> Job openings in the US fell by 303,000 to 7.146 million in November 2025, the lowest since December 2020 and well below market expectations of 7.60 million. The number of job openings decreased in accommodation and food services (-148,000); transportation, warehousing, and utilities (-108,000); and wholesale trade (-63,000). On the other hand, openings increased in construction (+90,000). Meanwhile, hires were little changed and total separations were unchanged at 5.1 million each. Within separations, both quits (3.2 million) and layoffs and discharges (1.7 million) were little changed.
I'd say personally it's worthwhile for Americans to know where to get the canonical data directly: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.a.htm. Everything else is some sort of spin, interpretation, or at best selective reporting of the underlying primary data.
I generally agree. But with the current administration firing the former BLS chief (possibly due to bad numbers being reported) and changing economic reporting (e.g. PPI and GDP estimates), I'm not sure I trust the government data to not also have some sort of spin or selective releasing.
Craig Fuller - the CEO of Freightwave - has been indicating that their freight data clearly suggests the US economy is in much worse shape than official reporting.
Certainly sounds like canaries telling us the rest of the economy is not doing great. (Not warning us that it's going to have problems. Telling us it already does.)
Happily, this wasn't actually the case. Canaries faint long before they die and miners would carry small resuscitation chambers where the canaries could be reawakened in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The Science and Industry Museum in Liverpool has one in their collection: https://blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/canary-resuscit...
Interesting, but I frankly doubt the birds remained utterly unharmed. Birds are really sensitive to many gases, with the common anecdote being to not cook with nonstick pans if you have a parrot.
> Some economists have questioned the validity of the JOLTS data, in part due to the survey’s low response rate and sometimes sizable revisions. A separate index by job-posting site Indeed, which is reported on a daily basis, showed openings rebounded in November after reaching a multiyear low.
This has been called out by the Moody's Analytics economists in their podcast [0] for a while. The generally accepted explanation is that online job postings no longer map 1:1 to actual open positions at companies, ie many companies are not actually hiring despite having a listing for an open role.
This has become common enough that it has gained it's own term: "ghost" postings/listings.
We also have the unemployment numbers, and they are low. If job openings were largely ghost listings, and we were in a stealth recession, we'd see it in rising unemployment. Now unemployment HAS been creeping up, but still is low. If it hits 5% then I'd worry about a downturn.
Does this 5% include people who have fallen out of the unemployed bucket into some sort of long term bucket? I know multiple people who have been looking for 6 months+. Not to mention underemployed.
It never has. The labor force participation rate for 25-54 year-olds is a better metric for such things.[1] Last time it was this high was 1990s through 2002. (Before that, it was never this high.)
The shape of that graph is roughly equivalent to the shape of labor force participation for women [1]. I don’t think that detracts from your point in regards to the last 20-30 years, but in regards to “before that it was never this high” I think it’s evident that the societal shift of women joining the workforce is the reason, not an improvement in the economy.
The data in the FRED link doesn't come from online job postings but rather from surveys that businesses complete about their open positions. They don't really have much reason to lie in those surveys (or at least not any more than they have in the past?)
honest question, because it's something I don't understand well. is it possible the quantity of job openings can mask the quality of jobs openings? if job openings at fast food restaurants goes up 1000% maybe this isn't positive
Yes, employment statistics rarely tell you anything about the quality of the jobs. And when they do tell something, it's the simplest information possible.
But the statistics are selected in a way that if a society maintains a low headline unemployment for a long time, it's correlated to an increase in the quality of the jobs¹. The correlation is still not perfect, and authoritarian countries love to redefine the date so their absolute value changes.
1 - More clearly, a constant low unemployment correlates to a positive derivative in quality. And a constant high unemployment correlates to a negative derivative in quality.
Mostly flat from 2010-2021, with a recent uptick to 131 million. The discrepancy is likely due to the boomers aging out of the category, and a smaller generation coming in.
Let me put it another way: the [20, 25) and [25, 30) age cohorts are larger than any cohort aged 50+ that might have recently aged out. So that "prime age" workforce is still growing.
This could be true, but it isn't obviously true (to me). (I dispute a little bit the idea that there are many new workers in the [25, 30) demo.) There are 37M workers 55+, but only 20M in the 16-24 range: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18b.htm (2024 numbers)
Nobody in either of those cohorts is in the BLS "prime age" group which is [25, 55). The incoming cohorts that are now 15 to 25 are larger than the outgoing cohorts that are 45 to 55.
> JOLTS defines Job Openings as all positions that are open (not filled) on the last business day of the month. A job is "open" only if it meets all three of the following conditions:
1. A specific position exists and there is work available for that position. The position can be full-time or part-time, and it can be permanent, short-term, or seasonal, and
2. The job could start within 30 days, whether or not the establishment finds a suitable candidate during that time, and
3. There is active recruiting for workers from outside the establishment location that has the opening.
Very likely which is the point of the ghost jobs and gives the illusion that the OP is falling for. Companies (especially publicly traded ones) do not want analysts at banks or hedge funds using their careers page as a good / bad signal.
"Cope" is ignoring every stat that disagree with what you want to believe. We aren't in a great economy, It looks like it is flattening, but not bad, not shrinking, and there is an abundance of jobs.
Arent a lot of job openings known to be resume collection bins and HRs keep them open so that company can say "Oh we created this many jobs but no was willing to work for us"
Thanks. It is very funny how young people perceive this market. Unemployment is basically lower than it has ever been and people are panicking. Prime age labor force participation rate near all-time record highs. The people are almost dangerously over-employed.
The job market is AWFUL for my generation, and pretty much always has been since we entered the workforce.
Unemployment might be low if you think that folks with advanced STEM degrees can go and get a part time gig at McDonald's.
If you look at meaningful employment - where one can make enough to live near where they work, save a bit, pay food/rent, and spend a bit for their leisure or health, well....no we are not over-employed. We are in a death spiral.
You seem to be mostly making a cost of living argument, with which I wouldn't disagree. But you can't employ/pay your way out of those costs, the problem is on the supply side. So that seems spurious to an employment rate conversation.
I am slightly older than you, and literally don't know a person who isn't employed and doing well (including plenty your age and younger), though I am aware they exist.
It's almost like anecdotal reports are meaningless, and we should rely on well sourced data to determine how things like the economy are doing.
Spoiler alert: there is no indication we are in a death spiral, though in my opinion Trump seems to be doing his best to correct that. Fortunately, I don't think he's up to the task.
I founded a company partially because I spent 2 years on the job hunt and got absolutely nothing. So yeah, here's one example of someone who isn't doing well - me.
I was doing terribly. Honestly, I still am. I've just been fortunate enough to have conceived a product some people in my city want. Will the business scale and succeed? I hope so, because I'm fucked if it goes south.
And yes, anecdotal data sucks. But I'd take that over whatever bullshit the Trump administration says. Especially after they fired the BLS statisticians.
I'd like to back you up and point out that I've considered doing the same. If VCs will throw money at anyone promising to advance the SOTA in AI, and I can promise that, why am I bothering to keep looking for research positions or with a financially flailing industry employer?
Fair enough. My product is very much non-tech (CPG - beverage). But you're right that VCs are still throwing money around like its the ZIRP days. If you have an idea, go for it.
LinkedIn applications, applying to every PM role available in my metro area that I could, attending as many tech & startup events as I could. I got to know the main writer of the local startup/tech news aggregator pretty well and would pester him regularly for contacts at new local companies that he's talking with. I was active in my city's tech Slack/Discord community.
I do have a degree albeit on not in STEM. Also have an advanced degree (also not STEM) that helped the company I was with from 2018 until 2021.
See my above post. Basically, tons of applications, going to networking events 2-3x a week, being active in local tech Slack/Discord groups, bothering the lead writer of the local tech/startup newsletter, etc.
I can assure you that has happened before. I just find it amusing. A professional now 25-30 years old started their career in what was the most spectacularly overheated labor market of all time. Now it is very very slightly cooling off, still way hotter than historical norms, and there are many complaints. But it is all relative.
The government has spent decades figuring out ways to lie about this. Are you actually shocked? The number of men who can buy a home and have a stay-at-home-wife on a random job they got out of high school is nigh 0% when this used to be the norm.
Leaving aside your misguided RETVRN subtext, none of this really comes down to government policy. All of it is an emergent wage-cost spiral. As soon as your neighbors collectively decide to have 2 incomes per household it becomes untenable to attempt to be the last household with only 1 income.
Corporate America is such a weird place. They rather hire immigrants than retrain or educate existing workforce. Everything about the US economy is plug and play then discard. And if they can’t plug and play, they will just scrap the whole thing. That’s exactly what’s happening right now.
Where is the evidence that corporate America prefers immigrants over existing workforce? I've never heard such a claim before.
> if they can’t plug and play, they will just scrap the whole thing
This isn't just corporate America, it's all of America and all of humanity. Anything that's not plug and play has higher costs, higher risk, higher delays, and less chance of success.
Sudden and unexpected changes that increase uncertainty make it harder to invest in retraining, rather than easier. Increased uncertainty always decreases investment, because there's higher risk.
These are very very basic management considerations to anybody that runs a group, a lab, a small firm, or a large firm.
> Sudden and unexpected changes that increase uncertainty make it harder to invest in retraining, rather than easier.
This largely ignores the uncertainty and costs of a revolving workforce, and the value of having a workforce that all knows each other, the way the company works, and cares whether it succeeds.
When I was younger, I did a bunch of short-ish stints at various companies (I think average tenure was a hair under 2 years) because someone else would offer more money, more exciting work, etc. It was incredibly inefficient for the employer. "Waiting for my laptop/credentials to be issued" was like a full percentage point of my time there. I barely cared whether the company did well because I wasn't going to be there long enough for my RSUs to swing wildly either way. I never got to the point where I knew offhand who to talk to about niche parts of the product, and never became "that guy" for anyone else.
Frankly a lot of our stuff was higher risk and took longer because of the revolving doors. People important to a project would leave in the middle, or the person who wrote an important system would quit so we were left with whatever tribal knowledge we had.
Things worked well when the lady that wrote our invoicing system 20 years ago was still around but in security now. Things went poorly when she quit 6 months ago and now I have to reverse engineer it to figure out why I get stack overflows on invoices that contain an image.
> This largely ignores the uncertainty and costs of a revolving workforce, and the value of having a workforce that all knows each other, the way the company works, and cares whether it succeeds.
I'm not "ignoring" that, and a retrained workforce is also a revolving workforce.
When I run teams or companies I invest heavily in giving employees opportunities to train for new skills, level up on their existing skills, and grow into greater responsibility and knowledge domains. But that always needs to be balanced with the rest of the needs. When my runway is uncertain, that reduces the ability to plan for adding training for existing employees rather than bringing in a consultant or a new hire.
Yes - same question - maybe I'm a frog in boiling water but same question. The most toxicity I've encountered is when working with large groups of foreign workers that retained their workplace norms from their home country.
How is that weird? If American's can't compete with the wage expectations of foreign workers then they're not going to be hired.
If US workers can't compete then vote for less immigration. It's not the corporates or the foreigners fault, it's the government that's putting those groups first over US workers.
its not that they're putting people who are immigrants over US workers, they are putting corporate profits before US workers.
the US is terrible at protecting american jobs for americans. i am not overly educated on this but it seems like a lot of countries, europe specifically, are extremely protective of their jobs.
i don't think americans are somehow inherently more worthy of employment and opportunity than people from other countries, but it does seem like it may be a playing field that isn't very level if a lot of other countries are protecting jobs but the US isn't. in addition to our cost of living being tremendously high compared to the countries we outsource our work to, it isn't even an option for an american to go get a job in (for example) india and send home paycheck to support family in the US.
Have you considered that those "protections" you mention in Europe are in fact counterproductive and actually are a large reason why they are less productive, and therefore less competitive and less wealthy (even when accounting for hours worked)?
I personally would like to see some sort of system where we account for discrepancies in regulations related to worker protections, government subsidies, and environmental standards through taxation (e.g. Chinese crap is no longer as cheap as it is right now because we account for the substandard worker conditions and environmental damage being done), but I think restricting the labor market too much would be incredibly damaging.
>the US is terrible at protecting american jobs for americans.
I recently finished Peter Zehan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning and in it, it explicitly says that the American economic order was created in such a way that the loss of American jobs over time was by design.
Basically, as the American worker and consumer expects more and more, we need a larger international system to support that ("a rising tide..." analogy). However, we let the profits derived from such a system wind up in a smaller and smaller group of self-interested people who don't give a damn if the whole system goes belly up, because they've "got theirs". Such short-sighted thinking.
It makes sense that you wouldn't hire in such an uncertain environment. We have a President using emergency powers to affect sweeping, unpredictable, consequential changes to the economy that can dramatically alter unit economics overnight and completely tank a previously viable business. Within this calendar year, the President's ability to do this may be upended by pending court cases, an election, or both. Following those potential changes, the breach of trust created by the previous chaos may mean that trade never returns to normal. I don't envy anyone trying to make long-term business decisions, like hiring, in such an environment.
One of my clients is a midsized logistics brokerage based in LA. Right now is RFP season, where they bid on freight contracts with various existing and potential customers. These contracts are typically one year long. A bid you submit now might be for a contract that goes Sept-Sept.
This is difficult even under normal circumstances because you have to predict what carrier (trucker) rates will be in the future. You also have to predict fuel costs, because even though these are usually variable, when fuel costs go up so does your margin (so if you expect higher fuel prices you can lower your bid price). And you have to game out what your competitors are going to bid too. You can’t be too conservative (expensive) or you won’t get the bid. But if you lock in a contract with a certain expectation of rates and it swings the other way, you’re on the hook for millions in losses.
Now imagine doing that normally difficult task in this environment. Who knows what will happen. Wars, a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), deportations, tariffs, the collapse of USMCA…the uncertainty is near endless. Big tech companies are doing great, everyone else is getting absolutely destroyed.
Related, yes. US DoT wants non-dom CDLs revoked[1]:
> The decision comes amid pressure from the U.S. Department of Transportation, which announced in November 2025 that it would compel California to revoke thousands of what it calls “illegally issued” non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses.
There's been a big up about undocumented Sikh commercial drivers with CDL licenses, primarily because there have been some spectacular fatal crashes on video.
Typically companies use things like futures, options, and forward contracts to fix or cap their input costs for commodities like oil. This lets them bid on projects without needing to know the future price of oil.
Uncertainty has a cost which exists no matter where you move it around. Yes, investment banks might sell you some kind of exotic derivative which moves the risk onto them, but they'll charge a risk premium for this (probably a very high one since the risk factors here are pretty unusual and hard to model), and that makes it harder to stay afloat as a business. There is no handwaving away the damage that uncertainty does to commerce.
Even if you can find someone to write you a weird, bespoke (and therefore expensive) derivative to hedge against the Trump DoT revoking thousands of CDLs, you've still only succeeded in moving all these calculations and risks to that counterparty. Somebody somewhere still has to have the headache of pricing this risk.
Seriously? What hedge contract you going to use for: 1) Wars, 2) a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), 3)deportations, 4)tariffs, 5) the collapse of USMCA
War-risk insurance is a thing [1]. You could probably buy a business-interruption policy with a line item for revocations. Adding a tariff contingency to customer contracts and/or engaging with vendors on a fixed-price tariff-notwithstanding basis transfers tariff risk.
Deportatios and the collapse of a free-trade zone are not mitigatable. De-leveraging from products that don't have a strong domestic alternative would be the only options there.
All costs. None easy. But all doable. (Not saying it's good business.)
Right, and then you lose the contract to someone who decided, rather than pricing in the risks, to have their hedge be "Idk guess I'll go bankrupt lmao" and bid as usual.
> Wars, a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), deportations, tariffs, the collapse of USMCA…the uncertainty is near endless.
So, uh, did business owners actually take any of these things, which very much were promised during campaign season, into account when voting? Or did they walk into the ballot box thinking, "no-one wants to work anymore!" and pull the lever for the guy promising to make applicants a bit more motivated to work at lower wages?
I work for an global company in the industrial automation space. Not only is there is a major effort underway to offshore jobs and manufacturing from the US, but our customers around the world are pulling way back on capital expenditures, citing US policy uncertainties as a primary reason.
A multi-million dollar company I help start, in the Midwest USA, had manufacturing, customer service, R&D, and shipping all in the same state. After being bought by Texas VCs, everything moved out of the area. They don't want to run and build a business, they want to make X millions in Y years.
To do this, manufacturing moved to South Korea, customer service to some Asian country, slashed R&D by removing QA, and shipped the other jobs to a more _cost effect state_ not in the Midwest. Everyone that had institutional knowledge was fired to reduce cost of employee salaries.
Note you want QA because it is a life safety solution. Speaking with former colleagues, the quality of the solution went down hill while the price kept rising.
In my current company, all assembly jobs were removed from in-state and shipped to a more _cost effect state_ before the end of 2025. This also affects the end user because I can no longer go to assembly and test software changes or custom hardware changes before the product ships.
Jobs are not being lost because of unskilled people, they are being lost to help the rich get richer.
> Jobs are not being lost because of unskilled people, they are being lost to help the rich get richer.
Indeed, imagine you're part of the wealthy elite. What you want is to be able to move your cash around the world, chasing cash growth. You also want yourself to be able to travel wherever you wish with your Gulfstream.
Why would they care about local midwest job growth ?
You don't have to be communist, you just have to be selective about the capitalists you engage with.
An business mentor of mine bootstrapped a highly profitable enterprise software company, growing it to 400 employees. When it was time to sell/retire, he vetted buyers not just for the money they could offer, but for the impact they would have on his team and community. He accepted an offer from a conservatively-run competitor and proudly told me that 5 years later, 90% of the original staff were still happily employed with the new owner.
These arrangements are simply not an option if you're beholden to VC, or entertain offers from Private Equity. You cannot preserve what you do not own.
Packaging. Boxes, shippers, pallets, parts transports for use within automotive and other factories, etc. Very little direct to consumer or display stuff.
Analysts use packaging companies as a canary for manufacturing in general.
Interesting! I am familiar with this space as we developed a software tool [0] to optimize packaging based on 3D packing technology we developed. If it is relevant to you, happy to chat!
We currently use ArtiosCAD and TOPS pro for load and pallet optimization. I'll check out your software and forward over to the people-that-sign-the-checks.
I mean that's a big part of why so many people want the USA dollar to go even lower. The administration has been very explicit that they want a cheaper dollar but unlike a lot of their other polices that goal has a lot of support among economists.
It sadly doesn't work that well with tariffs in play again anything done outside the USA has to pay and frankly other nation just don't spend like American's.
US would lose out significantly if this were applied by everyone worldwide. The whole of Europe + Anglosphere have surrendered their whole tech related sectors to US companies, an enormous wealth transfer.
You want to tax foreign businesses that sell stuff to you?
Ok, given you can only tax stuff when it passes into your territory what you really have there is called a "tariff", it is paid by… the customer, when they buy the thing.
The seller has an entire planet to sell to. The US has about 25% of the money to buy things with, but even then only because we all like your money. Moment we stop liking your money, that probably drops to 20%.
You may not like tariffs but it's not as straightforward as "customer pays".
Customers and businesses will part of it. Businesses will most likely give up some part of the margin and customers will pay a higher price.
>>The seller has an entire planet to sell to.
For a lot of goods US is responsible for 50% of profits. It was for me for a long time when I was selling software. Quick googling suggests some EU automakers make close to 50% of their profits in US as well.
US is the premium market everyone wants to sell to. There is nowhere else like that, especially for high margin goods.
I’m not sure why this logic isn’t more mainstream. Half the country is clamoring for tariffs, bans on H1Bs, offshoring taxes, etc. They’re not connecting the dots on how this affects innovation, the economy, debt, taxation, etc. Is it a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it?
For the US, it's not too out of the norm historically speaking. Up until relatively recently tariffs were very popular in the US despite the clear understanding by academics that they were incredibly damaging to the economy. Political movements based around protectionist economic arguments have a long history in the US.
For an example, take a look at the 1888 US presidential election, which largely revolved around tariffs. Grover Cleveland lost re-election due to being part of the pro-business wing of the Democrats, and he came to the conclusion that tariffs were a negative to the economy overall, while his opponents were strongly protectionist. After McKinley's Republicans won the election on a protectionist platform, he instituted the McKinley tariffs (average import duties of around ~50%), which were devastating to the economy despite being extremely popular with the nation in the election. It led to massive price increases which led to the re-election of Grover Cleveland in 1892 (only other non-consecutive term president aside from Trump). Despite expert opinion being fairly solidified against tariffs even at the time, the idea of "protecting American business" and "punishing other countries for their unequal trade deficits with the US" was pretty popular with specific interest groups!
Parts of this sound rather familiar, do they not? I would then argue that it points to a cultural element, out of the two options of a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it. History certainly rhymes on this point.
Serious question, if tariffs are so terrible, why did so many countries have tariffs on US (and other country's) goods?
Also, during the period you describe the US was a major export economy. Now the US economy is far more insular (even before Trump) than it was during that period (foreign trade was more than 50% in the late 19th century vs 7% today). Why would you assume that doesn't impact the effects of tariffs?
2. Quick and easy reaction to other nation's tariffs, which we saw this year when Trump announced all his tariffs.
3. Targeted at specific industries to influence politics in other nations. IIRC, the EU is actually doing this to the US, specific states that have a lot of support for Trump, in the hope those voters will make the connection and get Trump to back off.
4. Targeted at specific industries to protect domestic industries from being undermined. The USA has accused China of this in various cases, any "anti-dumping tariffs" would be perfectly reasonable where this happens. China was accused of trying basically the same thing Uber was accused of, spending (VC|tax) money to corner the market then raising prices when all the old (taxi drivers|PV makers) were gone.
5. Sin taxes. Singapore doesn't have their own car industry to protect, they make it really difficult to get a car just because they don't want lots of cars. I mean, it's more of a registration fee, but the effect there is much the same given the lack of local industry.
There's definitely debate over which specific scenarios tariffs could be beneficial, as I understand it, but the general theme is that any benefits are highly concentrated (one or two companies or industries will benefit) and the negatives are felt in a diffuse fashion(every consumer pays the tax). They are broadly protectionist and the ones that do exist usually are implemented for pretty specific reasons like the following:
1: A government wants to protect domestic industries over ones outside of the country by applying price increases to the foreign ones, with the idea being that the domestic industries just need to grow into being able to compete with the industries in other areas. This is called the infant industries argument. A central problem with this is that the industries will always benefit from the protectionist policy, and are unlikely to ever admit that they have "grown up" so to say. My general view on this is that groups will of course lobby to have benefits specific to their industry, and that there are probably scenarios where we would prefer to have things handled domestically rather than abroad, but I would generally want this to be highly targeted and time-gated(Once the industries are mature enough to compete, we wouldn't want to keep subsidizing them), and that other tools are probably more efficient for this purpose.
2: Some sort of national security argument, where production being cut off during war would be a serious concern. My general thought on this one is that if something is specifically important for national security, broad reaching taxes on all imports probably aren't as useful as targeted government interventions in those specific industries. The government can build whatever factories it wants or contract people to do specific things if it passes a law to do so. If we're worried that we need a domestic supply of beets(randomly selected example) and the government is willing to produce them at a loss for national security reasons, they should probably just do that rather than tax imports of coffee, chocolate, bananas, beets, beef, and cars in order to encourage domestic production of beets. The broad spectrum nature of across the board tariffs doesn't specifically protect any given industry, unless the specific protection desired is "nothing should be imported, only ever produced domestically."
3: Historically speaking tariffs were a major source of government revenue. There was no income tax in the very early US (and this was the case in many places), and tariffs were seen as an efficient way to raise a lot of money for the government. At the time it was also something that was a lot easier to measure than things like property value, sales, or individual income, because all the goods had to come in through a port. Pretty easy to check the majority of the things coming in, compared to other taxation methods. A major argument in the time period was actually that the government was making too much revenue, such that it was constricting the growth of the private economy! A huge debate in the 1880s and 1890s was on how the share of government revenue could be lowered, and the growth of the economy could be encouraged. Republicans argued that implementing more tariffs would actually reduce imports and lead to lower revenues, which was the stated goal of the McKinley tariffs.
The general reason some people oppose tariffs overall is that they represent an approach to economic growth based on zero-sum thinking, i.e. an idea that if another country experiences economic growth, ours must suffer economic decline. There tends to be more support from many people behind the idea that international trade allows multiple economies to grow in tandem, as I understand it, but I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff, haha. I just find the historical aspect interesting.
On your second point, describing it as a major export economy in the period I describe is maybe not capturing the scenario, because we were in the middle of a major change in manufacturing. We were major importers of manufactured goods in the preceding time period, and we exported agricultural goods! The period from 1890 to 1910 roughly(depending on when you draw the cutoff) is when the US mainly started exporting manufactured goods more than importing them, and it was a massive transition. The period we're talking about is probably best understood as when we were in the process of industrializing more.
It's fair to point out that the economy was pretty different at the time, but it was different in a bigger way.
They really don't there is a reason the EU pretty much instantly caved in the last trade "negotiation" and it's most of the world frankly doesn't have much money. There certainly isn't enough untapped demand to fill a USA sized hole anywhere.
The EU caved because they didn't want to agitate Trump too much due to Ukraine. This becomes less and less important as the EU ramps up arms production.
Anyone will tell you I'm not a regulations guy, but there's definitely a problem. When you watch these rounds of seemingly coordinated, sweeping layoffs, followed by H-1B hiring sprees, it's hard to pretend.
This is a real eye-opener. Do you know how to fix how stupid I am? Tell me what's wrong with my analysis.
Here's a report: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-lawmakers-scruti.... Is it factually wrong that "In the first half of 2025, Amazon and its cloud-computing unit, AWS, received approval for more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Microsoft and Meta had more than 5,000 H-1B visa approvals each" and that they did layoffs?
It's hard to see how H-1B hiring could move meaningfully either up or down, given that the number of H-1Bs is capped at 65,000 [1] (+ 20,000 for advanced degrees), no company is going to pay for the process of getting an H-1B visa and not actually hire into it, and if a person on an H-1B loses their job they lose their visa in 60 days. You know exactly how many H-1Bs there are in the country: it's mandated by Congress.
What has changed is that they are or will soon be allocated by pay level instead of randomly. That's going to bias hiring toward Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Meta and away from body-shops like Infosys and Wipro.
These are the companies that receive the most H1B approvals because they have large numbers of high skill employees, so it isn’t surprising that they have thousands of visas approved. But the total number of visas across the country is capped annually per the law (by Congress). All H1B workers combined are still only a fraction of a percent of the total jobs in America.
Another thing to keep in mind that these are also the largest and most innovative companies, and that’s in part due to having access to the best available talent. Those H1B workers cost the companies MORE than American workers. These companies have standardized compensation by job and level and it isn’t different for immigrants. But immigrants come with the additional costs of the immigration process, on top of having the same salary. This isn’t a cost saving measure, it’s a path to continuing to stay innovative and relevant.
As for layoffs - these are mega corps so one part of the company may be doing layoffs in their business while another business within the same company is hiring. And you’re seeing the total effects (layoffs and hiring), and it seems contradictory, but it’s actually just a bunch of little decisions that aren’t tied to each other.
The thing about all of these responses, factual as they may be, is that they don't address the issue we're discussing. Regardless of whether the number is fixed or how much the employees are paid, thousand of people lost their jobs. I'm sure a few are active on the board here. It looks bad when you request visas and do mass firings.
Your fellow Americans disagree, they will buy their stuff from whoever is the cheapest.
People need to understand that it matters how they spend. They can't expect everyone else to pay for things to be made in America when they're not willing to themselves.
Trump has made the idea of mafioso politics popular -- where you hold everyone hostage until they do what you want -- but that doesn't actually mean that it's good policy.
He has also shown that it isn't a functional policy either. Much of what he's done has backfired almost immediately after it was implemented, but much like a gremlin in a wiring loom by the time the sparks appear he's already moved on to tear out something else important. Mafioso politics only work when your concentrated power is wielded against fragmented power that will move too slowly to mitigate you. Even if there are a multitude of small groups if they turn against you even without unanimous action you're spending too much time and effort jumping from thing to thing to ever actually achieve your intended goals. The end result is a parade of violent whack-a-mole as force is used against the myriad number of small revolts that happen, exhausting the resources of the enforcement infrastructure and normalizing the expectation of violence.
Of course the four morons of the broken winds don't see this as a failure, but merely an excuse to normalize that violence until it reaches the extent that they will face little to no consequence when they push it to the logical extreme and attempt to exterminate the many opposing groups rather than simply subjugate them.
Nor is it popular once actually realized. It's mostly for dumbasses to go "rah rah" thinking they'll be at the top of the pyramid. The problem with this form of governance is it puts the most vicious, selfish, and brutal people at the top. Those are rarely the most intelligent and (obviously) never the most magnanimous.
Yes, I do want to pay more to bolster my country's domestic workforce vs subsidizing corporate shareholders and offshore workers, while also having that come out of corporate profits. shrug
What’s funny about this is that I actually can’t. 2 examples:
For years, I’ve tried to buy only American-made denim. When the Cone Mills plant closed, I bought a bunch of dead stock jeans. There was one attempt since Cone Mills closed to open a new US denim factory, but it failed. Unless you’re buying whatever’s left of that increasingly rare stock, you can’t buy American-made denim.
Another example — I’m currently in the market for custom-formulated silicone and acrylic products. Every US manufacturer I’ve approached just sends an email that says “no we don’t do that”. I have like 5 Chinese suppliers on Alibaba trying to make a deal with me.
I would much rather source domestically as soon as someone tells me how to do it.
Sure there is a (growing set) of product categories you can’t buy in the US. What I typically find though is all these “we should force people to buy US” folks don’t actually own American-made goods even in categories where it’s relatively easy.
You could buy US-made garments in the 80s and 90s. Just like you could buy American TVs, vacuum cleaners, computers, and everything else. In fact Americans had a great quality of life back then, arguably a better one if you go by the attainability of things like housing, affordability, and economic inequality.
Not imaginary, I have been sharing info with Congressional reps on this topic who are working on policy, as well as the data on H-1B fraud and use for wage suppression. I haven't even had to pay a bribe ("campaign contribution") to get their ear, which is nice.
> How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
This is a tired argument. The electorate was told "not to worry, we're offshoring the low value work so we can focus on high value work." Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
> You are aware we do make many things in America today, right?
As someone who owns quite a few American made garments (and has paid the price to do so), I'm amazed you got such a long response that basically dodged the question.
The US service economy is ~83% of GDP. Manufacturing only makes up 8% of jobs in the US. Why do I care about US made products? Corporations are offshoring services and knowledge work, manufacturing has been gone for some time and will not be back. If it does come back, it'll be mostly automated, lights out facilities (like China).
So! I think it makes a lot of sense to impair the offshoring of these service and knowledge jobs when there isn't a labor shortage and we're likely in a recession. If you need more data, I can provide as much as you would like on this topic.
There's more to manufacturing than just rebuilding factories. You need everything from supply chains (which are going to include some foreign materials in many cases), to people who want to work in a factory in 2026, to consumers who want to pay extra for domestically made products.
It's not as easy as saying "just tax imports" or "just tax offshoring" because that hits the average folks who are barely getting by, as every cost gets passed down to the consumer.
I live in a country that used to be heavily industrialized (back in the previous regime when the goal was to be self-sufficient). In the 90s we lost most of the domestic industry as the factories got privatized and opening foreign trade enabled cheaper foreign products to flood the market. Most factories were sold off or just went out of business.
There's been some success with small businesses doing manufacturing domestically but it's mostly niche and not near what it used to be back when every house had at least some domestically made clothes, furniture, electronics...
Labor is expensive, market small, taxes high, and lately even high energy costs and rising import fees on materials from abroad. Plus of course the fact that people can't afford to pay 5-10x for the same thing made domestically when they can barely afford the thing at 1x the price.
This comment is literally just numbers about how the US has ceded low value add jobs and dominated high value add jobs.
I am asking why this is intrinsically a problem.
Or if it's not intrinsically a problem, then what are the downstream consequences we should care about, and can we talk about them explicitly instead of just assuming the best way to mitigate them is to put our economy into reverse advancement.
Could you please name one non-food product in America that a typical consumer could buy that doesn't subsidize corporate shareholders? Name one thing the average American can buy that contributes to gainful employment at the expense of corporate profit.
Where I'm sitting, the only manufacturing that exists in the USA is, for subassemblies or components that are purchased by larger companies on a contract basis, and manufactured by lower-middle class citizens. Boeing and GE is an example. And the reason Boeing buys domestically is only because they have to in order to limit their liability, reduce labor costs, and protect their IP. If the America you're looking for existed, Boeing would happily pay twice as much for labor to make components in house. If that America existed your television would be made here too, by people who weren't being subsidized themselves by Food Stamps.
There are no consumer commodity manufacturers in the USA who provide gainful employment without significant consideration towards corporate profit. There is basically nothing at Wal-Mart that you can buy that is made in the USA by people who are living in financial comfort. That's just not how late stage capitalism works.
Cool, give me as much statute and regulation required to squeeze companies and encourage competition to drive down profits while protecting workers. This system and game is all arbitrary, we can change the rules (of course, with time and effort). If we have to kill some companies to do this, that's acceptable. As someone wise once said, "We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try."
The way you protect workers is to create the most appealing place to employ them for people starting businesses.
Otherwise, those businesses will go to somewhere with a less regulated environment and ship it in.
The only way to truly protect workers is to increase the cost of bypassing the regulations that you want to protect them so that operating within the regulations is the best choice for the business.
This is a disconnect that we see in numerous topics nationally, like pushes to raise the minimum wage which just result in lots of job losses while companies relocate. So instead you see politicians push for a national increase to the minimum wage, so that there’s nowhere else in the US to relocate to because they are all equally expensive.
The moment you start creating policies where the first concern is making sure people can’t escape, it should be an indicator to rethink the policy.
Democratic socialists were just recently democratically elected in NYC and Seattle. Support for unions in the US is at historical record highs [1]. ~2M 55+ people in the US die every year, ~5k per day. ~3M people turn 18 every year and become eligible to vote, young people who only see bleakness ahead. 31% of wealth is held by people over 70 [2]. This is a population dynamics story, old ideas die out, new ideas come in (Planck's principle). I'm confident support for worker vs corporate policies is high, based on all available evidence [3] [4] [5]. Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life on their income [6], as another data point. So, I'm unsure who is in the "pro capitalism pro corporation" corner to be honest, when you consider the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of equities.
No harm should come to humans of course, but corporations, entities, and systems are all fair game.
[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher... ("A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.")
Your take is questionable and increasingly becomes asinine every time a boomer croaks and a young person makes it to voting age. No amount of seductive "institutions who's inner workings we will figure out late as though they don't make or break it all will provide for us" rhetoric are going to change the fact that the electorate is increasingly made up of people who have only seen institutions, both public and private, engage in accumulation of power self enrichment at the expense of literally everyone else.
I don't know what the future holds but I assure you it does not involve the people vesting yet more power in institutions that have only led them astray in their lifetimes (governments, unions and other industry groups, academia, etc). As the evil among us like to say "demographics are destiny" [1].
Given how Trump’s second election seems to have been driven by the youth vote, it seems like an overly optimistic take to assume that youth vote is in the bag for progressive ideas. And we’ll see what Mondani has in store in terms of actual progressive policies that he can enact, but corporate death penalty is not on the table last I checked.
Yup. And the whole "Oh, we're not releasing the numbers because they're not right/misleading but trust us, the economy is the best its ever been!" is getting older and (even) less convincing.
There's another factor: Due to the unpredictable and unreliable nature of the current US administration, the rest of the west is "America-proofing" itself.
Expect cash flows to dry up as Europe, Latam, Canada and Korea/Japan diversify away to more reliable suppliers. It's already happening.
The theory makes sense, but it doesn't match with the graphics in the article.
We can see that job openings have been declining since before the 2024 election and that hiring actually increased briefly around the time the tarrifs were implemented. This seems to suggest there are other factors at play, including macro trends.
Investment monies have been tightened across the board, mainly due to high interest rates and the fact that investments in anything other than Tech/AI don’t match expectations of growth.
Understand something, though: many of those people making those decisions thought that the current administration would be a way to fix regulation.
We're learning why government shouldn't be run like a business. Corporate governance, at least in the view of these people, arguably benefits from tyranny in some ways. You have a management structure where people have the ability to cut off your income and health insurance for an indeterminate amount of time for almost any reason. The reasons they can't fire you for are very specific and it's often on you, the now-jobless person, to prove their maleficence. Sounds pretty tyrannical to me.
They thought if they had someone who was used to working within a system like that - and Trump absolutely was, having his name on the building he worked in his entire adult life - it'd allow them to get rid of roadblocks to productivity and increase the value created by their businesses.
Well, as it turns out, an economy is different than a business, and needs to be run according to rules that were deliberated upon by the society at large.
We had people warning about this ten years ago. They were ignored. We had him impeached five years ago. Didn't convict. We had him convicted of 34 felony counts less than two years ago. Didn't sentence.
Seems to me like it's American businesses that are increasingly operating like governments. Acquiring media outlets to manufacture consent, bending the courts to deregulate their operations, trading political favors and engaging in centralized economic planning for giant bets on AI, funded with debt.
> engaging in centralized economic planning for giant bets on AI
If they're centralizing economic planning on that, then there's probably at least some economic planning that they would be doing to keep a relatively stable regulatory regime in place.
Which, y'know, isn't the case.
Ultimately the world has reached a point where social systems in both business and government are run the same way. Probably because they're run by the same kind of person. Sometimes even the same people.
There were purges aplenty during the Communist times, to make way for loyalist bureaucrats. What's taking place is the incipience of not just a stable regime but a calcified one.
- A non-independent monetary authority
- A Department of Labor that uses data from a single private vendor instead of its own payroll tax records and surveys to measure unemployment
- A pro-monopoly consumer protection bureau scaling
back unprofitable regulations
- A foreign service ready to threaten allies within its own sphere of influence to protect its tech businesses.
> There were purges aplenty during the Communist times, to make way for loyalist bureaucrats. What's taking place is the incipience of not just a stable regime but a calcified one.
If it were calcified, you'd probably have a lot more willingness to bet on a business decision being profitable. There'd be a very obvious, solid understanding of market rules and there would be little likelihood of them changing.
The problem with Trump - well, in this regard; there are plenty of others - is that he is used to operating as an absolute monarch, with his previous "kingdom" being the Trump Organization. That kingdom existed purely for his benefit and there wasn't really any consideration of peers like you'd have with actual kings who rule over countries with societies and borders. The only decisions he had to make right were the ones benefitting him, and whether or not they did that was quite evident.
Now he's a leader of a country that does have borders and a society. There are parties with interests that he must satisfy. You can tell he's never had to do that before and part of how he handles that is to just bully those parties into submission, but the other way is to use his status to make proclamations that supposedly have some sort of force to them to placate the other interests.
An example would be the proclamation that institutional investors will be banned from buying single-family homes. That's meant to placate his working-class base, most of whom can't afford a home. Do we know how far he'll go in enforcing that proclamation? No. It directly contradicts some of the other positions he's been identified as supporting, and is unlikely to be enforceable on a mass scale, but if he does sign some sort of order telling the DoJ or SEC or whoever to investigate purchases of that sort of real estate by institutional investors, well, you could end up at the wrong end of a government investigation, particularly if you have somehow pissed him off. Which isn't particularly hard to do, either.
Thus, you can say the regulatory regime over single-family residential real estate market is now less stable than it was before. We don't know what will happen. And that makes it hard to make a business decision around it.
The people who I work with who support the current administration don't really value a good economy.
They actually are smug about a worsening standard of living. What makes them happy is "tough talk" on immigration, to them the brutality against suspected undocumented immigrants is a good deterrent.
It's not surprising but it's important to understand how important the brutality is and how unimportant economic growth is. It helps that they Silicon Valley tech workers who are already rich.
US companies have long been reliant on free flowing investment monies subsidized by the USG. Tightening those purse strings has reduced the level of jobs openings, including tightening of SBIRs and other non-research grant programs that small to medium sized companies use. Small business loans are also tight or non-existent. So, of course jobs will be limited.
The macro-level economic policies really only affect large corporations, unless a business is impacted by the tariffs. In general, hiring is fucked by immigration visas in large companies, which are still going strong and sneaking around the anti-immigration barriers. In some way, hiring non-U.S. workers for work funded by the USG is unacceptable, and economic theft.
If USG opens up funding more, then things will normalize, including for immigrant or non-U.S. contract workers in other places. As always, it’s the economy that’s the problem, but which part of it is always hard to pin down when other parts of it make up for it.
This is just Trump, not the USG as a whole. Congress approved a budget and Trump refuses to give the money out. People have to fight in court to get the money they're owed.
Data shows jobs have been in decline before Trump, likely related to reduced investments from high inflation and high interest rates. I guess I should add that part of opening up more funding includes managing other aspects so we don’t end up in the same economic environment post-2020.
we had a much larger disruption to logistics just a few years ago if you recall =) and hiring really took off then. so i don't think this argument really holds any water
Money was free then, and hiring took off in software, which people were relying on a lot more during the pandemic. All of my friends who are performers or work in events were wrecked financially. The industry still hasn’t really recovered.
more likely, higher interest rates and and oversupply of hiring from previous quantitative easing have left number of roles open limited, not to mention with AI - many companies feel there is a deflation in the market, that is to say, if we wait till next year our programmer may accomplish twice as much, why hire a second person now?
It's the rate of change. Things like NAFTA took many years to implement, and were debated and developed in the open. Everyone understood what would happen to the economy and that there would be a decade of transition.
> A huge part of our power was that we were safe and predictable and that's gone forever.
That is a big deal. The US has for a long time been seen as a stable economy that's easy to trade with because policy changes would take a long time to come into effect by which everyone had had the time to adjust.
Compared to the various stuff that was happening in Europe in the previous decades (at least here in the east) the US were a stable safe heaven where you could trust things wouldn't drastically change overnight.
That's what I thought after the first Trump administration. But the fact that we re-elected him proves that it wasn’t a one-off, we will always be four years away from the possibility of a wild regime change.
That’s why it would jar to be Vance and this reigime, Kay without Trump. 10 more years of both red and blue and enough change to undo and prevent this in the future could get it out.
Germany was reformed, Japan was reforms. These things take time
But the problem is the American people want this. This isn’t some dictator in Korea or Iraq or Venezuela, this is someone with full democratic support. There are many checks and balances in the American system to avoid a single person doing this amount of damage without having widespread support.
No, not even close. The basis for most of these actions requires novel legal re-interpretations to claim power from Congress for the executive, ignore time or scope limits, and remove expert judgement from what are often supposed to be consensus decisions. The courts cases over tariffs are highlighting the unprecedented claims for both the nature of the purported emergency and the scope of the response, but this shows up in many other areas such as inventing a “power emergency” to force coal plants to stay open over the wishes of the owners, communities, and state governments. We’ve never had anything like this level of direct economic interference in the modern economy - even things like WWII policies were at least targeted and based on a real threat.
No, every President does not declare tariffs by fiat using specious emergency powers that change day to day depending on who kissed their ass most recently.
Even setting aside whether the changes are good or not themselves, no President before has thrown away laws mandated by Congress the way the current President is.
Further, this wasn’t even considered a possibility and is only happening now due to a confluence of events…
- the Supreme Court passing rulings that essentially make the President unaccountable
- the SC passing rulings preventing Congress from delegating powers which in practice means a lot of laws Congress had passed in the past have essentially disappeared (since the agencies tasked with making decisions related to them are no longer allowed to)
- Congress becoming completely supine and giving away as much power as they can
- a President that has accepted and is operating on what was until now a fringe legal theory of unbridled executive power ie “unitary executive” theory.
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The first that comes to mind was the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Biden cancelled it with EO 13990 when it was pretty much done.
Would have been thousands of jobs, Canada wanted it too, it's safer than trucking/transporting by train. All just cancelled on a whim.
Then there's EO 14008 that put a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal lands and offshore waters. (fed land is 25% of oil production)
Regardless of your position on oil (I'm sure you have one), the point is those are two examples of disruption of an industry by EO from a previous president.
> The first that comes to mind was the Keystone XL Pipeline.
> Biden cancelled it with EO 13990 when it was pretty much done.
I'll admit to not being an expert on the Keystone XL Pipeline, but at least according to the timeline on wikipedia[1], the reason Biden was able to cancel it with an executive order was because Trump had approved it with an executive order, after people had tried and failed for years to get it approved the proper way (through the legislative and executive branches).
And even when Trump personally tried to make it happen, there were still years of court battles stopping construction, so when Biden came into office and ended it, it was in fact not "pretty much done" but apparently 8% done[2]
Seems like it again comes back to Trump just doing what he wants, and it was in fact him trying to unilaterally make it happen that caused that last four years or so of disruptions?
And never this sweeping: like when Japanese car manufacturers were threatening Detroit, the president negotiated with Congress and the response was targeted, not a random shotgun on other countries and industries.
True. I have not ordered a single product from the Heard Island and McDonald Islands since the tariffs were levied on them. I am champing at the bit for these to be reduced.
Haha, but every coffee, tea, snd chocolate provider I buy from has announced their prices going up and it’s not like there’s an American industry those taxes are supporting. Hawaii doesn’t have enough land to grow even a fraction of our domestic coffee consumption.
Yes: that’s kind of a textbook example of using tariffs strategically — there’s a valid argument that automobiles are a strategic industry worth protecting (just for military capacity alone) but they didn’t threaten to heavily tax coffee and chocolate from other continents at the same time or under the pretense that it would make those crops viable in the United States at scale.
As someone who's about to quit to go work on their startup, glad to know things are gonna be terrible if everything goes to shit and I need to return to the job market.
I see these reports as statistics. “54% Americans have zero retirement savings” doesn’t mean that I should expect a 50% chance my savings will magically disappear when I retire.
You have to be careful with statistics, and news in general. Remember that your life is your own, with a unique set of circumstances, and think for yourself.
My hotter take: we're in an economic death spiral. There isn't enough juice that can be squeezed short of mass wealth redistribution to reinvigorate the economy, and what is out there is locked up in stocks that don't translate to revenue. Slashing rates will just skyrocket prices and over inflate our monetary supply, and further tax cuts will only whittle away what's left of government services and social safety nets. Companies are going to start collapsing in a domino effect as liquidity dries up and contracts get cut.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Federal Receipts as a Percent of GDP measures total government revenue relative to the size of the economy, serving as a standardized way to track the federal tax burden over time.
Although the top marginal tax rate in the 1950s indeed exceeded 90%, federal receipts hovered around 17% of GDP; this was nearly identical to current levels, because loopholes and high income thresholds (roughly equivalent to $2MM for single/$4MM for couples) meant almost no one actually paid that top rate.
The effective tax rate for the top 1% was closer to 42% rather than 90%, demonstrating that extremely high statutory rates on paper do not necessarily generate proportionally higher government revenue.
The total tax intake is fairly unambiguous. Personal tax bill for the vast majority of people is also quite clear. But when you get to the top 0.1% or whatever it is, things like "income" and "tax" get ambiguous. I suppose a lot of the ultra rich don't have much earnings, at best cap gains, and even that can be offset, boxed and off-shored ad nauseam.
Maybe instead of looking at the ultra rich we could look at what GDP fraction the "bottom 95%" contribute to the tax burden - is that more or less than before. Not sure where to look for this data but sounds like a nice little exercise.
>But when you get to the top 0.1% or whatever it is, things like "income" and "tax" get ambiguous. I suppose a lot of the ultra rich don't have much earnings, at best cap gains, and even that can be offset, boxed and off-shored ad nauseam.
But the denominator isn't "income", it's GDP. That's far harder to "offset, boxed and off-shored ad nauseam".
Sure - but not at an individual level. If you're asking, how much tax are the rich paying now vs before, as a % basis, you need an individual numerator and denominator.
Maybe the total tax take now is 17% of GDP, same as before, but when measured correctly, the overall tax rate for the super-rich has gone down, and for the plebs gone up.
To even identify who the super-rich are in this exercise, you may need to be careful with the definition of "rich". If eg you go for highest income earners, you might find upper middle class people instead, with the super-rich having no supposed income as such.
Raising taxes should never be seen as a way to raise revenue. Even if the Laffer curve has come under attack, there is still some profit maximizing rate which I’m positive most modern countries are beyond both at a static rate and at a growth and future revenue maximizing rate. No we don’t tax at this point to increase tax revenue. We do tax to shape what society looks like.
Right now society doesn’t look very good to so many people in the US it’s almost hard to talk about. Job growth is literally people saying, “hey, tomorrow, I can see it look better. We can spend time and resources to create something we all want more than today.” When job growth is low, that vision must also be low.
Taxation can turn that around in an industry. It can turn that around in aggregate. It does thay by both signaling to players, and by changing the game tree payout structure.
I think much of the taxation conversation right now is unfortunate because it keeps getting couched in terms of tax brackets, and that is almost a strawman at this point (even if many people think it’s important). I would say we need to tax the 1% differently. For instance, stock buy backs are currently a hugely distorting effect on the world economy. You can start by greatly taxing that.
The real thing people are talking about when talking about taxing the 1% isn’t just about tax brackets, it’s more about how taxes don’t materially effect people once they reach certain thresholds. It’s the same fundamental problem with traffic tickets. They are not proportional to general wealth so that means it’s a set of laws that apply less and less as one gains wealth which not only feels unfair, it is arguably a corrupting influence undermining the rule of law.
I am choosing not to get involved in a discussion about tax policy miniutiae as I am not an expert in any related way; instead, I wanted to provide factual context to the oft-repeated 'America was better in the 1950s due to the tax rate on the rich,' claim so folks might be able to better understand what they're attempting to say.
It's about how the taxes are spent too. If the government cuts welfare and gives handouts and subsidies to special interests, that is not an effective redistribution.
It would be interesting to see the same graph broken down by wealth (preferably) or income quintile. Maybe higher tax rates don't mean more tax income, but it does mean more wealth redistribution.
no one pays the top rate today either. I've spent a large chunk of my adult life in the top 5% of income earners and I've never had an effective tax rate over 17% that I can recall.
and the effective tax rate today for the ultra wealthy is 0.
Shit, a few years ago Jeff Bezos got a tax credit for his kids.
Think of how absurd that is. Jeff Bezos, the founder of a multitrillion dollar corporation that already receives billions in government contracts and subsidies, who owns a $500m yacht and a multibillion dollar real estate portfolio, asked for, and was given, a tax credit for his adult children.
(Note: I am not GP, and am not necessarily saying you can draw conclusions from this one chart, just that the change in net worth cannot be attributed solely to inflation.)
You can argue it was primarily due to inflation (changes in the economy can never be attributed solely to any one thing).
The upper 0.1% largely owns things that are relatively safe from inflation (like expensive real estate in areas where increases in value have exceeded the rate of inflation for decades) while the lower 50 - 80% does not.
It's effectively impossible to prove definitively, but I find it hard to believe it's a coincidence that the share of wealth held by asset-heavy individuals shot up at the exact same time the money supply increased significantly, especially given that lower class wages were actually increasing faster than inflation and upper class wages at the same time.
Yeah, there's absolutely a reason that we're not releasing a lot of key economic numbers and it's not because the government needs to clean house of people determined to sabotage things, and it's not because the numbers are so amazing that we have the "best economy the country has ever seen", either.
> we will be the harbinger of a large-scale societal collapse.
The harbingers are already here and have been for a while now. Harbingers are signs that things are breaking down. More like "or else we will have a large scale societal collapse".
My even hotter take: This was always the inevitable result of shareholder capitalism.
The only outcomes left are either unchecked descent into fascism as oligarchs consolidate power and finish their government takeover before their current power base falls apart, or a successful socialist revolution.
>This was always the inevitable result of shareholder capitalism.
Just capitalism. There's no actual or necessary distinction about what shape that capitalism takes.
A system where getting more money means you have more opportunity to generate more money by itself has all the feedback loop you need to consolidate over time, generate monopolies, and end up here.
Competition just doesn't happen in a free market. Actually competing, and trying to win marketshare or mindshare that way is too expensive, as there are much simpler and cheaper ways to impact a market.
Competition requires a fair market. This was fully understood by both Roosevelt trust busters, and both Teddy and FDR made big talk about "I'm not trying to kill business, I just want them to compete because that's such a force multiplier".
It doesn't take a socialist revolution. All it takes is like a gentle sprinkling of welfare and a fair and competitive market.
Granted, we have a lot of work to make the current market competitive. We've allowed so much consolidation that we would probably have to actively break up companies, we would have to nullify lots of contracts and IP rights and reduce the power a EULA can hold over you. Interoperability is necessary for competitive markets so we would have to roll back the DMCA anti-circumvention language. Improved customer rights would also help.
there is a saying that fascism is capitalism in crisis. I don't think this reactionary crisis response is restricted to capitalist economies or fascism. though. We can see this, for just one example, in the various persecutions of Jews in Europe during the middle ages any time there was a crop failure or a plague or some similar disaster.
I think that's mostly just HNers assuming AI like Claude Code is already penetrating the day to day work of the workforce.
"If I use, then everyone is probably using it".
Yet AI penetration is so low right now that it probably has zero role in the job market.
And it keeps us distracted from talking about the real reasons behind job opening decline.
That said, once AI ubiquity picks up within the next few years, we'll have all of the existing problems we're not talking about... plus AI. And we'll probably be even less capable of talking about the complexities of the market intelligently.
I think parent comment was talking about hype vs reality rather than disagreeing with you.
"We're not hiring but AI is in the news" = "We're not hiring because of AI! Don't sell our stock!" It's independent of actual current or future AI adoption.
Maybe. I am likely not a typical HNer, but my company actually has use of AI our 2026 goals. I am not guessing. I know majority of people in this company have those goals baked in. Now, can I suspect other like companies do the same? No. But even if they don't, it does not matter. Because the companies that don't allow AI, have people who use it anyway..
That is a lot pressure to put on a conjunction. It is up there along with 'it will never be'.
In all seriousness ( and some disclosure ), I like this tech so I am mildly biased in my stance. That said, I almost fully disagree with yours.
As much as I dislike Nadella, his last blog entry is not that far off. Using LLMs for stuff like email summaries is.. kinda silly at best. The right use cases may have not emerged yet, but, in a very real sense, it already has been transformative..
Yea, at being a search interface. But what else? Not that it can't be, but the failure rate for AI is absurd right now. What happens if it collapses and all its used for is answering questions on your phone and maybe better search of your emails? That seems to be a real and probably likely outcome. What then? Ironically, I think it will improve the economy because there are a lot of decisions that are on hold until we know what LLMs will be used for. Probably isn't going to be good for SEs either way.
<< but the failure rate for AI is absurd right now.
I keep a personal log of specific failures for simple CYA reasons. I do get some, but I can't honestly say it does not seem high to me. A lot likely depends on what is defined as a failure ( to me it typically is a clearly wrong result ). But those clearly wrong results do not seem to cross 10% of output.. so about the same as average human.
The writing is on the wall for AI. It is coming fast and it is transformative. That your company is still trying to ramp up AI adoption and processes for 2026 supports my point.
But we've been blaming AI for a couple years now, yet I suspect it's still too early in the adoption curve to have a meaningful impact on hiring compared to more boring explanations.
Even if AI wasn't being used for daily tasks by general employees, it's being used by HR and staff sourcing firms to sort through applications, so it already has had a large (negative) impact on hiring.
Maybe we should do an "Ask HN" for those in HR or adjacent roles to poll for experiences there.
"it's being used by HR and staff sourcing firms to sort through applications"
I think you are correct, but is anyone happy about the current situation? I suspect it will change and that change very likely will intentionally not involve AI. I suspect it will be an economic solution, not a technological one.
I hear what you are saying. In a very practical sense, I have no real way to measure either of those factors and the company I work for is international so that does not allow for an easy extrapolation. I guess what it really means is: we will find out:P
Really? I see H1B as the tiniest drop in the bucket compared to AI, at least in software. It's not that AI is filling 1 human role with 1 AI, it's that everyone who has a job knows that they need to keep it because the market is insanely cutthroat right now. Everyone has an AI-polished resume, and employers no longer see the value in having talented employees. Even if they did have talented employees they don't trust them enough to know how to do the work. If your employer says "I need you to start using AI" they may as well be saying "I don't trust you to know what's worth is worth your time." I see even a lot of people who have jobs as acting in a way that's consistent with on the verge of being fired, which I think is most of the real "value" of AI so far.
Bespoke AI has not gotten everywhere but generic AI absolutely has.
The workforce is happily making themselves more efficient by using AI on their phones for what used to be multi step look it up in the literature or your supplier's catalog or consult the instructions or read the rules process when performing cookie cutter tasks they know but don't remember exact specifications for.
Do you have a source for that? Everyone I know who works outside of tech is complaining about how AI is making their jobs harder because it’s wrong so much of the time that they’re spending more time correcting it than it saves, and it’s been a boon for cheaters looking to remove obvious tells from their attacks.
I'm talking about people who shower after work not people who shower before work.
I have no doubt that people who are having AI foisted upon them by admins at the behest of someone else hate it.
They use AI as basically a leveled up version of the summaries google used to provide for certain search types. Saves them a bunch of obnoxious clicking around on the internet or in software that was never designed for mobile or to make giving up the kind of info they're seeking easily.
These people usually know enough to know when it's "not quite right". Same "don't trust the docs" story that existed in many workplaces long before AI
An example I saw recently was someone asked for a modern equivalent of a grease that's no longer made/relevant and it replied back with some weird aviation stuff. The "real" answer wound up being "just use anything, the builders intent in specifying was to prevent you from using tallow or some other crap 100yr ago"
You’re getting very worked up arguing about a 6% difference. Please grow up. You can call people doomers all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that the economy is getting worse.
I'm not worked up about anything, just pointing out that a contrived metric isn't all that meaningful but feeds into the preconceived notions of people like the parent poster who seem to love to submit drive-by comments about how terrible everything is.
The economy is not doing great. That doesn't mean the "economy is completely fucked and we are in a race to steal and horde all the data before people catch on", which is an absurd statement on numerous levels.
And don't tell me to grow up, especially when you've completely missed the point.
>”economy is completely fucked and we are in a race to steal and horde all the data before people catch on”
Have you been following current events for the past year? This is not an absurd statement.
You can’t just dismiss news you don’t want to accept as ”doomer FUD”, call a leading economics an “huckster” and then not back it up with real data. Go to twitter or truth social if you want to cherry-pick the news you want to believe in.
Yes, I've been following current events for the last few decades, including the last year. We weren't "completely fucked" in 1990-1991, 2000-2001, 2008, or 2020, (or any of the other cataclysmic events that occurred long before my lifetime) so why would slowing down from the hottest labor market in a generation mean we are "completely fucked" now?
And what on earth does "we are in a race to steal and horde all the data before people catch on" even mean? Who is the "we" who are stealing and hoarding (which is the correct spelling FYI) compared to the "people" who would catch on that it's happening (and presumably care)? What data is being stolen, how, and from whom? Why is hoarding data a problem? Why would any of this matter in the first place if we're "completely fucked" anyway?
Could it be that people like you and the parent poster lack perspective (and potentially some self-awareness) and are prone to overreacting?
And I didn't call the parent poster any names, just pointed out that the assessment he was relying on was nonsensical (and probably designed solely to generate ad revenue and brand awareness) and his conclusions were extremely pessimistic compared to the consensus.
Should I have invented my own biased metric (maybe based on land mass since very few of the larger US states are experiencing a recession based on the source provided) as a counterpoint?
What are your ideas concerning the displayed data and narrative?
Personal-savings rate says we're heading into a recession, but aren't yet in one [1]. Labour-force participation, on the other hand, suggests we may be [2].
Assuming we go into another shutdown at the end of the month, none of this may be clear until well into the autumn.
Eh, layoffs also declined, consumer spending is up YoY, and we all know about the investments being made in AI that very well might be propping up the economy.
AI, when effective, is deflationary because it allows for similar productivity at a lower cost. That's what you're describing above, not a shadow recession that is being papered over by claims of AI use.
To my point: You could have replaced "AI" with "computing" for most of the last 50 years and been left with the same argument.
My own personal example working at a small govt contractor in which we had a team of 12 working on an app for 10 years. We lost the re-bid to a smaller team (5 to 6)/budget using AI. We have been informed going forward the company will be following the competition (small teams using AI and bidding like the competition via smaller budget needs).
Many job openings are just a way for recruiting to harvest resumes, or to give the impression there's some growth going on, or to conceal the actual open headcounts for teams. Ghost jobs.
This impacts vulnerable people looking for jobs and makes job search highly inefficient.
I was just telling someone the other day how all the talk of civil wars and unrest were overblown, Americans will never resort to that with the economy the way it is. Even in the '08 recession (and even worse scenarios), recovery was a possibility. There would be no jobs at the time, but you can reasonably expect them to be created in a few years. You could go to school and switch careers.
But I think right now there is a dreadful perfect storm of sorts.
- It's not just LLMs, the social/political environment just doesn't favor risk taking, which means less opportunities.
- The US will be alienated from all its good trade partners for a decade plus at best. They'll still do trade, but the era of relying on US companies, or relying on a stable US consumer base is over.
- The dollar will decline, by how much I don't know but it will. Less buying power for American companies.
- Education is in shambles, and skilled & educated immigrants who can leave the US are doing so in droves. Brain drain will be real, the pipeline to replace them will take a generation, and that is if it was fixed today.
- Historically, there is a natural re-balancing of powers that happens as a result of people getting upset and organizing change or some sort. But the ability of the population to organize meaningfully is curtailed because tech, moderation and surveillance capitalism.
- I won't say too much about the current admin, but things are really scary. Not as in "i'm upset about this" or "so much for democracy" but more like "i'm scared for my life" levels of scary.
- Erosion of trust is huge, you don't take risks if you don't have some trust. consumer spending, loans, business spending,etc... and the erosion of trust is fundamental and hard to repair. Trust is also heavily asymmetric, it costs a lot to obtain, but it takes little to lose it. Once lost, gaining it again is usually orders of magnitude more costly.
let me stop there for brevity, but my point was how the US has never truly been in a situation where the economy is doing bad, and the politics is untenable. You have people who are in power and well incentivized to make things even worse, you can cancel elections and deploy troops better if things are really and truly "bad". When people stop having their basic needs met (and I don't mean health care and affordable houses - but food and shelter), I'm concerned there will not be many ways left where the rule of law and peace can be sustained.
It's one of those things, like "you can't unspill the milk". If things get as bad as I fear, right now, today is as good as it will ever get in the US. What scares me is that Americans aren't terrified enough, those that know better are in catatonic state of "what can i possibly do about it?" - and I mean all Americans regardless of politics.
From what I understand, things will get bad but for 99% of the world, the rest of this century should be bearable climate-wise. There simply aren't enough fossil fuels in the ground to keep it burning longer than 2100~ish anyways. I mean, the problem is very real and millions might die, but at the same time the majority of the billions will do ok as well, so no real cause for nihilsm on that front. Especially considering the mortality rates at the same decades a century earlier would still be significantly higher.
Wars, economic crises and other turmoils however, that's a tough one. Even climate change alone will stress out too many things and exasperate those areas.
It's more like we've had it really good post-WW2 over all, and that will go away pretty soon. Even ocean currents collapsing and acidification of the ocean, as bad as it is, it won't yet be the worst or cataclysmic I'm afraid.
Widespread undesirable situations like that tend to result in humans coming up with solutions too. It took us WW2 to get nuclear energy. It took slavery and colonialism to get us the industrial age. Bad things and good things tend to come and go alike.
I can only speculate, but many are going back to their home countries. China is also ok-ish from what I hear (at least in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen). Native born americans are also trying very hard to move to Canada, UK and EU.
But your question is what is a better country for them? A year ago, I would have said none. But I'm sure you're seen the same news that I am where even when immigrate legally, work hard, obey the law,etc.. even having real-ID proof is of no use, they get jailed. the threat of imprisonment alone, just for existing is scary, I'd say just about any other country that won't throw you in prison for existing is better. They're also talking about revoking citizenship of Americans so non-nonchalantly, hardly anyone cares. I don't even if the US is safe right now just for getting your degree at an Ivy-league school.
You said "especially for americans" - they're talking about getting rid of H1Bs right now, my comment is about the brain-drain from immigrants. The majority of the time, it isn't to save money, but the talent just isn't there in the US. Even in software-dev, there is a sort of flood of compsci grads right now, but it's only so because so much of these positions are filled with immigrants. Many other fields will have strong demand, and if the supply could be bootstrapped in a few years it isn't a big deal, but while americans get degrees (which isn't happening like before! it's really really bad right now) american companies lose their competitive advantage. Look at the CEOs of Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, they 're the type of people ICE would be eager to throw in prison were it not for their wealth and connections. Go to Arxiv.org to see pre-prints on research papers from various industries, look at the names of who's publishing.
You have to understand that the current environment and government in the US is specifically to drive out immigrants. There is a reason ICE has a higher budget than the US marines right now ($50B), they're not at the border arresting illegal migrants, they're hunting legal migrants in american cities. There are many countries where there are little opportunities for work, and population and government are very hostile to migrants (russia for example, or even japan in certain cases),but you will not have to fear being thrown in jail at-random, or constantly fear for your safety, especially for those who have family hear, I can't image what it must be like.
i'm also not really sure why the budget the marines is relevant here. the DoD has a nearly trillion dollar budget. if we're going to randomly segment out expense centers why not focus it even more narrowly to something arbitrary like how much the military spends on flour for pizzas?
for ICE, total effective/enhanced funding for FY2026 is widely reported in the $28–30B from what I can tell.
not trying to be a dick but dont want to spend more time wording this more softly
They didn't outsource manufacturing, rely on foreign parties for critical tech, and rely on immigrants (legal or not) for both skilled and unskilled labor. They didn't have instant comms and globalized commerce either.
Only tangentially related, the Nazis started the holocaust, in part, as a way to boost their domestic economy while making invasion supply chains viable. Less people to fight over resources, they were removing demand because of supply shortages, in literally the worst way possible.
> They didn't outsource manufacturing, rely on foreign parties for critical tech, and rely on immigrants (legal or not) for both skilled and unskilled labor.
Outsourcing manufacturing is new. But you are wrong about the other two.
Why do you think fascists (and proto-fascists and the unrelated look-alikes) keep losing wars all through history?
Fascism as a term started getting used with Mussolini from what I recall. Italy back then did not depend much on foreign supply chain or immigrant labor as far as I know, am I mistaken, or are there other examples you're thinking of.
Germany did enough for it to matter¹, Spain did. Everything in Japan was imported when they started warmongering around².
Italy was in an exception situation at the beginning of WWII, where they couldn't afford external goods.
1 - Mainly because they pushed their definition of "hated foreigner" to an extreme.
2 - They made a huge movement into replacing production chains, mandated by the government at the beginning of the war. But their lack of access to tech was still crippling at the end of the war.
Yeah I didn't say it was an easy fix, I just said I thought it was (probably) the best. America has been having diversity/foreign policy issues since day 1 with wiping out the Indians. It's not going to go away tomorrow.
> Look at the US South. They have been poor for generations because they dislike diversity more than they want a strong economy and common prosperity.
The US South is the only place in the country with "diversity" seriously go look a population maps the north has a fraction of the diversity of the south.
Florida has a GDP in line with Australia, or South Korea, or Spain, and with a smaller population. Not exactly what I would call generationally poor. Texas has the same GDP as Italy, but with half the population.
Alabama, US and Bavaria, Germany also have a similar GDP per capita. You would simply be insane to think Alabama was in any way wealthier than Bavaria. This isn't me having a go at the US, this is me having a go at GDP.
Bavaria is one of the wealthiest regions in Germany and Alabama is one of the poorest US states. So it's not really a great comparison.
Also GDP per capita doesn't have that much to do with "wealth". It's a good proxy for income though. So I'm not sure what you are claiming here exactly.
> You would simply be insane to think Alabama was in any way wealthier than Bavaria.
Is it accurate? Europe has a fairly low standard of living compared to America, but their totalitarian governments are quite effective at silencing all dissent.
Yes, life in Bavaria, working in manufacturing, is nothing but miserable oppression. Horrible 35 hour work week. Wretched 6 weeks of vacation. Ruinously expensive 500 EUR/month daycare. The prospect of having to pay a couple hundred Euros per semester when my child reaches university.
The good wine is now 8 EUR/bottle.
Suffering and deprivation.
Do not come here, I beg of you. Save yourself.
I had to use extraordinary means to get this message out.
GDP per capita is about the crudest possible metric for economic well-being. Nobody in Australia is going into bankruptcy over hospital bills or student loans.
Try comparing life expectancy instead, it's a better metric for how well the population is actually doing. Those two US states have comparatively high inequality and lower life expectancy, suggesting they're burning human capital to fuel GDP and generate billionaires.
I haven't read about it much since the height of the Purdue/Oxycontin scandal but the so-called 'deaths of despair' - suicide, overdose and alcoholic liver disease - are also relatively high in the USA.
Jolla's Sailfish OS, GrapheneOS (I know, uses AOSP). It's going to be more touch than running stock Android or iOS, but the more users and funding these get, the more resources for development.
I think there will be a lot of chaos in the coming years. But chaos also creates opportunities. There is a lot of local talk about moving away from US Tech and for new tech, you already see this happening. E.g. our local university has forbidden the use of most US LLM services (because of privacy and data protection issues) and are doing trials with Mistral. Most likely they'll roll out Mistral university-wide. Two years ago, they would have certainly gone Gemini.
The bears will be right eventually. But they'll be wrong many times in a row before that. And we'll pull through, eventually. I'm a long-term optimist, so I'm not particularly worried about when the next downturn will be.
In other years, the US was not threatening to annex allies, blow up NATO, etc. To speak in Hacker News terms, the world is slowly and increasingly faster going to rebase away from the US. Sadly for the US, their biggest arch enemy (besides DEI), China, is going to benefit from it hugely.
Frenemies that play according to a rule book are more worthy than frenemies that have gone insane.
Makes sense. I know of multiple companies that reduced their headcount by a factor of 10 after Opus 4.5. Their new business model is basically: CEO + CTO + CFO + hundreds of Opus 4.5 agents.
I'm a big agent proponent myself but I don't think these kinds of companies actually exist yet. It's gotta either be some CTO who learned the word "orchestration" or "agent harness" and decided to play around with that stuff, or pure fantasy from the usual suspects of VC-twitter trying to build FOMO/signal themselves as part of the "in crowd"/drive engagement with hyperbole.
Bloomberg gift linK: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-07/us-job-op...
Not necessary, this information is free:
https://finviz.com/calendar/economic/detail/UNITEDSTAJOBOFF?...
> Job openings in the US fell by 303,000 to 7.146 million in November 2025, the lowest since December 2020 and well below market expectations of 7.60 million. The number of job openings decreased in accommodation and food services (-148,000); transportation, warehousing, and utilities (-108,000); and wholesale trade (-63,000). On the other hand, openings increased in construction (+90,000). Meanwhile, hires were little changed and total separations were unchanged at 5.1 million each. Within separations, both quits (3.2 million) and layoffs and discharges (1.7 million) were little changed.
I'd say personally it's worthwhile for Americans to know where to get the canonical data directly: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.a.htm. Everything else is some sort of spin, interpretation, or at best selective reporting of the underlying primary data.
I generally agree. But with the current administration firing the former BLS chief (possibly due to bad numbers being reported) and changing economic reporting (e.g. PPI and GDP estimates), I'm not sure I trust the government data to not also have some sort of spin or selective releasing.
transportation, warehousing, and utilities being a headlining loser here is the most striking.... perhaps?
Heavy Truck Sales Collapsed in Q4; Down 32.5% Year-over-Year in December - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514490 - January 2026
(heavy trucks sales collapse is a recession indicator)
Craig Fuller - the CEO of Freightwave - has been indicating that their freight data clearly suggests the US economy is in much worse shape than official reporting.
this is usually more accurate than most indicators - as America's economy runs on trucks not donuts.
more trucks on the road - more goods flowing - heavy machinery included, things getting built etc. less trucks - trouble
Certainly sounds like canaries telling us the rest of the economy is not doing great. (Not warning us that it's going to have problems. Telling us it already does.)
The economy canaries can't tell us anything: they're already dead.
That's literally how the canaries would inform the miners about toxic gases.
Happily, this wasn't actually the case. Canaries faint long before they die and miners would carry small resuscitation chambers where the canaries could be reawakened in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The Science and Industry Museum in Liverpool has one in their collection: https://blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/canary-resuscit...
Interesting, but I frankly doubt the birds remained utterly unharmed. Birds are really sensitive to many gases, with the common anecdote being to not cook with nonstick pans if you have a parrot.
"Yes, Ted. That was the joke."
Gift link costs me nothing :)
> Some economists have questioned the validity of the JOLTS data, in part due to the survey’s low response rate and sometimes sizable revisions. A separate index by job-posting site Indeed, which is reported on a daily basis, showed openings rebounded in November after reaching a multiyear low.
Thank you!
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL
Job openings are still very high, ~30% higher than the average for the last few decades.
This has been called out by the Moody's Analytics economists in their podcast [0] for a while. The generally accepted explanation is that online job postings no longer map 1:1 to actual open positions at companies, ie many companies are not actually hiring despite having a listing for an open role.
This has become common enough that it has gained it's own term: "ghost" postings/listings.
[0] https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/insights/podcasts/inside-ec...
We also have the unemployment numbers, and they are low. If job openings were largely ghost listings, and we were in a stealth recession, we'd see it in rising unemployment. Now unemployment HAS been creeping up, but still is low. If it hits 5% then I'd worry about a downturn.
Does this 5% include people who have fallen out of the unemployed bucket into some sort of long term bucket? I know multiple people who have been looking for 6 months+. Not to mention underemployed.
It never has. The labor force participation rate for 25-54 year-olds is a better metric for such things.[1] Last time it was this high was 1990s through 2002. (Before that, it was never this high.)
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
The shape of that graph is roughly equivalent to the shape of labor force participation for women [1]. I don’t think that detracts from your point in regards to the last 20-30 years, but in regards to “before that it was never this high” I think it’s evident that the societal shift of women joining the workforce is the reason, not an improvement in the economy.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
The data in the FRED link doesn't come from online job postings but rather from surveys that businesses complete about their open positions. They don't really have much reason to lie in those surveys (or at least not any more than they have in the past?)
honest question, because it's something I don't understand well. is it possible the quantity of job openings can mask the quality of jobs openings? if job openings at fast food restaurants goes up 1000% maybe this isn't positive
You want to look at info broken down by sector and wages yeah. Look into "underemployment" for more
Yes, employment statistics rarely tell you anything about the quality of the jobs. And when they do tell something, it's the simplest information possible.
But the statistics are selected in a way that if a society maintains a low headline unemployment for a long time, it's correlated to an increase in the quality of the jobs¹. The correlation is still not perfect, and authoritarian countries love to redefine the date so their absolute value changes.
1 - More clearly, a constant low unemployment correlates to a positive derivative in quality. And a constant high unemployment correlates to a negative derivative in quality.
Cash is king. Look at change in income by quintile (or preferably decile, but I was too lazy to check mark all those and make a graph)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1Q95B&heig...
Shouldn’t job openings always trend upwards with increasing population?
FRED lets you control for population actually! It does flatten the change a bit but it's still a bump: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Q8J6
Is that still true? I would guess net immigration is 0 or negative at this point.
Fred also has that answer: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTHM
Growing up to an estimated 342 million.
It also has an estimate for the working population (ages 25-54, so called "prime workers"): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU00000060
Mostly flat from 2010-2021, with a recent uptick to 131 million. The discrepancy is likely due to the boomers aging out of the category, and a smaller generation coming in.
Maybe this isn't what you meant, but Millennials are the larger generation and they just finished aging into the workforce category.
The youngest Millennials were 18 in 2014 and 22 in 2018. At this point, it's the smaller Gen Z entering the workforce, not Millennials.
Let me put it another way: the [20, 25) and [25, 30) age cohorts are larger than any cohort aged 50+ that might have recently aged out. So that "prime age" workforce is still growing.
This could be true, but it isn't obviously true (to me). (I dispute a little bit the idea that there are many new workers in the [25, 30) demo.) There are 37M workers 55+, but only 20M in the 16-24 range: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18b.htm (2024 numbers)
Nobody in either of those cohorts is in the BLS "prime age" group which is [25, 55). The incoming cohorts that are now 15 to 25 are larger than the outgoing cohorts that are 45 to 55.
Ah, that makes sense. Thank you.
I don't understand how this chart can be true at all. Does this include ghost listings?
It comes from surveys based on this criteria:
> JOLTS defines Job Openings as all positions that are open (not filled) on the last business day of the month. A job is "open" only if it meets all three of the following conditions:
1. A specific position exists and there is work available for that position. The position can be full-time or part-time, and it can be permanent, short-term, or seasonal, and
2. The job could start within 30 days, whether or not the establishment finds a suitable candidate during that time, and
3. There is active recruiting for workers from outside the establishment location that has the opening.
Very likely which is the point of the ghost jobs and gives the illusion that the OP is falling for. Companies (especially publicly traded ones) do not want analysts at banks or hedge funds using their careers page as a good / bad signal.
Therefore, it is cope.
Fake job listings, possibly, but doubt. Fake low unemployment too?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
OK, how about employment, if the jobs are fake, this should be down:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
"Cope" is ignoring every stat that disagree with what you want to believe. We aren't in a great economy, It looks like it is flattening, but not bad, not shrinking, and there is an abundance of jobs.
Arent a lot of job openings known to be resume collection bins and HRs keep them open so that company can say "Oh we created this many jobs but no was willing to work for us"
They're not
Thanks. It is very funny how young people perceive this market. Unemployment is basically lower than it has ever been and people are panicking. Prime age labor force participation rate near all-time record highs. The people are almost dangerously over-employed.
I'm young-ish transitioning to middle age (36).
The job market is AWFUL for my generation, and pretty much always has been since we entered the workforce.
Unemployment might be low if you think that folks with advanced STEM degrees can go and get a part time gig at McDonald's.
If you look at meaningful employment - where one can make enough to live near where they work, save a bit, pay food/rent, and spend a bit for their leisure or health, well....no we are not over-employed. We are in a death spiral.
You seem to be mostly making a cost of living argument, with which I wouldn't disagree. But you can't employ/pay your way out of those costs, the problem is on the supply side. So that seems spurious to an employment rate conversation.
I am slightly older than you, and literally don't know a person who isn't employed and doing well (including plenty your age and younger), though I am aware they exist.
It's almost like anecdotal reports are meaningless, and we should rely on well sourced data to determine how things like the economy are doing.
Spoiler alert: there is no indication we are in a death spiral, though in my opinion Trump seems to be doing his best to correct that. Fortunately, I don't think he's up to the task.
I founded a company partially because I spent 2 years on the job hunt and got absolutely nothing. So yeah, here's one example of someone who isn't doing well - me.
I was doing terribly. Honestly, I still am. I've just been fortunate enough to have conceived a product some people in my city want. Will the business scale and succeed? I hope so, because I'm fucked if it goes south.
And yes, anecdotal data sucks. But I'd take that over whatever bullshit the Trump administration says. Especially after they fired the BLS statisticians.
I'd like to back you up and point out that I've considered doing the same. If VCs will throw money at anyone promising to advance the SOTA in AI, and I can promise that, why am I bothering to keep looking for research positions or with a financially flailing industry employer?
Fair enough. My product is very much non-tech (CPG - beverage). But you're right that VCs are still throwing money around like its the ZIRP days. If you have an idea, go for it.
LOL the primary reason I haven't done it was needing to come up with a concrete business model and MVP.
Genuine question: how did you conduct your job search? What steps did you take during those two years? Do you have a degree?
LinkedIn applications, applying to every PM role available in my metro area that I could, attending as many tech & startup events as I could. I got to know the main writer of the local startup/tech news aggregator pretty well and would pester him regularly for contacts at new local companies that he's talking with. I was active in my city's tech Slack/Discord community.
I do have a degree albeit on not in STEM. Also have an advanced degree (also not STEM) that helped the company I was with from 2018 until 2021.
I want to back this guy up because I was in the same hole.
See my above post. Basically, tons of applications, going to networking events 2-3x a week, being active in local tech Slack/Discord groups, bothering the lead writer of the local tech/startup newsletter, etc.
Sounds like you're on to something, hope that's what turns things around for you.
Thank you. Fingers crossed
Because it measures open job listing. All of the job listing i've apply to and never hear back from still exist too. Take from that what you will.
I can assure you that has happened before. I just find it amusing. A professional now 25-30 years old started their career in what was the most spectacularly overheated labor market of all time. Now it is very very slightly cooling off, still way hotter than historical norms, and there are many complaints. But it is all relative.
The government has spent decades figuring out ways to lie about this. Are you actually shocked? The number of men who can buy a home and have a stay-at-home-wife on a random job they got out of high school is nigh 0% when this used to be the norm.
Leaving aside your misguided RETVRN subtext, none of this really comes down to government policy. All of it is an emergent wage-cost spiral. As soon as your neighbors collectively decide to have 2 incomes per household it becomes untenable to attempt to be the last household with only 1 income.
Haha, you speak of ivory towers without even knowing so
In far more words this entire position is simply "let them eat cake" but without the excuse of a royal court distorting reality.
Willful ignorance is worse.
Correct. The prime age labor force participation rate is 0.8% lower than the all-time record highest in recorded US history, January 1999.
Corporate America is such a weird place. They rather hire immigrants than retrain or educate existing workforce. Everything about the US economy is plug and play then discard. And if they can’t plug and play, they will just scrap the whole thing. That’s exactly what’s happening right now.
Where is the evidence that corporate America prefers immigrants over existing workforce? I've never heard such a claim before.
> if they can’t plug and play, they will just scrap the whole thing
This isn't just corporate America, it's all of America and all of humanity. Anything that's not plug and play has higher costs, higher risk, higher delays, and less chance of success.
Sudden and unexpected changes that increase uncertainty make it harder to invest in retraining, rather than easier. Increased uncertainty always decreases investment, because there's higher risk.
These are very very basic management considerations to anybody that runs a group, a lab, a small firm, or a large firm.
> Sudden and unexpected changes that increase uncertainty make it harder to invest in retraining, rather than easier.
This largely ignores the uncertainty and costs of a revolving workforce, and the value of having a workforce that all knows each other, the way the company works, and cares whether it succeeds.
When I was younger, I did a bunch of short-ish stints at various companies (I think average tenure was a hair under 2 years) because someone else would offer more money, more exciting work, etc. It was incredibly inefficient for the employer. "Waiting for my laptop/credentials to be issued" was like a full percentage point of my time there. I barely cared whether the company did well because I wasn't going to be there long enough for my RSUs to swing wildly either way. I never got to the point where I knew offhand who to talk to about niche parts of the product, and never became "that guy" for anyone else.
Frankly a lot of our stuff was higher risk and took longer because of the revolving doors. People important to a project would leave in the middle, or the person who wrote an important system would quit so we were left with whatever tribal knowledge we had.
Things worked well when the lady that wrote our invoicing system 20 years ago was still around but in security now. Things went poorly when she quit 6 months ago and now I have to reverse engineer it to figure out why I get stack overflows on invoices that contain an image.
> This largely ignores the uncertainty and costs of a revolving workforce, and the value of having a workforce that all knows each other, the way the company works, and cares whether it succeeds.
I'm not "ignoring" that, and a retrained workforce is also a revolving workforce.
When I run teams or companies I invest heavily in giving employees opportunities to train for new skills, level up on their existing skills, and grow into greater responsibility and knowledge domains. But that always needs to be balanced with the rest of the needs. When my runway is uncertain, that reduces the ability to plan for adding training for existing employees rather than bringing in a consultant or a new hire.
Look at the incentives and you'll see it's not weird at all.
> They rather hire immigrants than retrain or educate existing workforce
The existing workforce is literally the most expensive in the world. And if you add to that its toxicity, what specifically surprises you?
What toxicity is unique to the US labor force?
Yes - same question - maybe I'm a frog in boiling water but same question. The most toxicity I've encountered is when working with large groups of foreign workers that retained their workplace norms from their home country.
> What toxicity is unique to the US labor force?
Assuming they're referring to litigation risk. Anecdotally, laying someone off in San Francisco basically means paying a $30k settlement.
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How is that weird? If American's can't compete with the wage expectations of foreign workers then they're not going to be hired.
If US workers can't compete then vote for less immigration. It's not the corporates or the foreigners fault, it's the government that's putting those groups first over US workers.
its not that they're putting people who are immigrants over US workers, they are putting corporate profits before US workers.
the US is terrible at protecting american jobs for americans. i am not overly educated on this but it seems like a lot of countries, europe specifically, are extremely protective of their jobs.
i don't think americans are somehow inherently more worthy of employment and opportunity than people from other countries, but it does seem like it may be a playing field that isn't very level if a lot of other countries are protecting jobs but the US isn't. in addition to our cost of living being tremendously high compared to the countries we outsource our work to, it isn't even an option for an american to go get a job in (for example) india and send home paycheck to support family in the US.
Have you considered that those "protections" you mention in Europe are in fact counterproductive and actually are a large reason why they are less productive, and therefore less competitive and less wealthy (even when accounting for hours worked)?
I personally would like to see some sort of system where we account for discrepancies in regulations related to worker protections, government subsidies, and environmental standards through taxation (e.g. Chinese crap is no longer as cheap as it is right now because we account for the substandard worker conditions and environmental damage being done), but I think restricting the labor market too much would be incredibly damaging.
>the US is terrible at protecting american jobs for americans.
I recently finished Peter Zehan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning and in it, it explicitly says that the American economic order was created in such a way that the loss of American jobs over time was by design.
Basically, as the American worker and consumer expects more and more, we need a larger international system to support that ("a rising tide..." analogy). However, we let the profits derived from such a system wind up in a smaller and smaller group of self-interested people who don't give a damn if the whole system goes belly up, because they've "got theirs". Such short-sighted thinking.
It makes sense that you wouldn't hire in such an uncertain environment. We have a President using emergency powers to affect sweeping, unpredictable, consequential changes to the economy that can dramatically alter unit economics overnight and completely tank a previously viable business. Within this calendar year, the President's ability to do this may be upended by pending court cases, an election, or both. Following those potential changes, the breach of trust created by the previous chaos may mean that trade never returns to normal. I don't envy anyone trying to make long-term business decisions, like hiring, in such an environment.
One of my clients is a midsized logistics brokerage based in LA. Right now is RFP season, where they bid on freight contracts with various existing and potential customers. These contracts are typically one year long. A bid you submit now might be for a contract that goes Sept-Sept.
This is difficult even under normal circumstances because you have to predict what carrier (trucker) rates will be in the future. You also have to predict fuel costs, because even though these are usually variable, when fuel costs go up so does your margin (so if you expect higher fuel prices you can lower your bid price). And you have to game out what your competitors are going to bid too. You can’t be too conservative (expensive) or you won’t get the bid. But if you lock in a contract with a certain expectation of rates and it swings the other way, you’re on the hook for millions in losses.
Now imagine doing that normally difficult task in this environment. Who knows what will happen. Wars, a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), deportations, tariffs, the collapse of USMCA…the uncertainty is near endless. Big tech companies are doing great, everyone else is getting absolutely destroyed.
Why is the revocation taking place? Is it related to the federal government?
Related, yes. US DoT wants non-dom CDLs revoked[1]:
> The decision comes amid pressure from the U.S. Department of Transportation, which announced in November 2025 that it would compel California to revoke thousands of what it calls “illegally issued” non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses.
[1]: https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/california-cancellati...
There's been a big up about undocumented Sikh commercial drivers with CDL licenses, primarily because there have been some spectacular fatal crashes on video.
Typically companies use things like futures, options, and forward contracts to fix or cap their input costs for commodities like oil. This lets them bid on projects without needing to know the future price of oil.
Uncertainty has a cost which exists no matter where you move it around. Yes, investment banks might sell you some kind of exotic derivative which moves the risk onto them, but they'll charge a risk premium for this (probably a very high one since the risk factors here are pretty unusual and hard to model), and that makes it harder to stay afloat as a business. There is no handwaving away the damage that uncertainty does to commerce.
Even if you can find someone to write you a weird, bespoke (and therefore expensive) derivative to hedge against the Trump DoT revoking thousands of CDLs, you've still only succeeded in moving all these calculations and risks to that counterparty. Somebody somewhere still has to have the headache of pricing this risk.
The insurance company can also just go bankrupt if they priced it incorrectly and then your hedge is worthless.
Ideally a reinsurer would be on the hook at that point.
Seriously? What hedge contract you going to use for: 1) Wars, 2) a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), 3)deportations, 4)tariffs, 5) the collapse of USMCA
Oh, that's easy. Just make bets on Polymarket, which totally has no connection to anyone in the adminstration.
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/05/nx-s1-5667232/polymarket-madu...
War-risk insurance is a thing [1]. You could probably buy a business-interruption policy with a line item for revocations. Adding a tariff contingency to customer contracts and/or engaging with vendors on a fixed-price tariff-notwithstanding basis transfers tariff risk.
Deportatios and the collapse of a free-trade zone are not mitigatable. De-leveraging from products that don't have a strong domestic alternative would be the only options there.
All costs. None easy. But all doable. (Not saying it's good business.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_risk_insurance
Right, and then you lose the contract to someone who decided, rather than pricing in the risks, to have their hedge be "Idk guess I'll go bankrupt lmao" and bid as usual.
> Wars, a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), deportations, tariffs, the collapse of USMCA…the uncertainty is near endless.
So, uh, did business owners actually take any of these things, which very much were promised during campaign season, into account when voting? Or did they walk into the ballot box thinking, "no-one wants to work anymore!" and pull the lever for the guy promising to make applicants a bit more motivated to work at lower wages?
Actually its easy if you're a multinational. You invest outside the United States.
I work for an global company in the industrial automation space. Not only is there is a major effort underway to offshore jobs and manufacturing from the US, but our customers around the world are pulling way back on capital expenditures, citing US policy uncertainties as a primary reason.
Yup, unfortunately my own job is at risk as our company has, if not explicitly at least in action, essentially ended technical hiring in the U.S.
They’re basically downsizing the technical sides through attrition while hiring heavily abroad.
Exactly what’s happening at my company
I work for a regional manufacturing company in the US and we have been booming since COVID (nearly doubling every year) and have not seen a slow down.
Manufacturing firms seem to be doing really well, here (midwest US).
This is all dependent on the company owners.
A multi-million dollar company I help start, in the Midwest USA, had manufacturing, customer service, R&D, and shipping all in the same state. After being bought by Texas VCs, everything moved out of the area. They don't want to run and build a business, they want to make X millions in Y years.
To do this, manufacturing moved to South Korea, customer service to some Asian country, slashed R&D by removing QA, and shipped the other jobs to a more _cost effect state_ not in the Midwest. Everyone that had institutional knowledge was fired to reduce cost of employee salaries.
Note you want QA because it is a life safety solution. Speaking with former colleagues, the quality of the solution went down hill while the price kept rising.
In my current company, all assembly jobs were removed from in-state and shipped to a more _cost effect state_ before the end of 2025. This also affects the end user because I can no longer go to assembly and test software changes or custom hardware changes before the product ships.
Jobs are not being lost because of unskilled people, they are being lost to help the rich get richer.
> Jobs are not being lost because of unskilled people, they are being lost to help the rich get richer.
Indeed, imagine you're part of the wealthy elite. What you want is to be able to move your cash around the world, chasing cash growth. You also want yourself to be able to travel wherever you wish with your Gulfstream. Why would they care about local midwest job growth ?
Solutions exist, but it's too communist.
You don't have to be communist, you just have to be selective about the capitalists you engage with.
An business mentor of mine bootstrapped a highly profitable enterprise software company, growing it to 400 employees. When it was time to sell/retire, he vetted buyers not just for the money they could offer, but for the impact they would have on his team and community. He accepted an offer from a conservatively-run competitor and proudly told me that 5 years later, 90% of the original staff were still happily employed with the new owner.
These arrangements are simply not an option if you're beholden to VC, or entertain offers from Private Equity. You cannot preserve what you do not own.
Where are your downstream clients?
All over the Midwest with some random ones all over the US. Tesla, Toyoda, and ThyssenKrupp are clients, for example.
What industry?
Packaging. Boxes, shippers, pallets, parts transports for use within automotive and other factories, etc. Very little direct to consumer or display stuff.
Analysts use packaging companies as a canary for manufacturing in general.
Interesting! I am familiar with this space as we developed a software tool [0] to optimize packaging based on 3D packing technology we developed. If it is relevant to you, happy to chat!
[0] https://www.pack-studio.com/
We currently use ArtiosCAD and TOPS pro for load and pallet optimization. I'll check out your software and forward over to the people-that-sign-the-checks.
also, future of USD-value is highly uncertain, dropped 10% last year, likely to drop more if interest rates keep dropping
That makes the US a more compelling place for foreign capital to invest in talent though.
Like your optimism
I mean that's a big part of why so many people want the USA dollar to go even lower. The administration has been very explicit that they want a cheaper dollar but unlike a lot of their other polices that goal has a lot of support among economists.
It makes it more attractive for FOREX trading, maybe, but economic instability (which Trump is absolutely fomenting) is anathema to investors.
The administration's target was an additional 20% devaluation or so by next year, they want to devalue by about 30% total
I'm not a multinational, but that's what I've been doing since February.
It sadly doesn't work that well with tariffs in play again anything done outside the USA has to pay and frankly other nation just don't spend like American's.
The US needs an offshoring tax. If you want to sell to Americans you also need to hire Americans.
US would lose out significantly if this were applied by everyone worldwide. The whole of Europe + Anglosphere have surrendered their whole tech related sectors to US companies, an enormous wealth transfer.
Most US tech related companies are actually headquartered in Ireland (for tax purposes)
> Most US tech related companies are actually headquartered in Ireland (for tax purposes)
Regional headquarters. That helps with their taxes in Europe. It wouldn't work to avoid taxes on money made in the US.
You'd be dead wrong there... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
You want to tax foreign businesses that sell stuff to you?
Ok, given you can only tax stuff when it passes into your territory what you really have there is called a "tariff", it is paid by… the customer, when they buy the thing.
The seller has an entire planet to sell to. The US has about 25% of the money to buy things with, but even then only because we all like your money. Moment we stop liking your money, that probably drops to 20%.
You may not like tariffs but it's not as straightforward as "customer pays". Customers and businesses will part of it. Businesses will most likely give up some part of the margin and customers will pay a higher price.
>>The seller has an entire planet to sell to.
For a lot of goods US is responsible for 50% of profits. It was for me for a long time when I was selling software. Quick googling suggests some EU automakers make close to 50% of their profits in US as well.
US is the premium market everyone wants to sell to. There is nowhere else like that, especially for high margin goods.
I’m not sure why this logic isn’t more mainstream. Half the country is clamoring for tariffs, bans on H1Bs, offshoring taxes, etc. They’re not connecting the dots on how this affects innovation, the economy, debt, taxation, etc. Is it a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it?
For the US, it's not too out of the norm historically speaking. Up until relatively recently tariffs were very popular in the US despite the clear understanding by academics that they were incredibly damaging to the economy. Political movements based around protectionist economic arguments have a long history in the US.
For an example, take a look at the 1888 US presidential election, which largely revolved around tariffs. Grover Cleveland lost re-election due to being part of the pro-business wing of the Democrats, and he came to the conclusion that tariffs were a negative to the economy overall, while his opponents were strongly protectionist. After McKinley's Republicans won the election on a protectionist platform, he instituted the McKinley tariffs (average import duties of around ~50%), which were devastating to the economy despite being extremely popular with the nation in the election. It led to massive price increases which led to the re-election of Grover Cleveland in 1892 (only other non-consecutive term president aside from Trump). Despite expert opinion being fairly solidified against tariffs even at the time, the idea of "protecting American business" and "punishing other countries for their unequal trade deficits with the US" was pretty popular with specific interest groups!
Parts of this sound rather familiar, do they not? I would then argue that it points to a cultural element, out of the two options of a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it. History certainly rhymes on this point.
Serious question, if tariffs are so terrible, why did so many countries have tariffs on US (and other country's) goods?
Also, during the period you describe the US was a major export economy. Now the US economy is far more insular (even before Trump) than it was during that period (foreign trade was more than 50% in the late 19th century vs 7% today). Why would you assume that doesn't impact the effects of tariffs?
Whole bunch of reasons. Off the top of my head:
1. Making the same mistake as Trump et al.
2. Quick and easy reaction to other nation's tariffs, which we saw this year when Trump announced all his tariffs.
3. Targeted at specific industries to influence politics in other nations. IIRC, the EU is actually doing this to the US, specific states that have a lot of support for Trump, in the hope those voters will make the connection and get Trump to back off.
4. Targeted at specific industries to protect domestic industries from being undermined. The USA has accused China of this in various cases, any "anti-dumping tariffs" would be perfectly reasonable where this happens. China was accused of trying basically the same thing Uber was accused of, spending (VC|tax) money to corner the market then raising prices when all the old (taxi drivers|PV makers) were gone.
5. Sin taxes. Singapore doesn't have their own car industry to protect, they make it really difficult to get a car just because they don't want lots of cars. I mean, it's more of a registration fee, but the effect there is much the same given the lack of local industry.
There's definitely debate over which specific scenarios tariffs could be beneficial, as I understand it, but the general theme is that any benefits are highly concentrated (one or two companies or industries will benefit) and the negatives are felt in a diffuse fashion(every consumer pays the tax). They are broadly protectionist and the ones that do exist usually are implemented for pretty specific reasons like the following:
1: A government wants to protect domestic industries over ones outside of the country by applying price increases to the foreign ones, with the idea being that the domestic industries just need to grow into being able to compete with the industries in other areas. This is called the infant industries argument. A central problem with this is that the industries will always benefit from the protectionist policy, and are unlikely to ever admit that they have "grown up" so to say. My general view on this is that groups will of course lobby to have benefits specific to their industry, and that there are probably scenarios where we would prefer to have things handled domestically rather than abroad, but I would generally want this to be highly targeted and time-gated(Once the industries are mature enough to compete, we wouldn't want to keep subsidizing them), and that other tools are probably more efficient for this purpose.
2: Some sort of national security argument, where production being cut off during war would be a serious concern. My general thought on this one is that if something is specifically important for national security, broad reaching taxes on all imports probably aren't as useful as targeted government interventions in those specific industries. The government can build whatever factories it wants or contract people to do specific things if it passes a law to do so. If we're worried that we need a domestic supply of beets(randomly selected example) and the government is willing to produce them at a loss for national security reasons, they should probably just do that rather than tax imports of coffee, chocolate, bananas, beets, beef, and cars in order to encourage domestic production of beets. The broad spectrum nature of across the board tariffs doesn't specifically protect any given industry, unless the specific protection desired is "nothing should be imported, only ever produced domestically."
3: Historically speaking tariffs were a major source of government revenue. There was no income tax in the very early US (and this was the case in many places), and tariffs were seen as an efficient way to raise a lot of money for the government. At the time it was also something that was a lot easier to measure than things like property value, sales, or individual income, because all the goods had to come in through a port. Pretty easy to check the majority of the things coming in, compared to other taxation methods. A major argument in the time period was actually that the government was making too much revenue, such that it was constricting the growth of the private economy! A huge debate in the 1880s and 1890s was on how the share of government revenue could be lowered, and the growth of the economy could be encouraged. Republicans argued that implementing more tariffs would actually reduce imports and lead to lower revenues, which was the stated goal of the McKinley tariffs.
The general reason some people oppose tariffs overall is that they represent an approach to economic growth based on zero-sum thinking, i.e. an idea that if another country experiences economic growth, ours must suffer economic decline. There tends to be more support from many people behind the idea that international trade allows multiple economies to grow in tandem, as I understand it, but I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff, haha. I just find the historical aspect interesting.
On your second point, describing it as a major export economy in the period I describe is maybe not capturing the scenario, because we were in the middle of a major change in manufacturing. We were major importers of manufactured goods in the preceding time period, and we exported agricultural goods! The period from 1890 to 1910 roughly(depending on when you draw the cutoff) is when the US mainly started exporting manufactured goods more than importing them, and it was a massive transition. The period we're talking about is probably best understood as when we were in the process of industrializing more.
It's fair to point out that the economy was pretty different at the time, but it was different in a bigger way.
> The seller has an entire planet to sell to.
They really don't there is a reason the EU pretty much instantly caved in the last trade "negotiation" and it's most of the world frankly doesn't have much money. There certainly isn't enough untapped demand to fill a USA sized hole anywhere.
The EU caved because they didn't want to agitate Trump too much due to Ukraine. This becomes less and less important as the EU ramps up arms production.
Anyone will tell you I'm not a regulations guy, but there's definitely a problem. When you watch these rounds of seemingly coordinated, sweeping layoffs, followed by H-1B hiring sprees, it's hard to pretend.
You’re misinformed or willingly stupid if you think there are H1 hiring sprees with the last set of changes. H1 hiring has tanked.
This is a real eye-opener. Do you know how to fix how stupid I am? Tell me what's wrong with my analysis.
Here's a report: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-lawmakers-scruti.... Is it factually wrong that "In the first half of 2025, Amazon and its cloud-computing unit, AWS, received approval for more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Microsoft and Meta had more than 5,000 H-1B visa approvals each" and that they did layoffs?
It's hard to see how H-1B hiring could move meaningfully either up or down, given that the number of H-1Bs is capped at 65,000 [1] (+ 20,000 for advanced degrees), no company is going to pay for the process of getting an H-1B visa and not actually hire into it, and if a person on an H-1B loses their job they lose their visa in 60 days. You know exactly how many H-1Bs there are in the country: it's mandated by Congress.
What has changed is that they are or will soon be allocated by pay level instead of randomly. That's going to bias hiring toward Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Meta and away from body-shops like Infosys and Wipro.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
These are the companies that receive the most H1B approvals because they have large numbers of high skill employees, so it isn’t surprising that they have thousands of visas approved. But the total number of visas across the country is capped annually per the law (by Congress). All H1B workers combined are still only a fraction of a percent of the total jobs in America.
Another thing to keep in mind that these are also the largest and most innovative companies, and that’s in part due to having access to the best available talent. Those H1B workers cost the companies MORE than American workers. These companies have standardized compensation by job and level and it isn’t different for immigrants. But immigrants come with the additional costs of the immigration process, on top of having the same salary. This isn’t a cost saving measure, it’s a path to continuing to stay innovative and relevant.
As for layoffs - these are mega corps so one part of the company may be doing layoffs in their business while another business within the same company is hiring. And you’re seeing the total effects (layoffs and hiring), and it seems contradictory, but it’s actually just a bunch of little decisions that aren’t tied to each other.
This article doesn’t provide any information at all, but existing H-1B visa holders have to have their visas renewed every few years.
Most of these visas are likely these companies simply renewing their existing employees’s visas.
The thing about all of these responses, factual as they may be, is that they don't address the issue we're discussing. Regardless of whether the number is fixed or how much the employees are paid, thousand of people lost their jobs. I'm sure a few are active on the board here. It looks bad when you request visas and do mass firings.
That's 1H25. How did it compare to 1H24, and for that matter, 2H25?
I doubt 2h25 data is available yet
Please prove this assertion with a citation to data.
> You’re misinformed or willingly stupid if you think there are H1 hiring sprees with the last set of changes. H1 hiring has tanked.
Yeah, probably because they're offshoring instead. Which is, you know, worse.
Your fellow Americans disagree, they will buy their stuff from whoever is the cheapest.
People need to understand that it matters how they spend. They can't expect everyone else to pay for things to be made in America when they're not willing to themselves.
Is that what we said about slavery?
If you can't reason about the concept of 'price sensitivity' without a slippery-slope invocation of slavery, then I think capitalism isn't for you.
The HIRE Act: 25% tax on outsourcing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161419 - September 2025 (19 comments)
Trump has made the idea of mafioso politics popular -- where you hold everyone hostage until they do what you want -- but that doesn't actually mean that it's good policy.
He has also shown that it isn't a functional policy either. Much of what he's done has backfired almost immediately after it was implemented, but much like a gremlin in a wiring loom by the time the sparks appear he's already moved on to tear out something else important. Mafioso politics only work when your concentrated power is wielded against fragmented power that will move too slowly to mitigate you. Even if there are a multitude of small groups if they turn against you even without unanimous action you're spending too much time and effort jumping from thing to thing to ever actually achieve your intended goals. The end result is a parade of violent whack-a-mole as force is used against the myriad number of small revolts that happen, exhausting the resources of the enforcement infrastructure and normalizing the expectation of violence.
Of course the four morons of the broken winds don't see this as a failure, but merely an excuse to normalize that violence until it reaches the extent that they will face little to no consequence when they push it to the logical extreme and attempt to exterminate the many opposing groups rather than simply subjugate them.
Nor is it popular once actually realized. It's mostly for dumbasses to go "rah rah" thinking they'll be at the top of the pyramid. The problem with this form of governance is it puts the most vicious, selfish, and brutal people at the top. Those are rarely the most intelligent and (obviously) never the most magnanimous.
shrug enjoy paying more taxes for your consumption, I guess.
Yes, I do want to pay more to bolster my country's domestic workforce vs subsidizing corporate shareholders and offshore workers, while also having that come out of corporate profits. shrug
You can just buy US-made products...
How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
Or is this more of an imaginary preference you're expressing right now?
What’s funny about this is that I actually can’t. 2 examples:
For years, I’ve tried to buy only American-made denim. When the Cone Mills plant closed, I bought a bunch of dead stock jeans. There was one attempt since Cone Mills closed to open a new US denim factory, but it failed. Unless you’re buying whatever’s left of that increasingly rare stock, you can’t buy American-made denim.
Another example — I’m currently in the market for custom-formulated silicone and acrylic products. Every US manufacturer I’ve approached just sends an email that says “no we don’t do that”. I have like 5 Chinese suppliers on Alibaba trying to make a deal with me.
I would much rather source domestically as soon as someone tells me how to do it.
Sure there is a (growing set) of product categories you can’t buy in the US. What I typically find though is all these “we should force people to buy US” folks don’t actually own American-made goods even in categories where it’s relatively easy.
Have you tried asking your parents that question?
You could buy US-made garments in the 80s and 90s. Just like you could buy American TVs, vacuum cleaners, computers, and everything else. In fact Americans had a great quality of life back then, arguably a better one if you go by the attainability of things like housing, affordability, and economic inequality.
Not imaginary, I have been sharing info with Congressional reps on this topic who are working on policy, as well as the data on H-1B fraud and use for wage suppression. I haven't even had to pay a bribe ("campaign contribution") to get their ear, which is nice.
> How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
This is a tired argument. The electorate was told "not to worry, we're offshoring the low value work so we can focus on high value work." Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
The question was how many American-made products you own.
You are aware we do make many things in America today, right?
> Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
Huh? American workers are more productive than ever, and vastly more productive than workers anywhere else in the world.
> You are aware we do make many things in America today, right?
As someone who owns quite a few American made garments (and has paid the price to do so), I'm amazed you got such a long response that basically dodged the question.
The US service economy is ~83% of GDP. Manufacturing only makes up 8% of jobs in the US. Why do I care about US made products? Corporations are offshoring services and knowledge work, manufacturing has been gone for some time and will not be back. If it does come back, it'll be mostly automated, lights out facilities (like China).
So! I think it makes a lot of sense to impair the offshoring of these service and knowledge jobs when there isn't a labor shortage and we're likely in a recession. If you need more data, I can provide as much as you would like on this topic.
America’s missing manufacturing renaissance - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/01/06/a... | https://archive.today/3qQUq - January 6th, 2026
The U.S. is losing thousands of manufacturing jobs, analysis finds - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobs-manufacturing-trump-tariff... - October 1st, 2025
Trump’s Trade War Squeezes Middle-Class Manufacturing Employment - https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trumps-trade-war-sq... - September 5th, 2025
USA Facts: What does the US produce? - https://usafacts.org/articles/what-does-the-us-produce/ ("Over four-fifths (83.3%) of value added to the US economy in 2024 was via services, for a total of $24.3 trillion.")
USA Facts: The diminishing role of manufacturing in the American economy - https://usafacts.org/articles/diminishing-role-manufacturing... - October 16th, 2020
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
There's more to manufacturing than just rebuilding factories. You need everything from supply chains (which are going to include some foreign materials in many cases), to people who want to work in a factory in 2026, to consumers who want to pay extra for domestically made products.
It's not as easy as saying "just tax imports" or "just tax offshoring" because that hits the average folks who are barely getting by, as every cost gets passed down to the consumer.
I live in a country that used to be heavily industrialized (back in the previous regime when the goal was to be self-sufficient). In the 90s we lost most of the domestic industry as the factories got privatized and opening foreign trade enabled cheaper foreign products to flood the market. Most factories were sold off or just went out of business.
There's been some success with small businesses doing manufacturing domestically but it's mostly niche and not near what it used to be back when every house had at least some domestically made clothes, furniture, electronics...
Labor is expensive, market small, taxes high, and lately even high energy costs and rising import fees on materials from abroad. Plus of course the fact that people can't afford to pay 5-10x for the same thing made domestically when they can barely afford the thing at 1x the price.
You want Americans doing non-competitive work in an increasingly competitive global economy?
Why?
Reddit is that way ->
This comment is literally just numbers about how the US has ceded low value add jobs and dominated high value add jobs.
I am asking why this is intrinsically a problem.
Or if it's not intrinsically a problem, then what are the downstream consequences we should care about, and can we talk about them explicitly instead of just assuming the best way to mitigate them is to put our economy into reverse advancement.
Personally I’m willing to pay more to support global trade, and reduce the harmful effects of excessive nationalism and imperialism.
It's even better than that, pay less and support global trade.
Just make sure you have a degree and a service sector white collar job though.
Could you please name one non-food product in America that a typical consumer could buy that doesn't subsidize corporate shareholders? Name one thing the average American can buy that contributes to gainful employment at the expense of corporate profit.
Where I'm sitting, the only manufacturing that exists in the USA is, for subassemblies or components that are purchased by larger companies on a contract basis, and manufactured by lower-middle class citizens. Boeing and GE is an example. And the reason Boeing buys domestically is only because they have to in order to limit their liability, reduce labor costs, and protect their IP. If the America you're looking for existed, Boeing would happily pay twice as much for labor to make components in house. If that America existed your television would be made here too, by people who weren't being subsidized themselves by Food Stamps.
There are no consumer commodity manufacturers in the USA who provide gainful employment without significant consideration towards corporate profit. There is basically nothing at Wal-Mart that you can buy that is made in the USA by people who are living in financial comfort. That's just not how late stage capitalism works.
I hate to break it to you, but corporate profits are rarely affected. They just pass on the costs of the tax directly to the consumer.
Cool, give me as much statute and regulation required to squeeze companies and encourage competition to drive down profits while protecting workers. This system and game is all arbitrary, we can change the rules (of course, with time and effort). If we have to kill some companies to do this, that's acceptable. As someone wise once said, "We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try."
The way you protect workers is to create the most appealing place to employ them for people starting businesses.
Otherwise, those businesses will go to somewhere with a less regulated environment and ship it in.
The only way to truly protect workers is to increase the cost of bypassing the regulations that you want to protect them so that operating within the regulations is the best choice for the business.
This is a disconnect that we see in numerous topics nationally, like pushes to raise the minimum wage which just result in lots of job losses while companies relocate. So instead you see politicians push for a national increase to the minimum wage, so that there’s nowhere else in the US to relocate to because they are all equally expensive.
The moment you start creating policies where the first concern is making sure people can’t escape, it should be an indicator to rethink the policy.
Are you going to stop at killing corporations? I can imagine a few people might also try to stop you from this people’s revolution you’re envisioning.
Democratic socialists were just recently democratically elected in NYC and Seattle. Support for unions in the US is at historical record highs [1]. ~2M 55+ people in the US die every year, ~5k per day. ~3M people turn 18 every year and become eligible to vote, young people who only see bleakness ahead. 31% of wealth is held by people over 70 [2]. This is a population dynamics story, old ideas die out, new ideas come in (Planck's principle). I'm confident support for worker vs corporate policies is high, based on all available evidence [3] [4] [5]. Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life on their income [6], as another data point. So, I'm unsure who is in the "pro capitalism pro corporation" corner to be honest, when you consider the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of equities.
No harm should come to humans of course, but corporations, entities, and systems are all fair game.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)
[2] 31% of Wealth Owned by People Over 70 - https://www.apolloacademy.com/31-percent-of-wealth-owned-by-... - December 7th, 2025
[3] The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079617 - November 2025 (4 comments)
[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher... ("A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.")
[5] Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062082 - November 2025 (15 comments)
[6] https://www.lisep.org/mql
(think in systems)
Your take is questionable and increasingly becomes asinine every time a boomer croaks and a young person makes it to voting age. No amount of seductive "institutions who's inner workings we will figure out late as though they don't make or break it all will provide for us" rhetoric are going to change the fact that the electorate is increasingly made up of people who have only seen institutions, both public and private, engage in accumulation of power self enrichment at the expense of literally everyone else.
I don't know what the future holds but I assure you it does not involve the people vesting yet more power in institutions that have only led them astray in their lifetimes (governments, unions and other industry groups, academia, etc). As the evil among us like to say "demographics are destiny" [1].
[1]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Given how Trump’s second election seems to have been driven by the youth vote, it seems like an overly optimistic take to assume that youth vote is in the bag for progressive ideas. And we’ll see what Mondani has in store in terms of actual progressive policies that he can enact, but corporate death penalty is not on the table last I checked.
Yup. And the whole "Oh, we're not releasing the numbers because they're not right/misleading but trust us, the economy is the best its ever been!" is getting older and (even) less convincing.
There's another factor: Due to the unpredictable and unreliable nature of the current US administration, the rest of the west is "America-proofing" itself.
Expect cash flows to dry up as Europe, Latam, Canada and Korea/Japan diversify away to more reliable suppliers. It's already happening.
The theory makes sense, but it doesn't match with the graphics in the article.
We can see that job openings have been declining since before the 2024 election and that hiring actually increased briefly around the time the tarrifs were implemented. This seems to suggest there are other factors at play, including macro trends.
Investment monies have been tightened across the board, mainly due to high interest rates and the fact that investments in anything other than Tech/AI don’t match expectations of growth.
Hiring slowed to a crawl back in 2023. A nice smack in the face after the "Great Resignation" period.
Understand something, though: many of those people making those decisions thought that the current administration would be a way to fix regulation.
We're learning why government shouldn't be run like a business. Corporate governance, at least in the view of these people, arguably benefits from tyranny in some ways. You have a management structure where people have the ability to cut off your income and health insurance for an indeterminate amount of time for almost any reason. The reasons they can't fire you for are very specific and it's often on you, the now-jobless person, to prove their maleficence. Sounds pretty tyrannical to me.
They thought if they had someone who was used to working within a system like that - and Trump absolutely was, having his name on the building he worked in his entire adult life - it'd allow them to get rid of roadblocks to productivity and increase the value created by their businesses.
Well, as it turns out, an economy is different than a business, and needs to be run according to rules that were deliberated upon by the society at large.
We had people warning about this ten years ago. They were ignored. We had him impeached five years ago. Didn't convict. We had him convicted of 34 felony counts less than two years ago. Didn't sentence.
This is hubris manifest.
Seems to me like it's American businesses that are increasingly operating like governments. Acquiring media outlets to manufacture consent, bending the courts to deregulate their operations, trading political favors and engaging in centralized economic planning for giant bets on AI, funded with debt.
> engaging in centralized economic planning for giant bets on AI
If they're centralizing economic planning on that, then there's probably at least some economic planning that they would be doing to keep a relatively stable regulatory regime in place.
Which, y'know, isn't the case.
Ultimately the world has reached a point where social systems in both business and government are run the same way. Probably because they're run by the same kind of person. Sometimes even the same people.
There were purges aplenty during the Communist times, to make way for loyalist bureaucrats. What's taking place is the incipience of not just a stable regime but a calcified one.
- A non-independent monetary authority
- A Department of Labor that uses data from a single private vendor instead of its own payroll tax records and surveys to measure unemployment
- A pro-monopoly consumer protection bureau scaling back unprofitable regulations
- A foreign service ready to threaten allies within its own sphere of influence to protect its tech businesses.
> There were purges aplenty during the Communist times, to make way for loyalist bureaucrats. What's taking place is the incipience of not just a stable regime but a calcified one.
If it were calcified, you'd probably have a lot more willingness to bet on a business decision being profitable. There'd be a very obvious, solid understanding of market rules and there would be little likelihood of them changing.
The problem with Trump - well, in this regard; there are plenty of others - is that he is used to operating as an absolute monarch, with his previous "kingdom" being the Trump Organization. That kingdom existed purely for his benefit and there wasn't really any consideration of peers like you'd have with actual kings who rule over countries with societies and borders. The only decisions he had to make right were the ones benefitting him, and whether or not they did that was quite evident.
Now he's a leader of a country that does have borders and a society. There are parties with interests that he must satisfy. You can tell he's never had to do that before and part of how he handles that is to just bully those parties into submission, but the other way is to use his status to make proclamations that supposedly have some sort of force to them to placate the other interests.
An example would be the proclamation that institutional investors will be banned from buying single-family homes. That's meant to placate his working-class base, most of whom can't afford a home. Do we know how far he'll go in enforcing that proclamation? No. It directly contradicts some of the other positions he's been identified as supporting, and is unlikely to be enforceable on a mass scale, but if he does sign some sort of order telling the DoJ or SEC or whoever to investigate purchases of that sort of real estate by institutional investors, well, you could end up at the wrong end of a government investigation, particularly if you have somehow pissed him off. Which isn't particularly hard to do, either.
Thus, you can say the regulatory regime over single-family residential real estate market is now less stable than it was before. We don't know what will happen. And that makes it hard to make a business decision around it.
The people who I work with who support the current administration don't really value a good economy.
They actually are smug about a worsening standard of living. What makes them happy is "tough talk" on immigration, to them the brutality against suspected undocumented immigrants is a good deterrent.
It's not surprising but it's important to understand how important the brutality is and how unimportant economic growth is. It helps that they Silicon Valley tech workers who are already rich.
It took me so long to realize this but it’s completely true. What they want most is for other people to suffer
US companies have long been reliant on free flowing investment monies subsidized by the USG. Tightening those purse strings has reduced the level of jobs openings, including tightening of SBIRs and other non-research grant programs that small to medium sized companies use. Small business loans are also tight or non-existent. So, of course jobs will be limited.
The macro-level economic policies really only affect large corporations, unless a business is impacted by the tariffs. In general, hiring is fucked by immigration visas in large companies, which are still going strong and sneaking around the anti-immigration barriers. In some way, hiring non-U.S. workers for work funded by the USG is unacceptable, and economic theft.
If USG opens up funding more, then things will normalize, including for immigrant or non-U.S. contract workers in other places. As always, it’s the economy that’s the problem, but which part of it is always hard to pin down when other parts of it make up for it.
This is just Trump, not the USG as a whole. Congress approved a budget and Trump refuses to give the money out. People have to fight in court to get the money they're owed.
Data shows jobs have been in decline before Trump, likely related to reduced investments from high inflation and high interest rates. I guess I should add that part of opening up more funding includes managing other aspects so we don’t end up in the same economic environment post-2020.
we had a much larger disruption to logistics just a few years ago if you recall =) and hiring really took off then. so i don't think this argument really holds any water
Money was free then, and hiring took off in software, which people were relying on a lot more during the pandemic. All of my friends who are performers or work in events were wrecked financially. The industry still hasn’t really recovered.
It wasn’t just software, far from it. Hospitality, construction, local/state government, healthcare jobs all soared in 2021
more likely, higher interest rates and and oversupply of hiring from previous quantitative easing have left number of roles open limited, not to mention with AI - many companies feel there is a deflation in the market, that is to say, if we wait till next year our programmer may accomplish twice as much, why hire a second person now?
Doesn't every president do that, just to do different industries?
It's the rate of change. Things like NAFTA took many years to implement, and were debated and developed in the open. Everyone understood what would happen to the economy and that there would be a decade of transition.
Nobody announces the largest tariffs since the 1930s overnight, and selectively increases or dismantles them from week to week. Just look at this line graph: https://www.usfunds.com/resource/americas-tariff-rate-hits-t...
A huge part of our power was that we were safe and predictable and that's gone forever.
> A huge part of our power was that we were safe and predictable and that's gone forever.
That is a big deal. The US has for a long time been seen as a stable economy that's easy to trade with because policy changes would take a long time to come into effect by which everyone had had the time to adjust.
Compared to the various stuff that was happening in Europe in the previous decades (at least here in the east) the US were a stable safe heaven where you could trust things wouldn't drastically change overnight.
"that's gone forever."
Your US history teacher failed you if you think even for a moment that is true.
It could come back. Trump being removed, Vance returning to normal, then normal for the next decade and it would just be a crazy blip.
But it’s not just Trump. This is what America wants.
That's what I thought after the first Trump administration. But the fact that we re-elected him proves that it wasn’t a one-off, we will always be four years away from the possibility of a wild regime change.
That’s why it would jar to be Vance and this reigime, Kay without Trump. 10 more years of both red and blue and enough change to undo and prevent this in the future could get it out.
Germany was reformed, Japan was reforms. These things take time
But the problem is the American people want this. This isn’t some dictator in Korea or Iraq or Venezuela, this is someone with full democratic support. There are many checks and balances in the American system to avoid a single person doing this amount of damage without having widespread support.
No, not even close. The basis for most of these actions requires novel legal re-interpretations to claim power from Congress for the executive, ignore time or scope limits, and remove expert judgement from what are often supposed to be consensus decisions. The courts cases over tariffs are highlighting the unprecedented claims for both the nature of the purported emergency and the scope of the response, but this shows up in many other areas such as inventing a “power emergency” to force coal plants to stay open over the wishes of the owners, communities, and state governments. We’ve never had anything like this level of direct economic interference in the modern economy - even things like WWII policies were at least targeted and based on a real threat.
No, every President does not declare tariffs by fiat using specious emergency powers that change day to day depending on who kissed their ass most recently.
Not really.
Even setting aside whether the changes are good or not themselves, no President before has thrown away laws mandated by Congress the way the current President is.
Further, this wasn’t even considered a possibility and is only happening now due to a confluence of events… - the Supreme Court passing rulings that essentially make the President unaccountable
- the SC passing rulings preventing Congress from delegating powers which in practice means a lot of laws Congress had passed in the past have essentially disappeared (since the agencies tasked with making decisions related to them are no longer allowed to)
- Congress becoming completely supine and giving away as much power as they can
- a President that has accepted and is operating on what was until now a fringe legal theory of unbridled executive power ie “unitary executive” theory.
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WTF? This is not an acceptable comment on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. We've had to ask you before to follow the guidelines. We have to ban accounts that comment like this repeatedly. Please remind yourself of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes they do. Not sure why you're being downvoted.
No - not to anything like the same extent, and not through executive orders.
From someone who is close to the energy sector that's simply not true.
There's been so many EOs from Democrat presidents that cause hugely negative disruptions in the industry.
Weird that you felt the need to specify Democrats
Is this something Republicans have simply never done until now?
I was giving a specific example for one industry.
Noting the political party was just a detail.
But yeah plenty of examples of R presidents for other sectors in the past I'm sure too.
Can you give a few examples, please.
Also, I'm curious, what you feel you're getting out of your support of the Trump regime?
The first that comes to mind was the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Biden cancelled it with EO 13990 when it was pretty much done.
Would have been thousands of jobs, Canada wanted it too, it's safer than trucking/transporting by train. All just cancelled on a whim.
Then there's EO 14008 that put a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal lands and offshore waters. (fed land is 25% of oil production)
Regardless of your position on oil (I'm sure you have one), the point is those are two examples of disruption of an industry by EO from a previous president.
> The first that comes to mind was the Keystone XL Pipeline.
> Biden cancelled it with EO 13990 when it was pretty much done.
I'll admit to not being an expert on the Keystone XL Pipeline, but at least according to the timeline on wikipedia[1], the reason Biden was able to cancel it with an executive order was because Trump had approved it with an executive order, after people had tried and failed for years to get it approved the proper way (through the legislative and executive branches).
And even when Trump personally tried to make it happen, there were still years of court battles stopping construction, so when Biden came into office and ended it, it was in fact not "pretty much done" but apparently 8% done[2]
Seems like it again comes back to Trump just doing what he wants, and it was in fact him trying to unilaterally make it happen that caused that last four years or so of disruptions?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#History
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-keystonepipelinexl...
We don’t really do tariffs like this before Trump. At least not for a long time.
And never this sweeping: like when Japanese car manufacturers were threatening Detroit, the president negotiated with Congress and the response was targeted, not a random shotgun on other countries and industries.
True. I have not ordered a single product from the Heard Island and McDonald Islands since the tariffs were levied on them. I am champing at the bit for these to be reduced.
Haha, but every coffee, tea, snd chocolate provider I buy from has announced their prices going up and it’s not like there’s an American industry those taxes are supporting. Hawaii doesn’t have enough land to grow even a fraction of our domestic coffee consumption.
Reagon and Congress directly negotiated with the Japanese auto manufacturers. They were threatening major tarrifs.
This lead to the 1981 automobile voluntary export restraint.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c8719/c8719.pdf
Yes: that’s kind of a textbook example of using tariffs strategically — there’s a valid argument that automobiles are a strategic industry worth protecting (just for military capacity alone) but they didn’t threaten to heavily tax coffee and chocolate from other continents at the same time or under the pretense that it would make those crops viable in the United States at scale.
We got rid of a lot of contractors at the end of year. We also aren't hiring anyone new and only replacing some people that have left.
Same - and even replacing those that have left is a fight right now.
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A new life awaits you in the offworld colonies!
Service guarantees citizenship!
Would this be: a chance to begin again, in land of golden opportunities?
You mean South Amerizuela
As someone who's about to quit to go work on their startup, glad to know things are gonna be terrible if everything goes to shit and I need to return to the job market.
I see these reports as statistics. “54% Americans have zero retirement savings” doesn’t mean that I should expect a 50% chance my savings will magically disappear when I retire.
You have to be careful with statistics, and news in general. Remember that your life is your own, with a unique set of circumstances, and think for yourself.
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Hopefully by the time your startup fails the job market has recovered /s
But what if they plan to fail fast?
My hot take: We’re already in a recession.
We just use AI to justify doing all the same recession behaviors while making it sound like innovation
- not hiring this year > AI is making us productive!
- no wage growth > AI means we don’t need to raise salaries
- layoffs > with AI we can do more with less people
- spending less on offsites, work perks etc > we really need that budget for AI
- not spending money on that new business tool > AI can do it instead
My hotter take: we're in an economic death spiral. There isn't enough juice that can be squeezed short of mass wealth redistribution to reinvigorate the economy, and what is out there is locked up in stocks that don't translate to revenue. Slashing rates will just skyrocket prices and over inflate our monetary supply, and further tax cuts will only whittle away what's left of government services and social safety nets. Companies are going to start collapsing in a domino effect as liquidity dries up and contracts get cut.
Massive wealth redistribution is just another word for Taxes.
When we taxed the rich we were happy. It’s literally all we gotta do.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S Federal Receipts as a Percent of GDP measures total government revenue relative to the size of the economy, serving as a standardized way to track the federal tax burden over time.
Although the top marginal tax rate in the 1950s indeed exceeded 90%, federal receipts hovered around 17% of GDP; this was nearly identical to current levels, because loopholes and high income thresholds (roughly equivalent to $2MM for single/$4MM for couples) meant almost no one actually paid that top rate.
The effective tax rate for the top 1% was closer to 42% rather than 90%, demonstrating that extremely high statutory rates on paper do not necessarily generate proportionally higher government revenue.
The total tax intake is fairly unambiguous. Personal tax bill for the vast majority of people is also quite clear. But when you get to the top 0.1% or whatever it is, things like "income" and "tax" get ambiguous. I suppose a lot of the ultra rich don't have much earnings, at best cap gains, and even that can be offset, boxed and off-shored ad nauseam.
Maybe instead of looking at the ultra rich we could look at what GDP fraction the "bottom 95%" contribute to the tax burden - is that more or less than before. Not sure where to look for this data but sounds like a nice little exercise.
>But when you get to the top 0.1% or whatever it is, things like "income" and "tax" get ambiguous. I suppose a lot of the ultra rich don't have much earnings, at best cap gains, and even that can be offset, boxed and off-shored ad nauseam.
But the denominator isn't "income", it's GDP. That's far harder to "offset, boxed and off-shored ad nauseam".
Sure - but not at an individual level. If you're asking, how much tax are the rich paying now vs before, as a % basis, you need an individual numerator and denominator.
Maybe the total tax take now is 17% of GDP, same as before, but when measured correctly, the overall tax rate for the super-rich has gone down, and for the plebs gone up.
To even identify who the super-rich are in this exercise, you may need to be careful with the definition of "rich". If eg you go for highest income earners, you might find upper middle class people instead, with the super-rich having no supposed income as such.
Raising taxes should never be seen as a way to raise revenue. Even if the Laffer curve has come under attack, there is still some profit maximizing rate which I’m positive most modern countries are beyond both at a static rate and at a growth and future revenue maximizing rate. No we don’t tax at this point to increase tax revenue. We do tax to shape what society looks like.
Right now society doesn’t look very good to so many people in the US it’s almost hard to talk about. Job growth is literally people saying, “hey, tomorrow, I can see it look better. We can spend time and resources to create something we all want more than today.” When job growth is low, that vision must also be low.
Taxation can turn that around in an industry. It can turn that around in aggregate. It does thay by both signaling to players, and by changing the game tree payout structure.
I think much of the taxation conversation right now is unfortunate because it keeps getting couched in terms of tax brackets, and that is almost a strawman at this point (even if many people think it’s important). I would say we need to tax the 1% differently. For instance, stock buy backs are currently a hugely distorting effect on the world economy. You can start by greatly taxing that.
The real thing people are talking about when talking about taxing the 1% isn’t just about tax brackets, it’s more about how taxes don’t materially effect people once they reach certain thresholds. It’s the same fundamental problem with traffic tickets. They are not proportional to general wealth so that means it’s a set of laws that apply less and less as one gains wealth which not only feels unfair, it is arguably a corrupting influence undermining the rule of law.
I am choosing not to get involved in a discussion about tax policy miniutiae as I am not an expert in any related way; instead, I wanted to provide factual context to the oft-repeated 'America was better in the 1950s due to the tax rate on the rich,' claim so folks might be able to better understand what they're attempting to say.
It's about how the taxes are spent too. If the government cuts welfare and gives handouts and subsidies to special interests, that is not an effective redistribution.
It would be interesting to see the same graph broken down by wealth (preferably) or income quintile. Maybe higher tax rates don't mean more tax income, but it does mean more wealth redistribution.
no one pays the top rate today either. I've spent a large chunk of my adult life in the top 5% of income earners and I've never had an effective tax rate over 17% that I can recall.
Your experience as a 95 %ile earner does not negate that people in the 99 %ile of earners pay the top rate. (I paid the top rate last year.)
and the effective tax rate today for the ultra wealthy is 0.
Shit, a few years ago Jeff Bezos got a tax credit for his kids.
Think of how absurd that is. Jeff Bezos, the founder of a multitrillion dollar corporation that already receives billions in government contracts and subsidies, who owns a $500m yacht and a multibillion dollar real estate portfolio, asked for, and was given, a tax credit for his adult children.
It really is this simple and this chart of Net Worth Held by the Top 0.1% demonstrates it well -
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLTP1246
That chart seems to demonstrate that there was a lot of inflation in the early 2020s, which I assume is not your point.
Here's one for share of net worth: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSTP1300
(Note: I am not GP, and am not necessarily saying you can draw conclusions from this one chart, just that the change in net worth cannot be attributed solely to inflation.)
You can argue it was primarily due to inflation (changes in the economy can never be attributed solely to any one thing).
The upper 0.1% largely owns things that are relatively safe from inflation (like expensive real estate in areas where increases in value have exceeded the rate of inflation for decades) while the lower 50 - 80% does not.
It's effectively impossible to prove definitively, but I find it hard to believe it's a coincidence that the share of wealth held by asset-heavy individuals shot up at the exact same time the money supply increased significantly, especially given that lower class wages were actually increasing faster than inflation and upper class wages at the same time.
You thought that graph mirrored inflation? That $4 in 2000 was $24 today?
I find that difficult to believe.
My hotter take: We've been in a depression since '08 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cMV
What if some of the population is experiencing a depression, some are in a recession, some are in stagnation, and some are experiencing an expansion?
I don’t know about the US but growth in the UK has been anaemic since the financial crisis.
>excluding current transfer receipts
Why was this metric chosen? What does showing that current transfer receipts grew show we're "in a depression"?
Yeah, there's absolutely a reason that we're not releasing a lot of key economic numbers and it's not because the government needs to clean house of people determined to sabotage things, and it's not because the numbers are so amazing that we have the "best economy the country has ever seen", either.
this needs to be shouted from the rooftops. something drastic needs to happen or else we will be the harbinger of a large-scale societal collapse.
> we will be the harbinger of a large-scale societal collapse.
The harbingers are already here and have been for a while now. Harbingers are signs that things are breaking down. More like "or else we will have a large scale societal collapse".
I've been saying this since last year too.
Sincerely, software developer turned fast food manager.
My even hotter take: This was always the inevitable result of shareholder capitalism.
The only outcomes left are either unchecked descent into fascism as oligarchs consolidate power and finish their government takeover before their current power base falls apart, or a successful socialist revolution.
This is what it's always been leading to.
>This was always the inevitable result of shareholder capitalism.
Just capitalism. There's no actual or necessary distinction about what shape that capitalism takes.
A system where getting more money means you have more opportunity to generate more money by itself has all the feedback loop you need to consolidate over time, generate monopolies, and end up here.
Competition just doesn't happen in a free market. Actually competing, and trying to win marketshare or mindshare that way is too expensive, as there are much simpler and cheaper ways to impact a market.
Competition requires a fair market. This was fully understood by both Roosevelt trust busters, and both Teddy and FDR made big talk about "I'm not trying to kill business, I just want them to compete because that's such a force multiplier".
It doesn't take a socialist revolution. All it takes is like a gentle sprinkling of welfare and a fair and competitive market.
Granted, we have a lot of work to make the current market competitive. We've allowed so much consolidation that we would probably have to actively break up companies, we would have to nullify lots of contracts and IP rights and reduce the power a EULA can hold over you. Interoperability is necessary for competitive markets so we would have to roll back the DMCA anti-circumvention language. Improved customer rights would also help.
> Competition requires a fair market.
Adam Smith's term in "The Wealth of Nations" is "freely competitive market". The "free market" bastardization came much later.
there is a saying that fascism is capitalism in crisis. I don't think this reactionary crisis response is restricted to capitalist economies or fascism. though. We can see this, for just one example, in the various persecutions of Jews in Europe during the middle ages any time there was a crop failure or a plague or some similar disaster.
I think that's mostly just HNers assuming AI like Claude Code is already penetrating the day to day work of the workforce.
"If I use, then everyone is probably using it".
Yet AI penetration is so low right now that it probably has zero role in the job market.
And it keeps us distracted from talking about the real reasons behind job opening decline.
That said, once AI ubiquity picks up within the next few years, we'll have all of the existing problems we're not talking about... plus AI. And we'll probably be even less capable of talking about the complexities of the market intelligently.
I think parent comment was talking about hype vs reality rather than disagreeing with you.
"We're not hiring but AI is in the news" = "We're not hiring because of AI! Don't sell our stock!" It's independent of actual current or future AI adoption.
Maybe. I am likely not a typical HNer, but my company actually has use of AI our 2026 goals. I am not guessing. I know majority of people in this company have those goals baked in. Now, can I suspect other like companies do the same? No. But even if they don't, it does not matter. Because the companies that don't allow AI, have people who use it anyway..
FOMO.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/21/ai-wall-street-big-tech
Have we forgotten this? It'll find its niche, but it isn't yet a truly transformative one.
<< it isn't yet a << yet
That is a lot pressure to put on a conjunction. It is up there along with 'it will never be'.
In all seriousness ( and some disclosure ), I like this tech so I am mildly biased in my stance. That said, I almost fully disagree with yours.
As much as I dislike Nadella, his last blog entry is not that far off. Using LLMs for stuff like email summaries is.. kinda silly at best. The right use cases may have not emerged yet, but, in a very real sense, it already has been transformative..
"it already has been transformative.."
Yea, at being a search interface. But what else? Not that it can't be, but the failure rate for AI is absurd right now. What happens if it collapses and all its used for is answering questions on your phone and maybe better search of your emails? That seems to be a real and probably likely outcome. What then? Ironically, I think it will improve the economy because there are a lot of decisions that are on hold until we know what LLMs will be used for. Probably isn't going to be good for SEs either way.
<< but the failure rate for AI is absurd right now.
I keep a personal log of specific failures for simple CYA reasons. I do get some, but I can't honestly say it does not seem high to me. A lot likely depends on what is defined as a failure ( to me it typically is a clearly wrong result ). But those clearly wrong results do not seem to cross 10% of output.. so about the same as average human.
The writing is on the wall for AI. It is coming fast and it is transformative. That your company is still trying to ramp up AI adoption and processes for 2026 supports my point.
But we've been blaming AI for a couple years now, yet I suspect it's still too early in the adoption curve to have a meaningful impact on hiring compared to more boring explanations.
Even if AI wasn't being used for daily tasks by general employees, it's being used by HR and staff sourcing firms to sort through applications, so it already has had a large (negative) impact on hiring.
Maybe we should do an "Ask HN" for those in HR or adjacent roles to poll for experiences there.
"it's being used by HR and staff sourcing firms to sort through applications"
I think you are correct, but is anyone happy about the current situation? I suspect it will change and that change very likely will intentionally not involve AI. I suspect it will be an economic solution, not a technological one.
I hear what you are saying. In a very practical sense, I have no real way to measure either of those factors and the company I work for is international so that does not allow for an easy extrapolation. I guess what it really means is: we will find out:P
Really? I see H1B as the tiniest drop in the bucket compared to AI, at least in software. It's not that AI is filling 1 human role with 1 AI, it's that everyone who has a job knows that they need to keep it because the market is insanely cutthroat right now. Everyone has an AI-polished resume, and employers no longer see the value in having talented employees. Even if they did have talented employees they don't trust them enough to know how to do the work. If your employer says "I need you to start using AI" they may as well be saying "I don't trust you to know what's worth is worth your time." I see even a lot of people who have jobs as acting in a way that's consistent with on the verge of being fired, which I think is most of the real "value" of AI so far.
Same here, basically word for word.
What industry and roles?
Finance, but tech adjacent. I am not super comfortable going into more detail.
yes, AI isn't penetrating those fields with high job losses at all
AI isn’t penetrating but all the money needed to invest in the economy has moved over. Maybe that’s also part of the problem
Bespoke AI has not gotten everywhere but generic AI absolutely has.
The workforce is happily making themselves more efficient by using AI on their phones for what used to be multi step look it up in the literature or your supplier's catalog or consult the instructions or read the rules process when performing cookie cutter tasks they know but don't remember exact specifications for.
Do you have a source for that? Everyone I know who works outside of tech is complaining about how AI is making their jobs harder because it’s wrong so much of the time that they’re spending more time correcting it than it saves, and it’s been a boon for cheaters looking to remove obvious tells from their attacks.
I'm talking about people who shower after work not people who shower before work.
I have no doubt that people who are having AI foisted upon them by admins at the behest of someone else hate it.
They use AI as basically a leveled up version of the summaries google used to provide for certain search types. Saves them a bunch of obnoxious clicking around on the internet or in software that was never designed for mobile or to make giving up the kind of info they're seeking easily.
That’s usually also followed shortly by learning that you can’t trust the results or you’ll be making customers whole.
These people usually know enough to know when it's "not quite right". Same "don't trust the docs" story that existed in many workplaces long before AI
An example I saw recently was someone asked for a modern equivalent of a grease that's no longer made/relevant and it replied back with some weird aviation stuff. The "real" answer wound up being "just use anything, the builders intent in specifying was to prevent you from using tallow or some other crap 100yr ago"
Sources for this?
Hot take? Half of the US is formally in recession already.
https://fortune.com/2025/10/09/america-feels-recession-state...
The economy is completely fucked and we are in a race to steal and horde all the data before people catch on.
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22/50 ~= half. No one claim it was half the population, other than you (strangely).
TIL Moody’s Analytics is "doomer FUD".
"Half the US" very rarely means "slightly less than half of the states in the US" without any qualifiers.
And yes, Moody's Analytics chief economist is generally known for making wildly inaccurate predictions.
Regardless, your take on all of this is what I called doomer FUD, which goes well beyond Zandi's take.
You’re getting very worked up arguing about a 6% difference. Please grow up. You can call people doomers all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that the economy is getting worse.
I'm not worked up about anything, just pointing out that a contrived metric isn't all that meaningful but feeds into the preconceived notions of people like the parent poster who seem to love to submit drive-by comments about how terrible everything is.
The economy is not doing great. That doesn't mean the "economy is completely fucked and we are in a race to steal and horde all the data before people catch on", which is an absurd statement on numerous levels.
And don't tell me to grow up, especially when you've completely missed the point.
>”economy is completely fucked and we are in a race to steal and horde all the data before people catch on”
Have you been following current events for the past year? This is not an absurd statement.
You can’t just dismiss news you don’t want to accept as ”doomer FUD”, call a leading economics an “huckster” and then not back it up with real data. Go to twitter or truth social if you want to cherry-pick the news you want to believe in.
Yes, I've been following current events for the last few decades, including the last year. We weren't "completely fucked" in 1990-1991, 2000-2001, 2008, or 2020, (or any of the other cataclysmic events that occurred long before my lifetime) so why would slowing down from the hottest labor market in a generation mean we are "completely fucked" now?
And what on earth does "we are in a race to steal and horde all the data before people catch on" even mean? Who is the "we" who are stealing and hoarding (which is the correct spelling FYI) compared to the "people" who would catch on that it's happening (and presumably care)? What data is being stolen, how, and from whom? Why is hoarding data a problem? Why would any of this matter in the first place if we're "completely fucked" anyway?
Could it be that people like you and the parent poster lack perspective (and potentially some self-awareness) and are prone to overreacting?
Nice - anything to offer up other than name calling? Do you have any ideas of your own related to the displayed data and narrative?
Sure, I already offered some thoughts up-thread.
And I didn't call the parent poster any names, just pointed out that the assessment he was relying on was nonsensical (and probably designed solely to generate ad revenue and brand awareness) and his conclusions were extremely pessimistic compared to the consensus.
Should I have invented my own biased metric (maybe based on land mass since very few of the larger US states are experiencing a recession based on the source provided) as a counterpoint?
What are your ideas concerning the displayed data and narrative?
> My hot take: We’re already in a recession
Personal-savings rate says we're heading into a recession, but aren't yet in one [1]. Labour-force participation, on the other hand, suggests we may be [2].
Assuming we go into another shutdown at the end of the month, none of this may be clear until well into the autumn.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
The prime age (25-54 years old) labor force participation rate disagrees.[1] It's almost the highest it's ever been and steady.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Also RTO mandates as a way to cover up for layoffs.
Q3 GDP was +4.3% We will know Q4 in a bit, but the projection is +2.7%
Hardly a recession
Remove AI data center spending from that.
> - layoffs > with AI we can do more with less people
That's pretty silly. Just look at the unemployment rate, not at the headlines.
Eh, layoffs also declined, consumer spending is up YoY, and we all know about the investments being made in AI that very well might be propping up the economy.
AI, when effective, is deflationary because it allows for similar productivity at a lower cost. That's what you're describing above, not a shadow recession that is being papered over by claims of AI use.
To my point: You could have replaced "AI" with "computing" for most of the last 50 years and been left with the same argument.
This is lowest in the past year or so, not the lowest since say ‘08.
Nor January, 1930.
This economy is in a bad and worsening state. But it definitely can get a whole lot worse.
AI is only going to reduce jobs further.
My own personal example working at a small govt contractor in which we had a team of 12 working on an app for 10 years. We lost the re-bid to a smaller team (5 to 6)/budget using AI. We have been informed going forward the company will be following the competition (small teams using AI and bidding like the competition via smaller budget needs).
Many job openings are just a way for recruiting to harvest resumes, or to give the impression there's some growth going on, or to conceal the actual open headcounts for teams. Ghost jobs.
This impacts vulnerable people looking for jobs and makes job search highly inefficient.
Generally economists say response is necessary at over 4% unemployment. It doesn't take a big swing to unsettle the entire economy.
I guess my point is that even if you think AI's displacement of workforce is vastly overblown, be scared of 5% labor impacts.
I was just telling someone the other day how all the talk of civil wars and unrest were overblown, Americans will never resort to that with the economy the way it is. Even in the '08 recession (and even worse scenarios), recovery was a possibility. There would be no jobs at the time, but you can reasonably expect them to be created in a few years. You could go to school and switch careers.
But I think right now there is a dreadful perfect storm of sorts.
- It's not just LLMs, the social/political environment just doesn't favor risk taking, which means less opportunities.
- The US will be alienated from all its good trade partners for a decade plus at best. They'll still do trade, but the era of relying on US companies, or relying on a stable US consumer base is over.
- The dollar will decline, by how much I don't know but it will. Less buying power for American companies.
- Education is in shambles, and skilled & educated immigrants who can leave the US are doing so in droves. Brain drain will be real, the pipeline to replace them will take a generation, and that is if it was fixed today.
- Historically, there is a natural re-balancing of powers that happens as a result of people getting upset and organizing change or some sort. But the ability of the population to organize meaningfully is curtailed because tech, moderation and surveillance capitalism.
- I won't say too much about the current admin, but things are really scary. Not as in "i'm upset about this" or "so much for democracy" but more like "i'm scared for my life" levels of scary.
- Erosion of trust is huge, you don't take risks if you don't have some trust. consumer spending, loans, business spending,etc... and the erosion of trust is fundamental and hard to repair. Trust is also heavily asymmetric, it costs a lot to obtain, but it takes little to lose it. Once lost, gaining it again is usually orders of magnitude more costly.
let me stop there for brevity, but my point was how the US has never truly been in a situation where the economy is doing bad, and the politics is untenable. You have people who are in power and well incentivized to make things even worse, you can cancel elections and deploy troops better if things are really and truly "bad". When people stop having their basic needs met (and I don't mean health care and affordable houses - but food and shelter), I'm concerned there will not be many ways left where the rule of law and peace can be sustained.
It's one of those things, like "you can't unspill the milk". If things get as bad as I fear, right now, today is as good as it will ever get in the US. What scares me is that Americans aren't terrified enough, those that know better are in catatonic state of "what can i possibly do about it?" - and I mean all Americans regardless of politics.
I feel ya 100%.
Add on atomic bombs and biosphere collapse and I’m not just worried for the USA but civilization itself not making it many more decades
That is literally the nihilism that got us here to begin with.
I mean, yeah.
If y’all didn’t pollute the climate to the point things will be unlivable I wouldn’t feel that way.
But rn my political goals are to leave a more beautiful corpse.
From what I understand, things will get bad but for 99% of the world, the rest of this century should be bearable climate-wise. There simply aren't enough fossil fuels in the ground to keep it burning longer than 2100~ish anyways. I mean, the problem is very real and millions might die, but at the same time the majority of the billions will do ok as well, so no real cause for nihilsm on that front. Especially considering the mortality rates at the same decades a century earlier would still be significantly higher.
Wars, economic crises and other turmoils however, that's a tough one. Even climate change alone will stress out too many things and exasperate those areas.
It's more like we've had it really good post-WW2 over all, and that will go away pretty soon. Even ocean currents collapsing and acidification of the ocean, as bad as it is, it won't yet be the worst or cataclysmic I'm afraid.
Widespread undesirable situations like that tend to result in humans coming up with solutions too. It took us WW2 to get nuclear energy. It took slavery and colonialism to get us the industrial age. Bad things and good things tend to come and go alike.
where will brain drain go to? what's the better country for highly educated and desirable workers? especially for americans?
I can only speculate, but many are going back to their home countries. China is also ok-ish from what I hear (at least in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen). Native born americans are also trying very hard to move to Canada, UK and EU.
But your question is what is a better country for them? A year ago, I would have said none. But I'm sure you're seen the same news that I am where even when immigrate legally, work hard, obey the law,etc.. even having real-ID proof is of no use, they get jailed. the threat of imprisonment alone, just for existing is scary, I'd say just about any other country that won't throw you in prison for existing is better. They're also talking about revoking citizenship of Americans so non-nonchalantly, hardly anyone cares. I don't even if the US is safe right now just for getting your degree at an Ivy-league school.
You said "especially for americans" - they're talking about getting rid of H1Bs right now, my comment is about the brain-drain from immigrants. The majority of the time, it isn't to save money, but the talent just isn't there in the US. Even in software-dev, there is a sort of flood of compsci grads right now, but it's only so because so much of these positions are filled with immigrants. Many other fields will have strong demand, and if the supply could be bootstrapped in a few years it isn't a big deal, but while americans get degrees (which isn't happening like before! it's really really bad right now) american companies lose their competitive advantage. Look at the CEOs of Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, they 're the type of people ICE would be eager to throw in prison were it not for their wealth and connections. Go to Arxiv.org to see pre-prints on research papers from various industries, look at the names of who's publishing.
You have to understand that the current environment and government in the US is specifically to drive out immigrants. There is a reason ICE has a higher budget than the US marines right now ($50B), they're not at the border arresting illegal migrants, they're hunting legal migrants in american cities. There are many countries where there are little opportunities for work, and population and government are very hostile to migrants (russia for example, or even japan in certain cases),but you will not have to fear being thrown in jail at-random, or constantly fear for your safety, especially for those who have family hear, I can't image what it must be like.
> The majority of the time, it isn't to save money, but the talent just isn't there in the US.
this is very clearly demonstrably not true. i posted about this months ago if you want to see my arguments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45425031
i'm also not really sure why the budget the marines is relevant here. the DoD has a nearly trillion dollar budget. if we're going to randomly segment out expense centers why not focus it even more narrowly to something arbitrary like how much the military spends on flour for pizzas?
for ICE, total effective/enhanced funding for FY2026 is widely reported in the $28–30B from what I can tell.
not trying to be a dick but dont want to spend more time wording this more softly
Might be time to check with history and see how fascist governments have historically sought resources to boost their domestic economy...
They didn't outsource manufacturing, rely on foreign parties for critical tech, and rely on immigrants (legal or not) for both skilled and unskilled labor. They didn't have instant comms and globalized commerce either.
Only tangentially related, the Nazis started the holocaust, in part, as a way to boost their domestic economy while making invasion supply chains viable. Less people to fight over resources, they were removing demand because of supply shortages, in literally the worst way possible.
> They didn't outsource manufacturing, rely on foreign parties for critical tech, and rely on immigrants (legal or not) for both skilled and unskilled labor.
Outsourcing manufacturing is new. But you are wrong about the other two.
Why do you think fascists (and proto-fascists and the unrelated look-alikes) keep losing wars all through history?
Fascism as a term started getting used with Mussolini from what I recall. Italy back then did not depend much on foreign supply chain or immigrant labor as far as I know, am I mistaken, or are there other examples you're thinking of.
Germany did enough for it to matter¹, Spain did. Everything in Japan was imported when they started warmongering around².
Italy was in an exception situation at the beginning of WWII, where they couldn't afford external goods.
1 - Mainly because they pushed their definition of "hated foreigner" to an extreme.
2 - They made a huge movement into replacing production chains, mandated by the government at the beginning of the war. But their lack of access to tech was still crippling at the end of the war.
I think this is somewhat normal? companies slow down hiring at the end of the year
Now this is what really is “AGI”.
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> They have been poor for generations because they dislike diversity more than they want a strong economy and common prosperity.
What do you expect when people reject education and embrace religion?
> As far as I can tell the best fix is higher education.
How do you "fix" higher education that's been rejected?
Yeah I didn't say it was an easy fix, I just said I thought it was (probably) the best. America has been having diversity/foreign policy issues since day 1 with wiping out the Indians. It's not going to go away tomorrow.
> Look at the US South. They have been poor for generations because they dislike diversity more than they want a strong economy and common prosperity.
The US South is the only place in the country with "diversity" seriously go look a population maps the north has a fraction of the diversity of the south.
> because they dislike diversity more than
Your reason for coming to the conclusion that this is the cause?
Florida has a GDP in line with Australia, or South Korea, or Spain, and with a smaller population. Not exactly what I would call generationally poor. Texas has the same GDP as Italy, but with half the population.
Alabama, US and Bavaria, Germany also have a similar GDP per capita. You would simply be insane to think Alabama was in any way wealthier than Bavaria. This isn't me having a go at the US, this is me having a go at GDP.
Bavaria is one of the wealthiest regions in Germany and Alabama is one of the poorest US states. So it's not really a great comparison.
Also GDP per capita doesn't have that much to do with "wealth". It's a good proxy for income though. So I'm not sure what you are claiming here exactly.
> You would simply be insane to think Alabama was in any way wealthier than Bavaria.
Is it accurate? Europe has a fairly low standard of living compared to America, but their totalitarian governments are quite effective at silencing all dissent.
Yes, life in Bavaria, working in manufacturing, is nothing but miserable oppression. Horrible 35 hour work week. Wretched 6 weeks of vacation. Ruinously expensive 500 EUR/month daycare. The prospect of having to pay a couple hundred Euros per semester when my child reaches university.
The good wine is now 8 EUR/bottle.
Suffering and deprivation.
Do not come here, I beg of you. Save yourself.
I had to use extraordinary means to get this message out.
That’s exactly what an oppressive government would have their citizens say, fellow Bavarian!
/s
GDP per capita is about the crudest possible metric for economic well-being. Nobody in Australia is going into bankruptcy over hospital bills or student loans.
Try comparing life expectancy instead, it's a better metric for how well the population is actually doing. Those two US states have comparatively high inequality and lower life expectancy, suggesting they're burning human capital to fuel GDP and generate billionaires.
I haven't read about it much since the height of the Purdue/Oxycontin scandal but the so-called 'deaths of despair' - suicide, overdose and alcoholic liver disease - are also relatively high in the USA.
A lot of rich old people move in and out of florida seasonally, or retire there living off pensions ($0 income).
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> it would mean to move away from google & android etc.
Where do you go?
Jolla's Sailfish OS, GrapheneOS (I know, uses AOSP). It's going to be more touch than running stock Android or iOS, but the more users and funding these get, the more resources for development.
I think there will be a lot of chaos in the coming years. But chaos also creates opportunities. There is a lot of local talk about moving away from US Tech and for new tech, you already see this happening. E.g. our local university has forbidden the use of most US LLM services (because of privacy and data protection issues) and are doing trials with Mistral. Most likely they'll roll out Mistral university-wide. Two years ago, they would have certainly gone Gemini.
I prefer Librem 5 and Pinephone, since they don't rely on proprietary software or Google.
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It is over. They are trying to turn America into an NVIDIA data centre only for it to go bust.
What makes you hopeful that this year is like the other years, and not more like something unto itself?
The bears will be right eventually. But they'll be wrong many times in a row before that. And we'll pull through, eventually. I'm a long-term optimist, so I'm not particularly worried about when the next downturn will be.
2016 socio-economy and 2025/6 socio-economy are vastly different.
Go look, you see these types of articles every year, not just 2016.
In other years, the US was not threatening to annex allies, blow up NATO, etc. To speak in Hacker News terms, the world is slowly and increasingly faster going to rebase away from the US. Sadly for the US, their biggest arch enemy (besides DEI), China, is going to benefit from it hugely.
Frenemies that play according to a rule book are more worthy than frenemies that have gone insane.
In other years they used similar excuses like China and then Trump in 2016 and then Covid, then J6, then Covid again… Again, doomer mentality.
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There is going to be plenty of jobs for soldiers, nurses and gravediggers when WW3 starts.
Makes sense. I know of multiple companies that reduced their headcount by a factor of 10 after Opus 4.5. Their new business model is basically: CEO + CTO + CFO + hundreds of Opus 4.5 agents.
I'm a big agent proponent myself but I don't think these kinds of companies actually exist yet. It's gotta either be some CTO who learned the word "orchestration" or "agent harness" and decided to play around with that stuff, or pure fantasy from the usual suspects of VC-twitter trying to build FOMO/signal themselves as part of the "in crowd"/drive engagement with hyperbole.
You should let them know that they should be able to let that CFO go soon
How is that working out, genuinely curious
Well, I was simply lying.
Genuinely, what would be the point of having a CEO?
Who else is going to run the models?
The CTO, obviously.
another model
https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...
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