How does this happen?
The way US workers survive in a high-skill economy is having complex, internationally supplied machines/services/trade.
People think what will happen is more stuff made in US, but then that room sized CNC milling machine you ordered from Germany so you can actually operate a US company suddenly has a massive tariff bill and now you have to fire 3 guys to pay the bank for that. And people are buying less of your stuff because they're already spending more money on all their other goods, either because of tariffs or because it's now made by people with less comparative advantage.
This is a massive hand-wave and only applies to companies that have an in with the administration. If you're a small/medium-size business that doesn't have a budget for "government relations," or you're in a field like renewable energy or EVs where the admin doesn't like the vibes? Too bad for you.
> Those same friends expect purchase amounts to increase once America starts producing more on its own.
Yes they will, and aggregate output will decrease because producers are now spending more money on worse domestic substitutes for foreign products. Also, you're now shoveling corporate welfare to those new domestic producers, so they have no incentive to step up their game and innovate. (If you want an example of this look at the consistent failure of US automakers to compete globally, because tariffs incentivize them to optimize for building pickup trucks domestically.)
Import substitution has been tried many times before, it doesn't work.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/radio-address-...
Hell, even the Heritage Foundation thought NAFTA was a good idea instead of tariffs:
https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/the-north-american-fre...
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
The question, and we pose it formally, is whether what you desire for France is the benefit of consumption free of charge or the alleged advantages of onerous production. Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!I’m not sure if you’ve driven in the US, but we have paved roads here, too! And an excellent interstate highway system! Driving around the unique, rugged American terrain is left for car commercials and a very small percentage of Americans.
They're not all hicks waving submachine guns with a beer in the other hand standing on the back of a Ranchero driving over sand dunes after fleeing mexican families.
And, the typical stereotype of "European cars are all small." Oh, boy.
Every heard of Chelsea Tractors?
But hey, maybe 30 years from now, your friends will be right about America producing more.
No one is honest about what is in those shipping containers (and no one wants to check). The longshoremen and their unions are corrupt AF and shouldn't even exist, let alone make more than google engineers. No one is honest about reporting what their goods are on customs forms. As of last time I checked, effective tariffs on GPUs and other important semis was actually slightly lower than under Biden. Not defending Trump but saying that what the executive says and what actually happens are different universes in regards to trade.
Oh and BTW, there's a whole parallel court system related to trade in the USA which does all the boring work of adjudication related to implementation of trade. No normie knows these guys exist and they are the reason that you can safely ignore whatever nonsense percentage trump says outloud next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Interna...
also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_International_Tr...
Also I buy a lot of clothes which are "made overseas" (Bronsen, soso, unbranded brand) which seems to have dodged the tariffs (Bronsen prices didn't even go up and they're made in china!!!) or made in the USA/Canada but with overseas material, i.e. Naked and Famous. In theory my clothes prices should have doubled or more. In practice almost nothing happened.
After the president fired the head of the BLS for publishing numbers he didn't like, there were a number of articles explaining why there are revisions.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/jobs-report-july-2025-revis...
The short answer is that there are various data sources and the most detailed ones are collected less than monthly, so the estimates based on the most recently monthly data are often corrected based on the other data.
As for why estimates are off, the data used by the estimators are presumably themselves even lower quality than whatever BLS is using.
Expect ADP to catch heat for this/ have their corporate charter revoked.
Were they so completely incorrect?
> That is down from a revised loss of 3,000 in August. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected an increase of 45,000.
Sure, you might say "gosh, +45,000 is way off from -3000". But at the same time, you have to consider they are measuring the change in a population of millions of people. In that sense, the percent error is very tiny whether it's +45K or -3K.
Yes, utterly. having number off by an order of magnitude in the complete opposite direction tells us at best that we are in unusual times and at worst that our estimates no longer work in this job market.
Because the situation we find ourselves in is highly unusual?
There's not much precedence for a global pandemic, a demented president, and the US shooting itself in the balls to piss off every major trading partner.
If records surrounding this topic are always correct and require revision maybe that's just how the data presents itself.
You only know the true amount of rainfall that happens after the storm passes.
that said, he has no problem putting drunkards in charge of national security...
I don't think his health really facilitates drinking even if he wanted to. He doesn't need to be drunk to struggle to walk straight or ramble off on some odd tangent.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
> If you ever looked at the actions of the Trump White House and wondered, ‘Are they on drugs?’ — the answer was, in some cases, yes. Absolutely, yes.
> In January, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report detailing how the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration distributed controlled substances with scant oversight and even sloppier record keeping. Investigators repeatedly noted that the unit had ordered thousands and thousands of doses of the stimulant modafinil, which has been used by military pilots for decades to stay alert during long missions.
While it seems our president use less coke that he did in 2018-2019 (to be clear, the only instance where i have heard a direct testimony is during the filming of the presidential new year vows of 2019, but a lot of people speculated about his coke habits until 2021), he do use a lot of more legal stimulants, at least during international trips. Age does not mesh well with this kind of stimulants, that can accelerate mental fatigue.
One of my pet theory is that Biden's "decline" was actually caused by drug overuse, and my guess is that he should be a bit more "here" now that he was a year ago.
The fact that Trump don't seems to work a lot and goes rest/golf often is actually a good thing in my opinion, because it will limit his needs for stimulants.
for example: you hear a new business forms. You know from historic data that a new business adds an average of 6 new jobs. So you estimate 6 and later on you get on the ground for proper counting.
In reality, this "business" is a single person doordash/uber gig worker. So you need to revise down 5 of those jobs. Maybe even 6, because maybe you counted the fact that there are X doordashers and Y uber drivers, but did not account for overlap. So you revise from 7 jobs added, to 1. Maybe 0 if that gig worker was laid off recently.
If this happens en masse, you get drastic revisions across the board. But this is usually desired by any president because fewer people look at revised numbers . Because revisions are usually small adjustments and normal. That good faith has clearly ended.
If the economy has been growing at N% a quarter, that’s your baseline until evidenced otherwise. The evidence comes in the form of BLS surveys and payroll data, both of which are lagging indicators.
Why lagging? If you’re hiring and firing, you’re going to be preoccupied with that before responding to a survey. So the folks who are doing the most change to their baselines tend to respond late. Similarly, if you’re hiring a firing a bunch, you may not get your numbers into ADP precisely correctly the first time around.
Sure, that's 1/5 of US jobs, but it's also going to be concentrated in some industries more than others -- would be nice to see how that lines up with where job adds and losses landed.
Correct, why I said “BLS surveys and payroll data.”
> you don’t see hiring/firing delay in the birth/death data like you do with the bls stats, but actual dataset bias is a factor
True.
As to how the losses happen, well, let the current US regime be exhibit A of how to shed jobs lol. Like are we really to think Trump's personal insistence on ~100,000 federal layoffs doesn't affect the workforce numbers? Like things already weren't good in the last two administrations...