All This Prosperity

All the manure aside the promises of a vivant economy has been all smoke and mirrors…..inflation is becoming crushing to us peons with food prices out of sight, manufacturing at an almost standstill and then there are those jobs that were suppose to come roar back thanks to those Donny tariffs…..all his promises have been crap.

Let’s look at the jobs picture….

The United States gained a decent 64,000 jobs in November, but it lost 105,000 in October as federal workers departed after cutbacks by the Trump administration, the government said in delayed reports. The unemployment rate rose to 4.6%, the highest level since 2021, per the AP. Both the October and November job creation numbers, released Tuesday by the Labor Department, came in late due to the 43-day federal government shutdown. US firms are mostly holding onto the employees they have, but they’re reluctant to hire new ones as they struggle to assess how to use AI, how to adjust to President Trump’s unpredictable policies—especially his tariffs—and how to deal with the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Federal Reserve engineered in 2022 and 2023 to rein in an inflation burst.

The uncertainty leaves job seekers struggling to find work or even land interviews. Fed policymakers are divided over whether the labor market needs more help from lower interest rates. Their deliberations are rendered more difficult because official reports on the economy’s health are coming in late and incomplete in the wake of the shutdown. The Labor Department is expected to provide at least a little clarity when it releases November numbers on hiring and unemployment on Tuesday, 11 days late.

Labor Department revisions in September showed that the economy created 911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported in the year that ended in March. That meant that employers added an average of just 71,000 new jobs a month over that period, not the 147,000 first reported. Since March, job creation has fallen farther, to an average 59,000 a month. During the 2021-2023 hiring boom that followed the end of COVID-19 lockdowns, by contrast, the economy was creating an average of 400,000 jobs a month. The unemployment rate, though still modest by historical standards, has risen since bottoming out at a 54-year low of 3.4% in April 2023.

Because of the government shutdown, the Labor Department didn’t release its jobs reports for September, October, and November on time. It finally put out the September jobs report on Nov. 20, seven weeks late. It will publish some of the October data—including a count of the jobs created that month by businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies—along with the November report on Tuesday. It won’t, however, release an unemployment rate for October, as it couldn’t calculate the number during the shutdown. More here.

The only people that are making out like bandits are those billionaires that Donny helps, a you scratch my back it’ll scratch yours, sort of thing.

The rest of the nation struggles and the Nero-esque fiddle.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Tariffs Scorecard

From Day One of Donny’s reign he told us that the tariffs he was imposing would lessen the deficit and return our manufacturing base……so far we are still waiting.

How should we assess whether President Donald Trump’s tariffs have been effective?

It’s an important question—yet frustratingly difficult to answer. Trump has outlined overlapping, confusing, and sometimes competing goals for the tariffs.

He’s celebrated them as a source of government revenue, for example, but also claimed they are meant as a negotiating tactic. They can’t be both. Tariffs used for negotiation are meant to be removed (once negotiations are complete), rendering them useless for long-term revenue. For Trump, tariffs are a solution to every problem, and the trade war is more about the vibes than the economics.

Thankfully, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer offered some more objectively measurable goals during an April 2025 hearing with the House Ways and Means Committee. When Rep. Brendan Boyle (D–Pa.) pressed Greer on what success would look like, Greer offered two clear metrics in response.

“The [trade] deficit needs to go in the right direction,” Greer said. “Manufacturing as a share of [gross domestic product] needs to go in the right direction.”

More than six months later, neither goal is any closer to being achieved. More importantly, neither seems likely to be completed over the long term by an economic policy rooted in barriers to trade.

https://reason.com/2025/12/08/trumps-tariffs-fail-their-own-test/

None of his promises is working….but so far all these have done is bust American’s budgets.

I am sorry but if you bought into his lies then you are an idiot (sorry to be blunt)….

“Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again,” Donald Trump told rallygoers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in August 2024. “We’re going to make it affordable again.” He said it over and over and over. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again. We’ll do that. We’ve got to bring it down,” he told a Wisconsin crowd that October.

Well. Guess what? Prices are up. And they’re not just up, at least in some cases, because of random, impersonal market forces. They’re up because Trump raised them, through his tariffs. But mostly, they’re up because politicians, even presidents, don’t have the power to lower prices quickly and unilaterally.

I thought everyone knew this. I thought everyone was at least sophisticated enough to understand that inflation is kind of complicated and has to do with a number of factors that can’t be easily erased or reversed. I mean, that’s not a particularly advanced political or economic concept. A president can’t just say, “Beef prices, I command thee down!” and beef prices go down. We live in the real world, not some fairy-tale land; there’s no legal limit to the snow here, as there was in Camelot.

And yet—apparently a lot of people did believe him. Well, you know what? I’m not in the habit of calling people idiots. Elected Republicans, yes. A lot of them are idiots, and hypocrites and liars and worse. But regular people—I try to stay away from calling them idiots. They have pressures, they don’t really follow politics, and even in the present case, I understand that a few million voters turned to Trump because Joe Biden seemed to be responsible for inflation (and was, to a certain extent), Kamala Harris didn’t plausibly explain how she’d do things differently, and Trump was the only other entrée on the menu. Those people, I sort of get.

https://newrepublic.com/post/204349/trump-2024-promise-lower-prices-inflation-voters-fooled

Please do not tell me about the trillions Donny says tariffs have raised that is a lie….billions maybe but trillions no flippin’ way.

These tariffs are going to continue too hurt….it is just that simple.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”