One can argue that we're only seeing the beginning of the destruction. The economic policies of this administration could take years to be fully realized. That also means that, unfortunately, it will take years to repair the damage.
Yup. Even if Americans vote out the current administration, there’s no guarantee they won’t vote in another administration like this again. They’ve already done it twice.
We need, at the very least, to revoke "emergency" powers of the presidency, and we need to reinforce that Congressional action overrides executive whim.
The administrative state is a good thing, not a bad thing, and people like Steve Bannon are cancers on American success.
Ideally, we would also ban gerrymandering, revoke unlimited anonymous political spending, and implement ranked choice voting.
I think the contradiction required for this is 1) we need a strong, power concentrated leader to decisively correct the ship and prevent future abuses. 2) we then need the leader to voluntarily limit their powers.
There is nothing unusual about Americans here. Every democracy has the same worry, and always has. Every change in party has brought in instability, going right back to the founding of the country. Sometimes worse than others. Trump isn't that much different from some of the stupid things presidents were doing in the 1800s...
As someone who is just starting their proper adult life, the feeling of seeing the past's most bleak, extreme, "irrational" depression fuel resurface as today's level-headed, sensible predictions for the future is difficult to describe.
Has either the US or the EU ever promised not to retaliate against their enemy states or something? Actually, has any nation or national organization in the world ever promised that? You know, not to engage in war or any retaliation for anything? Just be arbitrarily 'fair'? You're creating standards that simply never existed. When war is on the table, all bets are off, it has always been that way.
Once you do what Russia did, no one should be required to honor anything with you. Countries are bound by laws, especially when you talk about Western countries, but there's always ways to get around to do what's needed if it's important enough - such as in military conflicts. If anything, the legal frameworks that tie their hands often prevented them from going even further, which would've been far better.
It also comes off incredibly disingenuous how lightly you're treating Russia here. You're pretending as if they just had an oopsie, a momentary lapse of judgement, a minor accidental misstep, and the heartless hypocrite West unfairly punished them for it by arbitrarily declaring them 'evil'. Like anyone else is scared because they might just stumble and that'll cause them to get on the West's bad side.
Unless you can think of other countries that are itching to start the new bloodiest, most cruel invasion of a sovereign nation on EU's doorstep, no one's situation mirrors Russia's. If they wanted the EU to sit idle, perhaps they shouldn't have invaded.
Not to mention that most (all?) of those assets haven't been seized. They were frozen (although the interest earned on them was seized by diverting it to Ukraine in some cases).
This downvote isn't a punishment, it's a way to help decrease the visibility of lies and missinformation.
Russia literally launched an aggressive war of conquest. Any response that doesn't involve literal soldiers occupying russian cities is an extremely minor one.
These are numbers from March 2024 to March 2025, right? The current administration was present for 3 of those 12 months. I think the forces that move the whole US and world economy don’t really change between administrations.
About half the population doesn't even understand how marginal income tax rates work. I bet the fraction that doesn't know that "lowering inflation" still means "prices are going up, not down" is quite a bit larger than that.
Snark aside, I really wonder how we as a nation can get to better politics and policy when so many people are so misinformed about the basics. It seems hopeless at times.
Instilling critical thinking skills from a young age. The actual educational content is far less important. "Learning how to learn" should be the primary purpose of K-12.
I think its probably a lot more complicated than that. I think this started decades ago and we are at a point of pivot. I couldn't tell you where we are pivoting to but I'm not really reassured by the obsessive metricization(?) of our economy, from the stock market to inflation numbers to jobs numbers.
There are recurring cycles in the American/Western history, with each cycle lasting +- 20 years.
The cycles are High, Awakening, Unraveling and Crisis.
We're supposedly in the Crisis cycle, where there are major crises like war, depression,revolutions that would help the society to rebuild institutions.
This theory seems completely flawed as it applies itself retroactively, entrenched in confirmation bias, but still entertaining.
Once the gold standard was ended and our fiat currency could be printed and given directly to the ruling class, it was effectively curtains for everyone else.
This is probably the culmination of every administration after Clinton. Unsustainable spending that keeps going until now we are feeling the pressure. This administration is definitely acting in ways I feel are significantly suboptimal but it's unlikely to show the deeper impacts so quickly.
This article is saying the slowdown started as early as a year ago. That of course opens up the discussion of whether this new revision is political cover for the current administration since they just removed the BLS head.
Usually I'd be with you. It's a big ship and even presidents have limited power to steer. But he is really doing all he can to sink it, so while one cannot blame him entirely, one can blame him:
- Firing a lot of federal employees
- Creating an uncertain business environment where no planning is possible via tariffs
That's just what he is breaking short term. There will be no way to reverse the long term damage his policies do.
I'm not arguing about goals, just looking at the execution.
The last one fired the BLS head because he didn't like the jobs report?
Now not only are we seeing major job loss, our statisticians are intimidated and likely are no longer reporting the truth. We now have to rely upon shittier metrics because our core numbers are worthless.
"US job growth during much of the past year was significantly weaker than initially estimated, according to new data released Wednesday.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ preliminary annual benchmark review of employment data suggests that there were 818,000 fewer jobs in March of this year than were initially reported."
> Are you reporting on this breaking news scandal that predictions about future events are not always perfectly accurate?
If the predictions are always (or mostly) wrong but always in one direction then wouldn't one begin to suspect that either a) the model is flawed, or b) that there's goal-seeking behind the scenes?
If there's a recent revision of BLS figures showing a correction of PLUS 900k jobs, I'd love to see it.
> If there's a recent revision of BLS figures showing a correction of PLUS 900k jobs, I'd love to see it.
I know right? It's like the new numbers from the BLS are shit or something.
Trump fires the last guy, and then a month later they claim that Joe Biden lost 900,000++ jobs. A correction of this size that has never happened before.
It's like firing the head of statistics ruins your reputation and intimidates the other accountants into making up numbers that favor your politics.
Apologies but this isn't unique, nor has it anything specifically to do with the current POTUS. The US jobs figures has had huge revisions downwards before, for instance last year:
"There's still ongoing chatter about the huge revision to U.S. job growth seen yesterday and what it might signify for the economy and markets. 818,000 jobs were wiped out in the 12 months through March 2024 (or 68,000 per month), resulting in the biggest downward adjustment since the global financial crisis."
Are you ignorant to the large scale firings from DOGE and other intimidation tactics of this administration? Or are you just trolling with bad discussion points?
DOGE firings aren't really going to show up in this data. (The cutoff of March2025 is too new) Intimidation of our statistics teams isn't in the data. You aren't even countering the points I'm bringing up.
Everything in context. The problem now is the obvious and direct intimidation applied to our statisticians. Or do you think that Trump actually gives a care about statistical validity?
Your point is that you didn't trust statistics before. Cool. Well guess what? These actions have made it worse. Now NOBODY should be trusting these stats.
Congrats. You won. You destroyed the trust in our statistical system. That was your goal was it not?
I agree with you. The new crop of statistics is suspect. And all our statistics moving forward will continue to be suspect and I'm not sure how to fix the trust problem.
However, I trusted things before. And this new state of things is uniquely a consequence of recent events. You are ignoring all the crap that happened this year that leads me to distrust the new results over the old results and reporting.
Regardless of which administration is in place, the BLS (USA) does adjust the numbers every month (for two months after the initial release) and annually. This is fairly common with statistics and forecasting in general.
Regardless if the numbers go up or down, regardless of the administration.
So, yes...the last administration did the same thing, and the administration before that, etc.
They intentionally hired incompetent and/or politically-biased bureaucrats to cook the numbers?
Because that's what we're about to see. A players hire B players, B players hire C players, and Trump hires the rest. The next round of economic reports will be much better, I'm sure. Or else.
It is discussion. Continue with agreement or disagreement as desired. I'm not sure if the meta comment attempting to passive aggressively censor the original comment is needed, though.
