When the nation’s labor secretary flubs arithmetic while struggling to defend poor employment data, there’s a problem.
In mid-February, as Donald Trump’s State of the Union address neared, Peter Navarro, a leading White House voice on trade and economic policy, told Fox News that the U.S. economy was “perfect.” A week later, during JD Vance’s latest Fox News appearance, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom” in the economy.
Soon after, the American public learned that economic growth during the first year of the president’s second term reached a nine-year low (excluding the pandemic). Late last week, the latest job numbers were even worse: The U.S. economy lost 90,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate inched higher.
Indeed, the closer one looked at the data, the worse the figures appeared. Trump has been in the White House for 14 months, and during that time the cumulative total is 150,000 jobs. In the last 14 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, by contrast, the American economy added 1.74 million jobs.
I believe the US economy is entering a zombie state, buoyed by corruption and inertia it’s going to continue becoming less and less competitive until something chops the head off.
Like, you can actually pay the administration to blacklist your competitors now. You can pay for favourable laws, or pardons, or exemptions.
There’s going to be no real R&D anymore, and why bother when you don’t need to innovate, the government will just tariff your competition or ban them, or, force them to be “sold” like TikTok.
So why should companies hire staff? Why not lay them all off and save money? You’re not going to get beat by real competition anyways.
I mean US scientists are starting to leave the country. The brain drain is only going to get worse.
I know tech workers leaving too.
I mean US corporations are never one to squander an opportunity to gouge the customer.
Remember the washing machine tariffs that Trump first administration put out? Not only did it raise prices “foreign” washing machines AND dryers, the US companies didn’t bother to update their machines to compete with features or reliability, they ended up cutting factory jobs and RAISING their prices for US made washing machines and dryers to match the tariffed completion.
Make the recession great again
It’s just the economics of late stage capitalism. Companies are mandated to increase profits year over year. In the beginning stages of capitalism this can be achieved by cornering new markets by out competing/taking over your competition. Once the market is cornered you can do things like innovate and streamline. Once this is tapped out the only real way to continue the profits is to conglomerate, monopolize, and racketeer.
We are pretty much past all of these options, or at the final stages, so the only option on the table is to reduce cost, and the largest cost of just about any company is labor. This is why all the mega corps are sinking their hopes into ai, it’s their last way to squeeze as much money out of their organization as possible.