No More Jobs?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“Consumer confidence inched up in June as falling oil prices in recent weeks provided some relief to consumer inflation fears,” said Dana M Peterson, Chief Economist, The Conference Board. “Consumer appraisals of current business conditions were slightly more positive compared to last month. However, perceptions of the current labor market softened measurably as the percentage of consumers saying jobs were ‘hard to get’ rose to 22.5%, the highest level since January 2021 (22.8%). Conference Board

 

MarketWatch

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey highlighted what was behind the meager total of 57,000 new jobs in June – the fewest in four months. The job market may not recover from the damage the Trump administration has done to the U.S. economy anytime soon.

Some 755,000 worker dropped out of the labor force in June because “jobs are hard to get,” said the Conference Board’s survey.

What's more, job gains in May and April were revised down to a combined 277,000 from a previous 351,000 - 74,000 fewer than previously reported.

Trump’s Iran War disaster is probably the main reason for the job losses because higher energy prices from the Middle East are elevating inflation and slowing down hiring for years to come. Wall Street is hoping the A.I. revolution will boost labor productivity to such an extent that it will tame inflation, but without creating many new jobs.

The other culprit for fewer new jobs? Federal immigration officials have detained more than 10,000 people in the last five days, reports the NYTimes, a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates. Immigrants won in the latest SCOTUS rulings that ICE cannot hold them without due process, which might slow down the roundups because it means a bond hearing.

The shrinking labor force will shrink economic growth as well since fewer workers means less will be produced; unless the A.I. delivers on it promises of higher producivity. And that will take years. But that means fewer workers, anyway. There will be more robots, Claude, ChatGPT, Open AI, etc., etc. and a shrinking workforce that pays less taxes to support public policies, social security, Medicare and public debt don’t forget, which is soaring, of course.

Well, many of the new jobs will be in the lower paying healthcare industry — hospitals, doctor's offices, dentists, nursing homes and so forth — that created 47,000 of the 57,000 new U.S. jobs in June.

The big question will be how to support our public policies that serve all Americans in the future (and preserve jobs), rather than more Republican policies that continue to favor the concentration of wealth via A.I. or whatever, driving U.S. ever closer to insolvency.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Who Won the Shutdown?

 Financial FAQs

“What if conservatives succeeded in repealing Obamacare? “Republicans' Obamacare repeal bill would leave 17 million more people uninsured next year, and 32 million more in 2026, the Congressional Budget Office said in an estimate Wednesday. It also said premiums would double by 2026. …By 2026, three quarters of the population would live in areas with no insurers participating in the non-group market, due to upward pressure on premiums and downward pressure on enrollment, the report found.” Huffington Post

GETTYIMAGES

Republicans didn’t win the recent government shutdown because they don’t understand how important affordable healthcare has become to all Americans, not just the wealthy.

They were in fact attempting to take down Obamacare (ACA) once again by not including the subsidies in the continuing resolution that made it available for middle and low-income folk.

Republicans have proven time and again that they want non-senior Americans to pay for health care out of their own pockets, if not through their employer or business. Their extreme dislike of the federal government providing any public healthcare is most evident in Trump picking a very demented RFK, Jr. to lead the Department of Health & Human Services, while slashing Medicare and Medicaid benefits.

It reveals why they are the party of wealthy oligarchs. They are not at all interested in the health of their constituents. It’s why Republican administrations have attempted to repeal Obamacare more than 30 times and why many of the Republican red states haven’t enlisted in the Obamacare premium subsidies that would enable their own citizens to afford Obamacare

So I cited above a CBO estimate from my 2017 Huffington Post article of the benefits to Americans’ health from Obamacare resulting from its passage.

A 2016 Commonwealth Club study said “…evidence indicates that the ACA has likely acted as an economic stimulus, in part by freeing up private and public resources for investment in jobs and production capacity. Moreover, the law’s payment and other cost-related reforms appear to have contributed to the marked slowdown in health spending growth seen in recent years.”

Some of those benefits are:

· Health care spending growth per person—both public and private—has slowed for five years.

· A number of ACA reforms, particularly related to Medicare, have likely contributed to the slowdown in health care spending growth by tightening provider payment rates and introducing incentives to reduce excess costs.

· Faster-than-expected economic growth and slower-than-expected health care spending have led to multiple downward revisions of the federal deficit and projected deficits.

· These trends have also been a boon to state and local government budgets, as job growth has improved state tax revenues while cost growth in health care programs has slowed. At the same time, expanding insurance to millions of people who were previously uninsured has supported local health systems and enhanced families’ ability to pay for necessities, including health care.

We now must wait for the November 20 release of the delayed September unemployment report to learn just how much the shutdown hurt the American economy.

But the almost complete ignorance of Obamacare’s importance by Republicans during the shutdown enabled Democrats’ big win in the November elections.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

"Mr. President, do not come to Chicago."

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“So in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump's military occupations, take note: 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.” CBS News

CBS

President Trump and Republicans have expanded their defacto civil war by invading Democratic blue states, something the original confederacy couldn’t do. He wants to impoverish them just as Republicans have milked their red states for decades.

That’s why Illinois Governor JB Pritzer came out swinging at a press conference when he learned that President Donald Trump was looking at occupying Chicago and Philadelphia next with National Guard troops from some of the red states to combat crime.

“Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against, and it's the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances,” said Governor Pritzer

But there’s more to Trump’s actions. Pritzer wanted Americans to realize that Trump and his Republicans are defunding everything the federal government provides to protect Americans from crime to pay for his tax cuts for the wealthiest. The total is $1,166 billion in cuts to public safety and crime prevention programs, as well as grants to local police departments, said Governor Pritzer.

There are good reasons that blue states are more prosperous and do a better job at protecting their citizens. They have higher minimum wages, fewer restrictions to the right to collective bargain and form trade unions, women’s rights, and better health care than the red states.

And what if red staters understood they only get the leftovers, including less disaster aid when they suffer a disproportionate number of hurricanes, floods and tornadoes, such as happened in Kerrville, Texas?

Everyone loves tax cuts, but not when it creates an almost $39 trillion public debt that endangers the full faith and credit of the U.S. Trump wants to pay for the tax cuts with massive tariff hikes by regressing to a century-ago Gilded Age that enriched the few and corrupted many.

It is the reason for the continuing civil war, I said last week, Republicans trumpet there are more individual rights and freedoms with smaller government and lower taxes.

But it is really to maintain control by preserving as much of the vestiges of the agrarian, slaveholding culture as possible.

By depriving red state citizens of adequate health care in the name of lower taxes and smaller government, they become sicker. By restricting union organizing with right to work laws, workers not only have lower incomes, but less time with their families and for leisure.

And attempting to erase DEI mandates from existing laws and educational institutions is their attempt to resuscitate the Jim Crow laws of racial segregation that took a century to redress.

Won’t cutting government research on healthcare and the climate, slashing funding for the FAA and NOAA make us less safe as well, when the President’s primary job is to protect Americans not harm them?

It looks like a massive dereliction of duty that would fit the definition of a “high crime and misdemeanor.”

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Does Trump Want Another War?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“I’m not sure most Americans appreciate the monumental damage President Trump is doing to the post-World War II order that is the wellspring of American global leadership and affluence.” NYTimes Nicholas Kristof

USAToday

There is a growing outcry over the “monumental damage” emanating from the bromance of two ‘straight’ (and white) men on a tear of petty vindictiveness settling old scores, which can have far greater consequences.

It is tearing apart our closest alliances that protect Americans and other democratic countries from the depredations of autocrats and dictators, such as Vladimir Putin, who must imagine himself Czar Ivan the Terrible killing hundreds of thousands of his own people in attempting to conquer Ukraine to make it a part of a new Russian Empire (350,000 dead Russians at last count, per NBC’s Morning Joe).

“We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values—largely put in place by America since the Second World War—which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity.” Chris Patten, former UK Tory Chairman cited by Nicholas Kristof.

The level of ineptitude that Elon Musk’s DOGE team shows is breathtaking, as are the attempts to hide it.

“All in all, what we’ve just witnessed is a stunning display of incompetence, dismissal of critical federal workers by people with no idea of what they do and why it matters. Musk and Trump have, of course, apologized and promised to do better in the future.” Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman

Why the petty vindictiveness of our Bromancers? In a frightening insight by Timothy Snyder, Author of On Freedom, they are really ‘straight’ men trying to appear strong. But that can only be done by weakening the strong that actually stand in their way.

“Trump is a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak. He is strong in a relative sense; as Musk destroys institutions, what remains is Trump’s presence. But other sorts of power meaning vanish, as Musk takes apart the departments of the American government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. And then the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world.”

Dr. Snyder explained what he meant in a recent New Yorker article. Trump and Putin are both fascists, which by definition means masters of propaganda that twist words such as ‘communism’, or ‘deep state’ into meanings that feed their MAGA followers’ paranoid fantasies.

Hitler’s Goebbels, and Russia’s Stalin were masters of such propaganda that led to World War Two. It is detailed in Snyder’s bestselling book, “Bloodlands,” which describes the hideous period in the 1930s and ’40s when as many as 14 million people perished at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, with Ukraine a “particularly awful” mass grave.

And Trump is using the same fascist vocabulary today in branding Ukraine’s Zelensky the dictator, when it is Vladimir Putin.

That is why Trump and Musk’s actions threaten world peace and our own domestic order. They accomplish it by weakening the military alliances that have protected us such as NATO, while eliminating whole government departments that protect our health and safety and more environmental catastrophes, while weakening the FBI and DOJ that protect Americans from domestic and foreign terrorists.

In fact, settling old scores is an attempt to protect themselves from their own mistakes (i.e., Trump’s convictions, Musk-Tesla’s auto-drive accidents) by putting the blame on others. That is why Trump says he does not know what Musk is doing, when asked. He can therefore blame Musk or his lieutenants when said mistakes are uncovered.

Both Democrats and Republicans must now find a way now to counter Trump and Musk’s biggest mistake of all, their preoccupation with vengeance to and masks their own weaknesses that could lead to another war.

It is weakening our own strength and ability to stand up to Russia and China, where a larger war is most likely to start—because they have become emboldened by our growing weakness.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen