By my understanding, this is supposed to trend towards 2.0% when everything is hunky-dory; things are not perfect, but they look fine to me in historical perspective. Similarly for e.g. this 5-year forward chart: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T5YIFR
> Raising rates to put stress on businesses and consumers is the only method known to work for ending self-reinforcing high inflation
Yes, and that's how we made sure that the inflation peak in 2022 didn't become self-reinforcing. And as far as anyone seems to be able to tell, it worked.
> It's what Paul Volcker did at the Federal Reserve in response to the stagflation that started in the early 1970's in the US and other countries, after OPEC raised oil prices. Volcker raised the federal funds rate in fits and starts to a high of 20% in 1981:
Right. Current circumstances are very different. Posting this much about what you "hope doesn't happen" comes across as fear-mongering, given the lack of reason to expect it to happen. The tariff discourse allows people to throw around large, scary-sounding percentages, but in practice the corresponding price increases are on average much smaller. And the employment situation in the US is still very good in historical terms. (There are valid concerns about the methodology behind the headline unemployment rate, but it's still the same methodology.)
I'm not smart enough to fully evaluate if that's true, but it was an interesting theory to me at least.
Although raising interest rates tamped down inflation on the demand side, we don't give enough credit to Carter for attacking the supply side by deregulating energy markets.
Carter typically doesn't get credit because prices didn't really ease until he was out of office. However, it looks like energy prices wouldn't have decreased if Carter hadn't deregulated the oil and gas industry, which allowed domestic producers to become competitive. (Ironically, Carter thought deregulation would raise prices and foster a move to alternative energy. Instead we got shale oil and fracking. Unintended consequences.)
That's just not happening, no matter what happens.
The President is obsessed with lowering rates, because it personally enriches him, regardless of how it affects the economy. The cronies he has in line to replace Powell and the SCOTUS seeming like they'll back his unlawful removal of the Fed governors he doesn't like, means the independence of the Fed is guaranteed dead in, at most, 2026.
The businesses that should be pushing back just... Aren't? 5 billionaires just had a foot-kissing session with Trump. Law firms are capitulating. Most education institutions are capitulating. Companies would rather bribe Trump with gold statues (Apple) for their own short-term kickback than speak up even a tiny bit to prevent a mid-term economic collapse.
I genuinely don't see the US avoiding a self-inflicted (global) depression anymore.
Is there government waste? Sure, but that requires micro tweaks, aka instead of hiring more TSA agents maybe decide they shouldn't be randomly selecting every 3rd precheck user for additional screening/etc, or maybe decide that investing in even slower scanners isn't the right choice. Plus, in TX having seen some of these contracts the city/state gives out, the idea that private industry is more efficient is laughable. In some cases they are basically contracting out for millions of dollars a year a job that could be handled by one or two actual government employees paid less than $100k a year.
Republicans have done the exact opposite of balancing the budget at least since Reagan (inclusive) non-stop, zero R presidents have even done as well as democrats at pursuing a balanced budget since then, so they're not serious about it, including and perhaps especially Trump—but they really, really want to get their hands on social security, it's so much money out of the hands of rich people that they just can't stand it.
The federal tax revenue as percentage of GDP is remarkably stable regardless of widely varying income tax rates over the decades (ranging 15-20% since the 1940s): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN. This holds up no matter which regime (D or R) is dominant, because the economy reorganizes itself around incentives or disincentives created by various tax policies.
The thing that makes these policies work, of course, is the $1 is cut from a billionaire's taxes, and the $4 is paid by the rest of us. Voters seem to like this policy, for reasons that are beyond me.
April 2025 interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...
August 2025 interview (after BLS head statistician was fired): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bill-beach-on-how-trum...
Some notes and a transcript: https://www.crisesnotes.com/bloomberg-odd-lots-podcast-trans...
There could be various reasons Trump wants to report bad numbers, such as pressuring the Fed to lower rates, or to establish a horrible baseline from which he can then report improvement on by the midterms.
It reminds of the soviet union reporting all sorts of bogus improvement statistics by implicitly using the worst possible baseline they could - from decades earlier.
Trump doesn’t play 3D chess like this, he just doesn’t. This is just him failing to have the iron grip he wants to have over things. Perhaps he’ll fire more civil servants in response, or he’ll get distracted by something else before he can do so.
That may someday be the case, but is is not yet. Trump fired the head, but the analysis and reports are still being produced by the professional career statisticians that have long worked there.
Summary of the benchmark revisions The March 2009 benchmark level for total nonfarm employment is 131,175,000; this figure is 902,000 below the sample-based estimate for March 2009, an adjustment of -0.7 percent. Table 1 shows the total nonfarm percentage benchmark revisions for the past ten years.
Also, I'm not sure why it's allowed to have someone come from SA/Zimbabwe and comment on posts of US political candidates.
Now coming to the Right! I believe they are the single biggest reason behind America's current rot. Which problem are they trying to solve? They always contradict themselves.
This is the mindset we are forced to deal with https://x.com/ENERGY/status/1964010741247168958
It should be compulsory for voters to vote and have them go through training to make them understand how the economy, the Fed, world trade, US intelligence, foreign policy, interest rates, and bonds work. One might argue that it should be done in the schools. Sure! But then why are we here? Of course, Right would scream as usual No, my choice. No son! Enough with your damn choices. Not voting should invite severe legal, financial, and civil penalties. That's how we are going to fix this mess!
> First, political commentary should be regulated
Who does the regulating? The current Trump regime? Huge first amendment violation
> come from SA/Zimbabwe and comment on posts of US political candidates.
Because those posts are being made on a private platform. Are you sure you want something worse than UK's Ofcom proving your American identity just to speak?
> It should be compulsory for voters to vote
Maybe, but definitely not in a 2 party system.
> make them understand how the economy, the Fed, world trade, US intelligence, foreign policy, interest rates, and bonds work
Not specifically those. Please just have universal free education. There's no need to specifically teach kids how to think politically. That's definitely going to get abused for propaganda
dyauspitr•4h ago
ushiroda80•4h ago
noarchy•4h ago
KingOfCoders•4h ago
privatelypublic•3h ago
joshdavham•3h ago
unethical_ban•2h ago
The administrative state is a good thing, not a bad thing, and people like Steve Bannon are cancers on American success.
Ideally, we would also ban gerrymandering, revoke unlimited anonymous political spending, and implement ranked choice voting.
wnc3141•1h ago
throw0101d•1h ago
Reminder: Trump was re-elected. The first time could be considered an aberration, but the second time?
chimeracoder•4h ago
If you're old enough to be reading this comment today, it's unlikely that the full damage will be repaired in your lifetime.
tavavex•2h ago
franktankbank•4h ago
codyb•4h ago
triceratops•4h ago
Still using freedom units thank you very much, none of that metric namby-pamby /s
newsclues•4h ago
50+ years https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
codyklimdev•8m ago
whynotmaybe•3h ago
There are recurring cycles in the American/Western history, with each cycle lasting +- 20 years.
The cycles are High, Awakening, Unraveling and Crisis.
We're supposedly in the Crisis cycle, where there are major crises like war, depression,revolutions that would help the society to rebuild institutions.
This theory seems completely flawed as it applies itself retroactively, entrenched in confirmation bias, but still entertaining.
squegles•4h ago
add-sub-mul-div•4h ago
dyauspitr•4h ago
Nicook•4h ago
CaptWillard•1h ago
strathmeyer•1h ago
DragonStrength•4h ago
wnevets•4h ago
snickerdoodle14•4h ago
lokar•4h ago
duped•3h ago
lokar•3h ago
tencentshill•1h ago
wnevets•57m ago
shlip•8m ago
yepitwas•3h ago
wnevets•3h ago
Unlikely.
MisterTea•4h ago
rich_sasha•3h ago
Kapura•3h ago
Der_Einzige•3h ago
BrawnyBadger53•4h ago
JKCalhoun•3h ago
stocksinsmocks•3h ago
ceejayoz•3h ago
The current administration was running and fairly likely to win the election for the other nine, and promising policies that any prudent business would've paid heed to.
roxolotl•3h ago
bitsage•1h ago
CaptWillard•1h ago
pessimizer•37m ago