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

Inflation Is Contagious

 Popular Economics Weekly

“From the preceding month, the PCE price index for December increased 0.4 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index also increased 0.4 percent.

From the same month one year ago, the PCE price index for December increased 2.9 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 3.0 percent from one year ago.” BEA.gov

FREDpceindex

The inflation contagion is preceding unabated, per the FRED graph of the Personal Consumption Expenditure Index, the favored Federal Reserve inflation indicator.

Why? Because little to nothing has been done about inflation, although that may change with the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw Trump’s executive orders allowing retaliatory tariffs. The evidence is that tariffs have raised prices and done nothing to lower the trade deficit that Trump has railed about, per Paul Krugman’s Substack blog.

Paul Krugman

The Fed uses the PCE index because it most broadly measures the change in goods and services prices of goods consumed “by all households, and nonprofit institutions serving households”, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

It is a virus-like contagion indicator because consumers can’t do much about it over the short term other than shop for more bargains. It’s caused by product shortages and Trump’s tariffs, disruptions due to Trump’s continuous changes to tariffs that percolate through the general economy.

The FRED above graph also shows that President Biden had already brought PCE inflation down to 3% in October 2023. It has remained there ever since, only beginning to creep up after Trump’s April 2025 Liberation Day tariff announcements.

And it continues its creep, which will make the Fed’s decision about when to lower interest rates more difficult. Consumers are also becoming increasingly anxious about inflation.

And minutes of the Federal Reserve’s first meeting of the new year showed that several officials wanted the central bank to report there was a chance its next move might be to raise interest rates because of the stubborn inflation data.

The Conference Board’s Confidence Index also measures such attitudes: “Consumers’ write-in responses on factors affecting the economy continued to skew towards pessimism. Comments about prices, inflation, and the cost of goods remained at the top of consumer’s minds.”

Why is inflation so contagious, to use the virus analogy? Because price changes are connected, they ‘infect’ each other as every consumer and business knows. For instance a rise in import prices raises the price of the final product, whatever it is.

Economists call the phenomenon inflation expectations. Research has shown if businesses expect high inflation, they may raise prices immediately; if workers expect it, they will demand higher wages, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s all about attempting to predict future behavior, in other words. Consumer confidence surveys, such as the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index attempt to measure inflation expectations, for instance:

“Consumers’ average and median 12-month inflation expectations were little changed but remained elevated. Consumers also believed that interest rates will persist at higher levels over the next 12 months.

The good news is that even Independent voters are seeing through the propaganda and blatant lies that lay behind President Trump’s “Day One” promises.

Harlan Green © 2026

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

Is U.S. Growth Slowing?

 Financial FAQs

“Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 (October, November, and December), according to the advance estimate released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the third quarter, real GDP increased 4.4 percent.” BEA.gov

 

BEAgdp

The economic chaos that President Trump has sown by using the tariffs as a tool to coerce trading partners is a major cause of the sudden drop in fourth quarter (Q4) GDP growth from Q2 and Q3 growth (see graph).

So it’s great news the Supreme Court ruling that most of President Trump’s tariffs by executive order are illegal. It will create more certainty over the instability that has bedeviled consumers and businesses alike, which encourages future economic growth.

It’s also a huge victory for the rule of law over a president who routinely disobeys the law since only congress has the power to tax.

Businesses had rushed to counter the chaos created by the tariffs by stockpiling imports before Trump announced more tariffs. And import costs are subtracted from export prices to calculate GDP (Because imported goods aren’t produced domestically.), So higher imports, when all else is equal, tends to slow GDP growth, which measures what is produced domestically.

The furlough of hundreds of thousands of workers without pay during the 43-day government shutdown also slowed consumer spending that had already been affected by the tariff uncertainty.

So we are now beginning to see the damage Trump’s imagined cure for our trade deficits has done. He said other countries should have to eat the higher import costs from the tariffs but they passed on most of the higher costs.

Rump’s tariffs didn’t correct the trade imbalance between imports and exports either because importers then found ways to time their purchases between price swings and/or transfer their business to other countries that had lower tariffs.

In fact, the trade deficit—created by the amount imports exceeded exports— barely changed after all Trump’s planned chaos. It was $901 billion in 2025 vs. $903 billion in 2024.

“Had Congress intended to convey the distinct and extraordinary power to impose tariffs, it would have done so expressly, as it consistently has in other tariff statutes,” said the Supreme Court opinion, which was supported by a 6-3 majority of the court. Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas dissented.

In other words, President Trump can no longer govern by creating the chaos and uncertainty that has enabled him to accumulate so much power and wealth. So maybe “The times they are a changin?”

And sowing economic chaos by being unpredictable doesn’t work as a negotiating tactic either. Companies usually waited until Trump’s TACO bluster caused him to back down before agreeing to a rate. And SCOTUS ruled he now must do the research required by other laws to justify the tariffs.

Trump’s tariffs did not decrease the flow of imports or boost domestic manufacturing, as intended. Domestic manufacturing lost another 80,000 jobs last year, in large part because of the higher steel and aluminum prices that go into so much manufacturing output.

And the mostly illegal tariffs worsened inflation as well. A New York Fed bank study found U.S. businesses and consumers have paid most of the costs of the price increases on imported goods.

“Over the course of 2025, the average tariff rate on U.S. imports increased from 2.6 to 13 percent. In this blog post, we ask how much of the tariffs were paid by the U.S., using import data through November 2025. We find that nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers” per the NY Federal Reserve.

The harm done by Trump’s tariffs by fiat makes a long list. China had stopped buying agricultural products as in Trump’s first term and higher tariffs have cost Ford and GM $billions in lost profits.

The Supreme Court ruling exposed the harm ignoring laws and our constitution has done to economic growth. Trump’s Republicans are no longer the party that stands for lower taxes, except among their wealthiest supporters. So much for increasing affordability!

Harlan Green © 2026

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

Where Are the Jobs--Part II?

 Financial FAQs

“Job creation took a step back in 2025, with private employers adding 398,000 jobs, down from 771,000 in 2024. While we've seen a continuous and dramatic slowdown in job creation for the past three years, wage growth has remained stable.” ADP

FREDpayrolls

The FRED (St. Louis Federal Reserve) graph tells it all. Job formation has almost disappeared in the Trump economy. It’s not only the shutdowns, which have delayed the official U.S. unemployment report that was due for January, but past months as well, so private payroll data processors like ADP fill in the knowledge gap.

But we know from the latest FRED graph of private payroll hiring that private employers are barely hiring. Just 74,000 jobs were created in November 2025 and 22,000 in January, as reported by ADP.

So the GDP growth spurts last fall 2025 are from the $ trillions being invested in AI energy centers, not in corporations expanding their workforce. Corporations are laying off workers instead.

The best examples are Amazon and now the Washington Post. The NYTimes just reported that the Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs “that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.

“The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said,” said the NYTimes

CBS News reports that in 2025, companies directly pointed to their use of AI in announcing 55,000 job cuts — more than 12 times the number of layoffs attributed to AI just two years earlier, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Of those job losses, 51,000 were in tech, with most of the cuts concentrated in tech-heavy states such as California and Washington.

The main culprit are the tariffs that Trump is using to coerce concessions from foreign governments, but it is doing the most damage to Americans. U.S. vehicle sales plunged in January, for example. Automobile sales increased at an annual rate of 14.9 million in January, down 7% from 16.1 million in the final month of 2025, according to Wards Intelligence and profit losses of $billions have already been reported by GM and Ford due to the higher tariffs on aluminum and steel.

Consumers above all are reacting to the sudden changes in the employment picture. The Conference Board voiced their concerns in the headlineConfidence collapsed to lowest point since 2014, surpassing pandemic depths: “The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index® fell by 9.7 points in January to 84.5 (1985=100), from an upwardly revised 94.2 in December. A 5.1-point upward revision to December’s reading of the Index resulted in a slight increase last month, reversing the initially reported decline. However, January’s preliminary results showed confidence resumed declining after a one-month uptick.

So unemployed workers are now suffering under both the rising inflation from the tariffs and AI replacing many of their jobs.

It’s not a pretty picture, while we are still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether most of Trump’s tariffs are even legal. It much safer to do nothing in such circumstances—consumers to hold on to their savings and employers to replace their workers with more technology.

Harlan Green © 2026

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

A Greater Lawlessness Causes Greater Gun Violence

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

I wrote this Huffington Post piece in 2017 after the October 1 killing of 58 people with bump stock-equipped assault rifles at a Las Vegas music festival. It was one in a series on the greater lawlessness tearing apart Americans.

Nothing has changed with the Supreme Court now deciding the executive government, in the form of its ATF agency, did not have the power to outlaw bump stocks because when equipped with same, an assault rifle didn’t fit the exact definition of a machine gun, which is banned for civilian use.

The SCOTUS majority has caused a greater lawlessness because there is now no law or regulation to prevent the use of bump stocks in more mass killings.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” has been the credo of NRA, gun lobby and most Republicans since the 1980s when gun manufacturers came up with automatic pistols, so that guns could fire more rapidly.

But Las Vegas shooter Stephan Paddock had no discernible mental illness, criminal record — or anger problems, according to his brothers. The NRA will try in vain to find a reason this inhuman act was committed when there is no reason, other than the fact that military-style weapons are legal in most of America and easily obtainable.

Paddock’s assault rifles reportedly fired 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes, which is more than one round per second (1.5 rounds, actually). How is that not a machine gun?

Only guns can kill that many people — always the most vulnerable unable to defend themselves. His brothers didn’t even know he was a gun nut who owned more than 30 weapons and was able to smuggle in 10 suitcases containing 23 of those weapons without any Mandalay Bay Hotel staff even noticing such an oddity. Who needs that many suitcases in a hotel room?

President Trump’s administration did ban bump stocks at the time. But not for long with the Supreme Court majority now stepping in to make them legal again.

No existing laws now protect children in elementary and high schools from military-style assault rifles because in Justice Alito’s words, congress must decide, which said congress hasn’t been able to do.

For shame on the conservative SCOTUS majority.

Australia, the country most like US in population, had a similar gun problem until 36 people were killed in Port Arthur, and Prime Minister John Howard was able to pass strict gun control laws in 1996, the same year of the Port Arthur massacre. There hasn’t been a mass killing since then in Australia.

Australians apparently don’t believe owning an assault rifle is the ticket to manhood. Their gun control laws are maintained by weapon buyback programs and the requirement that gun owners must belong to a certified gun club.

How did our gun laws become so lax that military-style weapons are this easy to obtain? It was a little-known Supreme Court decision authored by its most extreme ideologue, Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1980s which said that said gun owners no longer must heed the constitutional Second Amendment stricture that owners of such guns be members of a well-regulated militia.

Our founding fathers must have put the works, “a well-regulated militia” in the Second Amendment for a reason. Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was not a member of a well-regulated militia.

Harlan Green © 2024

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