U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-since-great-recession/

by alephnerd • 6 months ago

350 223 6 months ago

stevetron• 6 months ago

I hear that the Washington Post just fired 1/3 of all of it's reporters.

Otherwise, if so many jobs have disappeared, does that mean that my garbage company no longer needs to employ a staf on every truck to drive it and empty my trash recepticle into the truck?

warkdarrior• 6 months ago

No, but the garbage will need fewer pickups if consumption drops. Fewer pickups means fewer trucks means free drivers.

sixothree• 6 months ago

Is that an argument of some sort? I can't quite identify the point.

downboots2• 6 months ago

I feel the same way about the article

mcphage2• 6 months ago

does that mean that my garbage company no longer needs to employ a staf on every truck to drive it and empty my trash recepticle into the truck?

Do… do you not want them to do this?

mono442• 6 months ago

For me, it seems like a logical consequence of overheating the economy by cutting interest rates to zero during the COVID period.

jaybrendansmith3• 6 months ago

You are off by several years on the interest rates, which have an 18-24 month impact. Also we have this idiotic and unlawful tariff war the US administration is currently perpetrating. But I'm certain AI is having a huge impact as well.

ghaff2• 6 months ago

I'm unconvinced of the AI impact outside of the tech sector. But there's certainly a lot of uncertainty generally. Probably more senior people with reputations are in a better position but likely tougher for people with no records.

duxup3• 6 months ago

I recall similar predictions from stimulus from the mortgage crisis. Things did not seem to play out predictably, I'm not sure all the old rules are as hard and fast anymore as people think.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 months ago

Combined with stimulus and PPP

scoofy• 6 months ago

So, we're just doing whatever it takes to blame the Democratic Party, huh?

Cutting interest rates during a period of time when people were literally locked in their homes waiting for a vaccine to be manufactured? I mean, yea, there were mistakes made, and the PPP and Biden stimulus were very obviously bad decisions, but pretending that tariffs and literally threatening allies has nothing to do with this economy is just lunacy. Just look at what's happening to the American tourism sector. It's falling apart.

I'm a liberal guy, but this take is ridiculous.

Herring2• 6 months ago

Since the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations.

https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...

crims0n3• 6 months ago

Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy.

JumpCrisscross2• 6 months ago

Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy

Why? What if constantly launching foreign wars, leveraging up the financial system and running up deficits isn’t sound economic policy?

sigmoid102• 6 months ago

The fact that consecutive Republican administrations in this graph fared even worse suggests that is not the case.

sigmoid102• 6 months ago

It's even crazier when you look at the data since the end of the cold war in 1989. Then the ratio of jobs created is 50:1 for democrats.

dataviz10002• 6 months ago

How am I supposed to consolidate my power if the market doesn't crash so I can purchase residential and commercial real estate at bargain prices? Every third restaurant and business on Las Olas was shuttered in 2009, the buildings sold for next to nothing. Today there's one after another—Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, Maserati—parked on the street in front of those same buildings, all the while, Steve B. and I enjoy that Luigi's coal fired pizza! /s

Gibbon1• 6 months ago

Financial looting is not good for the labor market. Who could guess.

0xy2• 6 months ago

Nothing happened in 2020 to affect this chart I'm sure. I would expect nothing less from the publication that falsely claimed Russians hacked into the US energy grid before an election.

lostlogin8• 6 months ago

Many publications have made that claim about a Russian hack. Is it inaccurate?

gertlex• 6 months ago

Ok, but there were also 36+ months prior to covid in Trump's first presidency...

mlcrypto• 6 months ago

9/11, 2008, and now AI job displacement is also bad luck

gok• 6 months ago

There are many marginally employable swing voters who vote Republican when they have jobs and the Democrats in charge ask for taxes, then vote Democratic when they get put out of work and need a social safety net.

steveBK1233• 6 months ago

This is largely the crux of it.

GOP is the fun dad party and Dems are the mommy party.

Republicans run economy hot until it blows, then Dems get voted in to clean up. People get annoyed about taxes and regulation when economy is ok again, fun dad promises ice cream and pizza for dinner forever.. rinse & repeat.

jandrewrogers• 6 months ago

Congress has a substantially greater impact on the business climate than the President.

raw_anon_11117• 6 months ago

That’s unless you have a Congress that lets the President usurp the pose of the purse that should be theirs and Supreme Court that rubber stamps everything he does

steveBK1233• 6 months ago

Except they have abdicated most responsibility, especially when the president is of the same party, for decades.

Many now talk like they work for the president.

cloverich• 6 months ago

And the president has enormous influence over what congress does (veto).

Of course everything is nuanced; the trend is merely interesting especially juxtaposed against people consistently voting for republicans for "economic" reasons.

treis• 6 months ago

I'm not so sure either have much impact. Economic policy doesn't change much between administrations and Congress has been ineffective for a long time. Politics is mostly culture war things these days.

The Fed seems to be the big driver of the economy. Other than that, the government is moving things at the margins. Even Trumps tariff shenanigans don't seem to have rocked the boat much.

Braxton19803• 6 months ago

And Congress is controlled by the president as overriding a veto is extremely difficult.

lostlogin8• 6 months ago

Where does threatening allies, tariffs and kidnapping foreign leaders fit into this?

He creates uncertainty and it’s hard to see how that helps the US economy.

b00ty4breakfast2• 6 months ago

I'll see if I can dig it up, but I remember reading that on average, under democratic presidencies going back to FDR, the economy in general performs better than it does under a republican presidency. If I'm remembering right, it's not as simple as mere ideological differences because there has been changes within the parties in those intervening ~75 years but the trend still holds.

xethos• 6 months ago

Found your article for you, as I was looking it up the other day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...

esbranson5• 6 months ago

CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.

JOLTS is where stress shows first. Openings fall,[1] hiring slows,[2] quits drop,[3] and layoffs rise later.[4] Biden in particular shows the weakness of your provided stats.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSHIL

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUL

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL

gpt5• 6 months ago

Thanks for providing actual data and contributing to the discussion instead of the knee-jerk responses in the rest of the replies here.

The charts paint a much more precise picture on what is happening, and I actually don't see anything that strongly support it being a partisan effect.

gruez• 6 months ago

CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.

Can you explain why? Given that it's presumably averaged over the president's entire term, doesn't that provide a good measure of how much jobs were added under a given administration?

arnonejoe• 6 months ago

I looked this up. "10 of the 11 recessions between 1953 and 2020 began under Republican administrations”. It seems Republican = Recession.

IncreasePosts• 6 months ago

Ok, but is it cause or effect? Maybe Republicans do well when there is fear about the economy and a recession is coming.

zeroonetwothree3• 6 months ago

It seems silly to blame these on the president though, consider just the past two recessions and how little they had to do with the actions of POTUS...

WillPostForFood2• 6 months ago

Carter has good employment, but terrible inflation making everyone poor in miserable. His Fed appointee, Paul Volcker raises interest rates, kills inflation, puts the country in recession, and drives unemployment up during Reagan's first years in office. Carter's job numbers look better than they should, and Reagan's worse, unless you look at the bigger picture.

reactordev• 6 months ago

The bigger picture being that this is political nonsense. We all know Reganomics.

majormajor• 6 months ago

Reagan supported those interest rate changes. Reagan than continued to push deficit spending well after the recovery from those first couple years, a huge lasting trend in Republican administrations ever since.

It's also very hard to assume that Reagan being elected in 76 would've avoided the oil-driven inflation at the end of that decade.

But of course, we've decided as a country/media to generally blame Biden for non-policy factors that put the economy on a wild bullwhip ride from 2020-to-2023ish, soooooo... maybe Reagan can deal with getting the blame for the inflation too!

sroussey• 6 months ago

Carter gave up the presidency to save America then. Volcker did the right thing.

theropost2• 6 months ago

I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term. That spending is the jobs. If you tighten spending to cut waste or rebalance the books, growth slows and jobs shrink, but that’s kind of the tradeoff when you’re trying to fix long-term issues.

Over the last few decades, neither party has really cared about deficits anyway. Everyone’s been spending, just at different speeds. The real question isn’t “who creates more jobs,” it’s whether the spending is efficient, sustainable, and actually creates long-term value. Eventually the bills come due, interest costs rise, and priorities shift from growth to just keeping the lights on.

So yeah, Democrats tend to show stronger job numbers, but spending more will almost always do that. Whether it’s good spending is a separate debate. Budget discipline isn’t partisan, it’s just basic economics.

Hikikomori4• 6 months ago

If you think republicans lowered spending I have a bridge to sell. See two Santas strategy.

davefol• 6 months ago

I’m not sure how true this is given that both Clinton and Obama cut the deficits and in Obama’s case he did it despite complaints from the left.

victor106• 6 months ago

I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term.

Thats not necessarily true. During Bill Clinton's presidency he cut the deficits and the debt and yet the economy saw very strong job growth.

https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-und...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presi...

ajross2• 6 months ago

Democratic administrations see less spending growth, though. Definitely not more. Look it up.

You're confusing rhetoric with policy.

kryogen1c• 6 months ago

I've always heard market forces and policies dont take effect until the following presidency.

lostlogin8• 6 months ago

The top comment has a graph. If you ignore single term presidents, the pattern remains the same.

isthatafact• 5 months ago

That seems like sarcasm because it is an overused excuse that republicans give for the bad usa economies under republican presidents.

I never once heard a reasonable explanation why policies only start to have an effect at the end of a year that is divisible by 4 or 8. It makes no sense if you think it through.

stopbulying8• 6 months ago

Is there a line chart or a stacked area chart of this over time?

This seems to confirm that Joe Biden created the most jobs of any president in recent modern history.

jeffbee3• 6 months ago

Joe Biden also presided over the largest America that ever existed, and took power at a moment when a huge rebound in jobs was inevitable.

nilamo2• 6 months ago

Joe Biden "created" jobs the way covid "created" job vacancies. Maybe time periods with worldwide upheaval should be taken with a little salt.

zeroonetwothree3• 6 months ago

I don't think presidents have all that much to do with the economy (vs. the legislature). Well... maybe the most recent example is to the contrary with certain actions that historically should have been the role of Congress.

kingkawn3• 6 months ago

If that were true then why would there be such a glaringly clear example that presidential party influences economic performance?

jfengel2• 6 months ago

That's true. Though in this case the administration is taking a much more active hand in the economy than any in almost a century.

For the most part the correlation between administrations and the economy is arbitrary. But in this case I would make a case that it is causative.

blackcatsec• 6 months ago

Sort of. I've done a lot of thinking about this one, and realize that it's really not just "one person" but a very large team of individuals, along with the "politics" of everything. If the President brings on a good staff, makes solid cabinet appointments, and they themself being a singular large part of the legislative process in modern years--given that it's usually fairly difficult to get 2/3rds of Congress to agree on anything--you can see the President actually has significantly more influence than you'd think.

In addition, it's the circles that person runs in and the circles that person's people run in. Do you think judge or cabinet appointments are decided on by one person? Sure, the President is a figurehead in this position and ultimately has to say yes or no, but there's a large pool of candidates out there and it's up to the staffers, maybe friends, maybe people in the know to propose those people to the President.

So while on paper the President doesn't, or shouldn't have that much power--in actuality with our current political process it's certainly much more.

Now, that said, just like the billionaires--they can only control so much. At least in the United States, there are competing interests even among the wealthy class, and sometimes shit just sort of happens--like a meteor killing the dinosaurs....or the release of decades of e-mails, videos, documents, and communications surrounding their pedophile behavior on a secret island in the Caribbean.

terminalbraid• 6 months ago

I disagree, but my personal belief is the economy and the government stewardship thereof work much the same way as WH40K ork technology

hcurtiss• 6 months ago

Is it possible that can be attributed to lagging effects of their predecessors’ policies?

duxup3• 6 months ago

The consecutive GOP events don't seem to point to that.

Atlas6672• 6 months ago

It's the ratcheting mechanism of bipartisanship.

One party develops, the other party cracks down on potential economic wins for the working class.

Both parties make sure the capitalist class stay in power.

tlogan• 6 months ago

There has to be some lag, and it is more about who controls Congress.

For example, the housing crisis and bubble were largely driven by legislation passed years earlier, including the 1999 repeal of Glass Steagall under Clinton. That was passed by a Republican controlled Congress, and the crisis eventually exploded under Bush. So I do not think either Clinton or Bush can be directly blamed for the housing crash. It is the repeal of the glass steagall act.

And was the dot com bubble crash in early 2000s caused by Clinton or by Bush? Or some legalization passed a long time ago? Or it just a business cycle?

More broadly, I would argue that presidents, and even legislators, have limited control over the actual health of the economy. Are we going to say Trump is responsible for the AI boom? And if this AI boom collapses into a massive bubble burst under the next administration, will that president be blamed instead?

nxm3• 6 months ago

Or Covid when roughly 22 million jobs were lost in March and April 2020 alone

sehansen• 5 months ago

The 2008 housing crisis would have played out exactly the same if Glass-Steagall had still been in effect. The big banks that failed--Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch--were all pure investment banks. The same applied to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, back then. And most of the small banks that failed were pure commercial banks.

The whole mortgage-backed security and collateralized debt obligation show would also have been legal under Glass-Steagall and had been common practice for years by the time of the repeal. The same with NINJA and 0% down-payment loans.

themafia4• 6 months ago

Yea, you can create programs that create jobs, by spending taxes. So this should be zero surprise.

The question you should /really/ be asking, since taxes are involved, is, was that hiring actually effective? Did we create jobs that actually provided lasting value to the world? Or did we just juice the numbers for the polls?

Dig1t• 6 months ago

S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color.

Democratic administrations also engage in and promote discriminatory hiring policies which flagrantly violate the civil rights act (Title VII specifically).

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...

lostlogin8• 6 months ago

Based on that link, I don’t think I want the jobs that were created.

It would also pay to keep in mind that the link claims that the preceding layoffs hit the same group. Ie, they were the ones there to be hired after losing their jobs.

It also says that people of colour are underrepresented in the job market (in the companies measured in your link) when compared to their overall makeup of the population.

Correcting that would take some years of imbalance in hiring.

stogot• 5 months ago

It often takes years to show the effect of one administration’s policies? How do we know that Eisenhower’s policies didn’t “help” Kennedy job market ? Or that Obama’s policies didn’t “hurt” Trump job market? Picking two examples

This graph is too simple as there were also other macroeconomic situations at the time but this is interesting enough that I’d like to see a long article that expands on this one graph with other data

esbranson5• 6 months ago

Chicken Little already told us. Armageddon is also coming, don't forget about that.

JOLTS data for January 2026 has been delayed, but don't expect those tea leaves to change your opinion about what the future holds.

shrubble2• 6 months ago

The big question is “whose jobs”?

If it’s federal government employment that is dropping, or illegal alien jobs dropping, then some will view it positively (I’ve seen this perspective advanced on x.com).

alephnerd2• 6 months ago

Mostly SWEs (especially the type who act pissy on HN).

whatshisface• 6 months ago

These perspectives bother me a lot, because I want to invest passively, but if people are out there thinking like that, maybe nothing is priced right...

adrr• 6 months ago

Priced right if money is moving from the bottom 90% to the top 10%. Stock market growth is because theres excess money and people need to invest the money. Supply and demand. There's reason why you can buy any ultra luxury car right(look at ferrari's revenue growth) and private jet industry is booming.

ambicapter• 5 months ago

The market is only "right" in the very long term, and probably not in a way that's useful (companies that die eventually price to 0...but not a useful signal if its riding high all the way before it crashes).

FireBeyond• 6 months ago

Ahh, yes, all the undocumented people working in tech...

gjlisjlrj• 6 months ago

Well those are incredibly ignorant and mostly likely strongly biased beliefs. When I worked for NASA and the DoE, I was surrounded by the most competent, hard-working, productive people I've ever known. Silicon Valley engineers are a joke compared to government engineers. Silicon valley people have newer toys and more flexible funding and no oversight, but government employees have vastly more impact and actual measurable utility. Only morons born into enough safety and security that they can be completely ignorant of how the actual world works believe the government is unnecessary and as many government jobs as possible should be deleted. The owner of that twitter platform you linked to killed several hundred thousand people last year, and again this year, and again next year, through sheer narcissistic incompetence. Is that a good source for any information at all?

raw_anon_11117• 6 months ago

The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.

Looking at salaries, senior developers working for the government get paid about the same as entry level software engineers who get return offers at BigTech. Well actually senior developers in government only about 10%-20% more.

And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?

I know how much senior cloud consultants working at AWS make working in the WWPS. I was there as an l5. Amazon is a shitty place to work. But I doubt it’s any worse than the government right now. GCP and Microsoft (not just Azure) both also pay their consultants a lot more than government employees make.

I’m not saying the government isn’t needed. But the best and the brightest aren’t going to give up the amount of money they can make in the private sector - especially now that government jobs are far from a secure paycheck

onerandompotato• 6 months ago

I agree with your opposition to the comment above, but I feel like the condescension towards silicon valley, and non-government employees is not a way to start a healthy dialogue. Like you are not going to convince anybody by calling 80+% of people here (private sector employees) "a joke".

I agree that randos on twitter are a bad source of information.

throwawayqqq112• 6 months ago

Also a good bs indicator: 'illegal alien jobs'. As if the demand vanishes with the poor souls to uganda. It just framing in hope of twisting a win out of it, because if you would have stated that sub-minimum wage jobs are in decline, this would be a terrible economic indicator for the US.

mcphage2• 6 months ago

The people looking to view this positively will find or imagine a reason to do so, regardless of which jobs it is.

hx8• 6 months ago

Mostly Transportation, Technology, and Healthcare [0].

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/layoffs-unemployment-jobs-econo...

mothballed2• 6 months ago

As it turns out, no one wants to invest in infrastructure when all the inputs are going to be tariffed to oblivion. All else equal why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper? Protectionism isn't enough to overcome losing access to world markets.

Eventually the protected industries will be totally disconnected from global markets causing them to lose global competitiveness, to the point they cannot even compete with the black market markups. And then you are maga, er mega, fucked.

testing223212• 6 months ago

You think illegal aliens working - by definition- illegally, show up on reports like this?

sigh If only the department of education was as well funded as the department of war.

spacebanana7• 6 months ago

It’s a non trivial question.

Estimates of criminal activity, for example, are frequently counted as GDP in places like the UK. And even if you’re working in violation of visa rules, the IRS will still expect and enforce taxes.

viraptor• 6 months ago

Yes, the illegal alien jobs that are being reported to the government by big corps are dropping. You're spot on /s

offmycloud2• 6 months ago

A big part of the job losses were driven by Amazon and the end of their UPS contract.

esbranson5• 6 months ago

The Challenger report contains large companies' announced future cuts. Not government, not small and medium business, not actual job losses. So neither, really.

crims0n3• 6 months ago

Important context is January is historically the month where most layoffs are enacted. Not saying the number is insignificant, just not entirely unexpected.

alephnerd2• 6 months ago

Yes. And this January's numbers are comparable to January numbers during the Great Recession.

dyauspitr• 6 months ago

It’s a disaster when compared to other Januarys.

softwaredoug• 6 months ago

Post WW2 was a time of labor scarcity the US benefited from - but eventually that went away with global competition. The tech boom years were another labor scarcity time, and that’s also going away.

Both these times were plausible ways of entering the middle class.

What does economic theory say should happen to labor when scarcity ends but capital is strong? Does the economy expand until there’s more labor demand? Or will structural and monopolistic problems cause capital to benefit while suppressing wages - making us all serfs?

justonceokay2• 6 months ago

Any system based on exponential growth will have almost all people become serfs as even if their capital grows it falls behind the growth of older capital

verdverm3• 6 months ago

Ideally our political systems act as a sigmoid filter over the growth, benefits, and harms

themafia4• 6 months ago

The population grows exponentially. Why would you think the system would work against that?

downboots2• 6 months ago

Labor supply and demand do not reliably reflect the productive or social value of labor.

Atlas6672• 6 months ago

An explanation to your analysis:

"War begins to be presented as the heroic alternative, the last hope, the “way out” from the unending nightmare of economic crisis, misery and unemployment. Fascism, the most complete expression of modern capitalism, glorifies war. The filthy sophism “War means Work” begins to be circulated by the poison agencies of imperialism, and filters down to the masses. ... War is only the continuation and working out of the crisis of capitalism and of the present policies of capitalism. It is inseparable from these, and cannot be treated in isolation. All the policies of capitalist reorganisation, all the policies of Fascism, can only hasten the advance to war. This is equally true of the line of a Roosevelt, a MacDonald or a Hitler. War is no sudden eruption of a new factor from outside, a vaguely future menace to be exorcised by special machinery, but is already in essence implicit in the existing factors, in the existing driving forces and policies of capitalism."

- R.P. Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1935

phendrenad22• 6 months ago

Yet housing costs keep increasing. The working class is being squeezed between employers who are suffering lost revenue and can't pay US wages, and landlords and mega-corp shareholders who won't budge on price. I foresee a slow protracted "collapse" (or really renegotiation) that will bankrupt stuck-in-the-mud billionaires (like Elon) as their means of recourse - law enforcement and the military - come under such powerful social coercion that no amount of money will stop them from siding with working-class-friendly new leadership like Mamdani, as the workers (who, despite what Elon tells himself in his robot fantasies, are still needed en masse), use their REAL voting power - moving their home to jurisdictions that are working-class-friendly.

betaby2• 6 months ago

I don't see any signs of that

phendrenad22• 5 months ago

Furthermore, people are stuck thinking about the world in a worker/employer dynamic. But there are scenarios where everyone in New York state could be paid UBI. There are 20 million people in the state, let's say we pay each one $100k/year. That's $2 trillion. Conveniently, the current GDP of New York state is $2.3 trillion. If they can increase that to 5+, it should be no problem distributing 50% to the citizens. And how can they do that? By charging high taxes on any business that wants to do business in NY. By leveraging their strategic access to the NY harbors. By essentially turning the entire state into a business, everyone inside it an employee or shareholder, and everyone outside a customer.

AtlasBarfed• 6 months ago

The country desperately needs antitrust action to vastly increase.

We need all these monopolies and cartels broken up so that there is a dynamic competitive environment in all sectors of the economy

throwaway1324483• 6 months ago

You’re talking about something that happens in a country that wants free markets. It doesn’t really apply to countries that want oligopolies or monopolies.

game_the0ry2• 6 months ago

And yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH.

That makes no sense...unless the economy is an a sort of death spiral where companies layoff employees, then stock goes, then companies layoff more, then stock goes up, so on and so forth.

Ouroboros. The economy is eating its own tail.

jeffbee3• 6 months ago

If you think of the DJIA as being denominated in dollars the ATH looks less impressive.

hackyhacky2• 6 months ago

And yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH.

The price of stock is based in dollars. The value of the dollar goes down due to inflation, so the stock goes up, while not actually changing in value.

game_the0ry2• 5 months ago

True. It is actually doing poorly when priced in gold.

offmycloud2• 6 months ago

Link to report PDF: https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CR...

throwaway1324483• 6 months ago

Allowing individuals to hoard enough wealth to corrupt, at will, the system that gave them their wealth - maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all.

But who knew?

verdverm3• 6 months ago

apparently a lot of people knew based on the treasure trove of their communications

marginalia_nu• 6 months ago

It's not like the Soviets fared much better with regards to corruption and institutional decay, to the part where the rampant corruption of the Brezhnev-era was a major contributing cause to the eventual collapse of the union.

Institutional longevity is largely an unsolved problem. Seems having checks and balances like the US does helps slow it down to some extent, but is far from a guarantee.

throwaway1324483• 6 months ago

Not sure I follow the link to the Soviets, but yes they certainly excelled at letting too few people accumulate too much power too. If only we were able to learn a little more from history.

kiriberty2• 6 months ago

So much winning

shomp• 5 months ago

If you follow the American school of economics (Henry C. Carey), tariffs are actually a good thing, mainly because: 1) other nations all have tariffs (against the US and other nations) making free trade a delightful delusional idea 2) tariffs protect lesser industrialized nations from refining/enhancing raw materials into more expensive goods and selling them back to them. The systematic offshoring of industrial potential to cheaper labor places basically un-industrialized the US. I think it's very short-sighted to say tariffs are bad. What was bad was the de-industrialization of the leading superpower. The cure, if we may call it that, might be bitter medicine. Bitter, but necessary.

kiriberty2• 6 months ago

Tariffs are bad for the economy. Foreign countries are ditching US partnerships, contracts. Less travelers are coming to US. Wow I wonder when will we open our eye. In the middle of all these, US is ditching its allies and planning to invade sovereign countries (Greenland).

colechristensen2• 6 months ago

Foreign adversaries are getting exactly what they wanted, their manipulation of US politics has been extremely successful.

dj_gitmo• 6 months ago

We did this to ourselves. Let’s not make excuses.

a_ba2• 6 months ago

would you care to clarify on this? are you saying the current administration has been corrupted by foreign adverseries? or has the administration been outsmarted by foreign adverseries?

nosianu• 6 months ago

The Heritage Foundation, billionaires and a lot of other people who want this are all US citizens, and they planned for this for a long time. Let's not blame others for something entirely US-homegrown.

As an ex East German, I wonder how much of it is the disappearance of the competing model. Some of the old communists actually warned about this. Don't get me wrong, I participated in the demonstrations back then, socialism had clearly failed as a society and economically. Does not make that particular idea wrong though. The powerful want to go back, take back the power they think is theirs, consciously or as a reflex.

Note that Europe, Germany in particular, are far from the "socialist" examples some, or many, Americans think, welfare state and all that. Fact is, when it comes to rigid stratification of society, who rules, who owns, Germany is far on the side of capital, and according to a study the few thousand people at the very top are from the same 4% of the population almost exclusively.

What is happening in the US is happening in more places. Here in Germany we too now have more and more attacks on social systems. It's never the fault of inept leadership, no the people must work more and longer! They have zero new ideas. That is the only one they can think of. I am not really exaggerating, even the representatives of our powerful "Mittelstand" (much of Germany's industry) heavily criticized especially the conservative CDU in the government only a few days ago, publicly.

I see no reason to try to blame the Chinese, or the Russians, or anyone. All of it comes from within, and not just in the US.

theflyinghorse• 6 months ago

Tariffs, forcing capital into 7 very large companies instead of small startups, wage suppression through weird offshoring and immigration schemes so on and so forth. There are seemingly unending number of issues that all contribute to the same outcome we're seeing today.

CSSer• 6 months ago

It seems strange not to mention ICE or even treatment of transgender individuals if you mention travelers. We've effectively taken out round-the-clock advertisements saying "If you're not a fire-breathing, straight WASP, tread lightly". Normally, out of a sense of egalitarianism for even conservatives, I would tag on "even though it's not true", but I fear the evidence simply doesn't bear this out anymore.

We're searching the phones of visiting punk kids. We're cruelly punishing Canadian residents for clerical errors by unnecessarily detaining them. We've told our own citizens that it's reasonable to interrogate them at any moment for looking brown or black. We told an entire class of people they simply do not exist as they or even their family, friends, and coworkers understand them. Finally, we're deporting people who, although they've been here unlawfully for years, have also contributed a great deal. I've left out the most egregious examples to remain focused on the system.

All of this is happening as a backdrop while droves of US-born and immigrant citizens alike lose their jobs and are unable to find new ones. To say the irony is palpable is an understatement.

worldsavior• 5 months ago

Like if the US needs alies. Europe is currently begging for the US.

nicbou• 5 months ago

The US needs allies, and at the moment it's antagonizing all of them simultaneously. Europe is currently reorganising around the US, as are others.

Collaboration benefited all.

nxm3• 6 months ago

It's more nuanced as usual.

Trump had a booming economy right before Covid, and took the brunt of the jobs cuts in 2020. Biden next year "created" the jobs per the numbers there.

Also, what's the breakdown between public & private sector jobs? Spending taxes on government jobs in not something to celebrate.

nullocator2• 6 months ago

Rephrased: Trump inherited a strong economy, did not know how to govern or appropriately wield the power of his office (zero experience), did not have a good relationship with congress so made no progress there unlike most presidents, and was constrained from his worst impulses by his own staff. Finally when Covid occurred and he was actually required to lead it all came crashing down because he was and is incapable. A geriatric democrat had to come and right the ship again immediately after.

TwoNineFive• 5 months ago

COVID saved Trump. His policies, such as the section 174 tax change, were tanking the economy in 2019, and we would have likely seen a recession in 2020-2021 instead of 2022.

His solution to COVID was to tell the public to inject themselves with bleach. Or just go get infected and let natural selection figure it out.

It was no more a joke than the racist cartoon he posted the other day.

You need consequences.

cal_dent• 5 months ago

An interesting addendum is the relatively weak new job creation through the 2nd half of 2025 (partly geopolitcs, partly ai; through the mechanism of diverting capital to tech capex rather than labour).

The economy feels in a tricky position to me. The last couple of days have shown that there are many people/institutions primed to bail out of the stock market at the whiff of any negativity (or things perceived to be negative). I suspect there is likely more bad news before there's good news so the short term looks like it could be a bit of a roller-coaster.

cjoelrun• 5 months ago

They couldn't through a per capita somehwere...

U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession

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