U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession
forbes.com
forbes.com
https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
Why? What if constantly launching foreign wars, leveraging up the financial system and running up deficits isn’t sound economic policy?
Conservative approaches tend to be…. Conservative. Which is the opposite of growth.
Eisenhower had two terms = 8 years - did poorly.
Kennedy + Johnson two Democratic terms in a row = 8 years, did well.
Nixon + Ford, two Republican in row = 8 years, did poorly.
Carter 1 term, did well.
Reagan Bush - 3 terms Republicans 12 years, did poorly.
Clinton 2 terms 8 years did well.
Bush the second, 2 terms 8 years did poorly.
Obama 2 terms 8 years did well.
Trump, 1 term did extremely poorly
Biden 1 term did well.
So this 4 years thing you're talking about you mean that we can't be sure about Biden, Trump, or Carter. Fair enough, is the 8 years good enough or is that also too short to draw a conclusion?
Correct. But across repeated administrations, some of which held power for two terms, one can identify patterns. Post-Reagan Republicans have been a consistent trash fire for the American worker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulation_by_dispossession
Don't know why you're downvoted, that such possibilities are allowed in a completely made up system that can be changed at any time to better society, and not just ~10,000 people across the world, is a gross indictment of the current system.
All neoliberalism has done is made us more alienated, privatized the public commons, destroyed the environment, and hasten income inequality to levels that were worse than the gilded age.
If something doesn't change soon... we'll you can use your imagination to fill in the blanks.
The United States does similar and we also have a nice twist on the concept. We have $38,000,000,000,000 in national debt which increased $2,500,000,000,000 in 2025. Which is like $111,764 per citizen with ~$3,000 in interest payments a year each, all going to a handful of families (and Japan) who hold most the debt as an investment.
The US government borrowed the money, gave the money back to people the government borrowed it from in form of kickback contracts, subsidies to oil companies and farmers who vote for the politicians who increased the debt by $2,500,000,000,000 in 2025, and every citizen is responsible for paying the interest on it.
As an American, all of this is insane to me.
GOP is the fun dad party and Dems are the mommy party.
Republicans run economy hot until it blows, then Dems get voted in to clean up. People get annoyed about taxes and regulation when economy is ok again, fun dad promises ice cream and pizza for dinner forever.. rinse & repeat.
I'm happy to see many Democrats now supporting free trade, but that's traditionally been a conservative position.
Many now talk like they work for the president.
Of course everything is nuanced; the trend is merely interesting especially juxtaposed against people consistently voting for republicans for "economic" reasons.
The Fed seems to be the big driver of the economy. Other than that, the government is moving things at the margins. Even Trumps tariff shenanigans don't seem to have rocked the boat much.
“These days” like, since Eisenhower, or are we just posting absurdist nonsense as apologia? Economic policy doesn’t change much? Ok.
He creates uncertainty and it’s hard to see how that helps the US economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...
JOLTS is where stress shows first. Openings fall,[1] hiring slows,[2] quits drop,[3] and layoffs rise later.[4] Biden in particular shows the weakness of your provided stats.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSHIL
The charts paint a much more precise picture on what is happening, and I actually don't see anything that strongly support it being a partisan effect.
Can you explain why? Given that it's presumably averaged over the president's entire term, doesn't that provide a good measure of how much jobs were added under a given administration?
Also think of average populations under constant growth, as under Obama and Trump I pre-COVID: Trump's average would be higher in absolute terms than Obama, despite no fundamental change, and Biden higher still, and Trump II higher yet. Absolute populations and jobs go hand in hand. Averages without normalization are statistical theater.
Us Wikipedians have done a poor job on the federal statistical system (FSS or NSS), and this one of many results, this HN thread. I am working on it with the help of chat bots, but progress is slow given my focus on US healthcare and welfare systems. Fundamental laws have been documented, but the actual systems they enable are poorly documented.
If it's a Dem president in office? 100% the Dem's fault.
Why try to make it as if it was the "opposite side" doing it while I'm reading it?
But, the way pundits and journalists write about it makes, the way discpurse goes systematically pretends literal opposite of reality.
The Tarifs and the way trump acts, for example, massively disrupts markets.
They cut taxes and debt-financed war, which forced the US further into debt.
(Carter wins among US Presidents for least deaths on his watch.)
Most US invasions since 1980 have been the result of Reagan/Bush international oil meddling.
They were only able to take power because of unpopular inflation. And susceptibility to "revival superstar" oil saviors with Trilateral/CIA oil plans.
But they don't pay their bills for debt-financing illegal foreign wars.
Anyways, Nixon also disregarded the La Guardia commission and the interim findings of the Shaeffer report. So, after the supreme court back then in Leary vs in 1969 overturned the Tax Stamp Act of 1937 after 32 years on the grounds that the law required self-incriminatiom for compliance, Nixon re-criminalized medical Kaneh Bosm.
It's also very hard to assume that Reagan being elected in 76 would've avoided the oil-driven inflation at the end of that decade.
But of course, we've decided as a country/media to generally blame Biden for non-policy factors that put the economy on a wild bullwhip ride from 2020-to-2023ish, soooooo... maybe Reagan can deal with getting the blame for the inflation too!
Over the last few decades, neither party has really cared about deficits anyway. Everyone’s been spending, just at different speeds. The real question isn’t “who creates more jobs,” it’s whether the spending is efficient, sustainable, and actually creates long-term value. Eventually the bills come due, interest costs rise, and priorities shift from growth to just keeping the lights on.
So yeah, Democrats tend to show stronger job numbers, but spending more will almost always do that. Whether it’s good spending is a separate debate. Budget discipline isn’t partisan, it’s just basic economics.
Thats not necessarily true. During Bill Clinton's presidency he cut the deficits and the debt and yet the economy saw very strong job growth.
https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-und...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presi...
You're confusing rhetoric with policy.
Historically, Democratic and Republican administrations have followed distinct fiscal and economic patterns: Democrats typically oversee deficit reduction and falling unemployment, often achieved by maintaining or increasing the tax burden. Conversely, Republicans typically oversee deficit growth and rising unemployment, largely driven by decreased tax burdens through legislative cuts. Statistically, since 1945, real GDP has grown faster under Democrats (4.3% vs. 2.5%), while modern Democratic presidents (Clinton, Obama, Biden) have all reduced the deficits they inherited, whereas every modern Republican (Reagan through Trump) left office with a larger deficit than when they started
So you'd think tax cuts would create more jobs, less unemployment but it has not. It seems like the opposite, I'm sure there is much more to it.
Only if you believe in trickle-down economics, which many people could see was bunk when Reagan first implemented it 40 years ago.
Again, that idea is rhetoric, not policy. In fact no one ever thought this, it's a zero-sum/microeconomic intuition (to wit: that there is only so much money available) that doesn't hold at the macro level.
Economic growth happens naturally via finance. Growing companies and interests that want more money to build stuff just borrow, that's literally what banks are for. No one needs to go the government for a handout to make that happen.
At the extremes, sure. Tax corporate profits at 100% and you'll just train them to offshore. Drop taxation to zero and the government won't be able to repay bonds and kill its own finance spigot. But in the middle, where real governments live? No meaningful effect.
I never once heard a reasonable explanation why policies only start to have an effect at the end of a year that is divisible by 4 or 8. It makes no sense if you think it through.
This seems to confirm that Joe Biden created the most jobs of any president in recent modern history.
You've just helped explain that job creation was necessary due to the disaster performance of his predecessors.
How does that affect the job growth statistic?
Bond yield curve inversion prior to COVID and probably due to what they had done economically by then
Here we're looking for a change in the slope of that job creation line
When you cut revenue and increase expenses and the real problem here is disease in the world
I do believe that there could be a small causative effect, but there is usually a very long delay between cause and effect.
For the most part the correlation between administrations and the economy is arbitrary. But in this case I would make a case that it is causative.
In addition, it's the circles that person runs in and the circles that person's people run in. Do you think judge or cabinet appointments are decided on by one person? Sure, the President is a figurehead in this position and ultimately has to say yes or no, but there's a large pool of candidates out there and it's up to the staffers, maybe friends, maybe people in the know to propose those people to the President.
So while on paper the President doesn't, or shouldn't have that much power--in actuality with our current political process it's certainly much more.
Now, that said, just like the billionaires--they can only control so much. At least in the United States, there are competing interests even among the wealthy class, and sometimes shit just sort of happens--like a meteor killing the dinosaurs....or the release of decades of e-mails, videos, documents, and communications surrounding their pedophile behavior on a secret island in the Caribbean.
One party develops, the other party cracks down on potential economic wins for the working class.
Both parties make sure the capitalist class stay in power.
For example, the housing crisis and bubble were largely driven by legislation passed years earlier, including the 1999 repeal of Glass Steagall under Clinton. That was passed by a Republican controlled Congress, and the crisis eventually exploded under Bush. So I do not think either Clinton or Bush can be directly blamed for the housing crash. It is the repeal of the glass steagall act.
And was the dot com bubble crash in early 2000s caused by Clinton or by Bush? Or some legalization passed a long time ago? Or it just a business cycle?
More broadly, I would argue that presidents, and even legislators, have limited control over the actual health of the economy. Are we going to say Trump is responsible for the AI boom? And if this AI boom collapses into a massive bubble burst under the next administration, will that president be blamed instead?
The whole mortgage-backed security and collateralized debt obligation show would also have been legal under Glass-Steagall and had been common practice for years by the time of the repeal. The same with NINJA and 0% down-payment loans.
The question you should /really/ be asking, since taxes are involved, is, was that hiring actually effective? Did we create jobs that actually provided lasting value to the world? Or did we just juice the numbers for the polls?
Democratic administrations also engage in and promote discriminatory hiring policies which flagrantly violate the civil rights act (Title VII specifically).
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...
It would also pay to keep in mind that the link claims that the preceding layoffs hit the same group. Ie, they were the ones there to be hired after losing their jobs.
It also says that people of colour are underrepresented in the job market (in the companies measured in your link) when compared to their overall makeup of the population.
Correcting that would take some years of imbalance in hiring.
This graph is too simple as there were also other macroeconomic situations at the time but this is interesting enough that I’d like to see a long article that expands on this one graph with other data
But if there were a healthy public discourse, there would be little acceptance of the slop economy, absurd lies, and repulsive rhetoric.
From Russia to Peter Thiel in the Epstein files, they all want the US to undergo an even worse Brexit.
The rise of the alt-right took weaknesses in the right and left and amplified them to engineer the situation where there was a populist takeover of the Republican party. Epstein met moot. 4chan took a turn from being the asshole of the internet that was the original source of the concept of memes and a lot of other internet culture and turned it political and the conspiracies and thought processes jumped from 4chan to your dimwitted fox news loving uncle.
All of this is taking and molding stupidity and weaknesses in order to achieve outcomes: international conflict and weakening America on the world stage with both its allies and adversaries. Not outright commanded by foreigners but shaped by them taking advantages of the post-9/11 fear and general stupidity and anti-intellectualism and fear of immigration.
As an ex East German, I wonder how much of it is the disappearance of the competing model. Some of the old communists actually warned about this. Don't get me wrong, I participated in the demonstrations back then, socialism had clearly failed as a society and economically. Does not make that particular idea wrong though. The powerful want to go back, take back the power they think is theirs, consciously or as a reflex.
Note that Europe, Germany in particular, are far from the "socialist" examples some, or many, Americans think, welfare state and all that. Fact is, when it comes to rigid stratification of society, who rules, who owns, Germany is far on the side of capital, and according to a study the few thousand people at the very top are from the same 4% of the population almost exclusively.
What is happening in the US is happening in more places. Here in Germany we too now have more and more attacks on social systems. It's never the fault of inept leadership, no the people must work more and longer! They have zero new ideas. That is the only one they can think of. I am not really exaggerating, even the representatives of our powerful "Mittelstand" (much of Germany's industry) heavily criticized especially the conservative CDU in the government only a few days ago, publicly.
I see no reason to try to blame the Chinese, or the Russians, or anyone. All of it comes from within, and not just in the US.
We're searching the phones of visiting punk kids. We're cruelly punishing Canadian residents for clerical errors by unnecessarily detaining them. We've told our own citizens that it's reasonable to interrogate them at any moment for looking brown or black. We told an entire class of people they simply do not exist as they or even their family, friends, and coworkers understand them. Finally, we're deporting people who, although they've been here unlawfully for years, have also contributed a great deal. I've left out the most egregious examples to remain focused on the system.
All of this is happening as a backdrop while droves of US-born and immigrant citizens alike lose their jobs and are unable to find new ones. To say the irony is palpable is an understatement.
Collaboration benefited all.
Both these times were plausible ways of entering the middle class.
What does economic theory say should happen to labor when scarcity ends but capital is strong? Does the economy expand until there’s more labor demand? Or will structural and monopolistic problems cause capital to benefit while suppressing wages - making us all serfs?
Or are we going to work from the modern perspective that these peoples are somehow outside of our sphere of influence or concern?
To me it just looks like "we're screwing around and falling behind on the work of actually advancing the cause of humanity." I'm hoping that's what you meant but around here it would be unusual.
Blowing unaccounted billions on elite golden cows. For all this money would could have built a house for every homeless person in the USA.
"War begins to be presented as the heroic alternative, the last hope, the “way out” from the unending nightmare of economic crisis, misery and unemployment. Fascism, the most complete expression of modern capitalism, glorifies war. The filthy sophism “War means Work” begins to be circulated by the poison agencies of imperialism, and filters down to the masses. ... War is only the continuation and working out of the crisis of capitalism and of the present policies of capitalism. It is inseparable from these, and cannot be treated in isolation. All the policies of capitalist reorganisation, all the policies of Fascism, can only hasten the advance to war. This is equally true of the line of a Roosevelt, a MacDonald or a Hitler. War is no sudden eruption of a new factor from outside, a vaguely future menace to be exorcised by special machinery, but is already in essence implicit in the existing factors, in the existing driving forces and policies of capitalism."
- R.P. Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1935
But who knew?
Institutional longevity is largely an unsolved problem. Seems having checks and balances like the US does helps slow it down to some extent, but is far from a guarantee.
We need all these monopolies and cartels broken up so that there is a dynamic competitive environment in all sectors of the economy
The economy feels in a tricky position to me. The last couple of days have shown that there are many people/institutions primed to bail out of the stock market at the whiff of any negativity (or things perceived to be negative). I suspect there is likely more bad news before there's good news so the short term looks like it could be a bit of a roller-coaster.
If it’s federal government employment that is dropping, or illegal alien jobs dropping, then some will view it positively (I’ve seen this perspective advanced on x.com).
Looking at salaries, senior developers working for the government get paid about the same as entry level software engineers who get return offers at BigTech. Well actually senior developers in government only about 10%-20% more.
And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?
I know how much senior cloud consultants working at AWS make working in the WWPS. I was there as an l5. Amazon is a shitty place to work. But I doubt it’s any worse than the government right now. GCP and Microsoft (not just Azure) both also pay their consultants a lot more than government employees make.
I’m not saying the government isn’t needed. But the best and the brightest aren’t going to give up the amount of money they can make in the private sector - especially now that government jobs are far from a secure paycheck
Plenty of people will also earn their chunk of change as an l5 at Amazon or whatever, then transition to a lower paid job with more impact.
In fact, I know almost nobody who makes their employer decisions based on the pay factor alone.
Myself personally, I worked on the other side of the consulting - government divide. I saw a lot more people jump on the consulting side than the government side. I never heard one person say “I would love to take a 40% cut in pay and go into the office and deal with government shut downs. Sign me up!
But why in the heck would anyone want to work for a government that constantly insults them, forcing RTO and making people move to South (where I am from).
I'm ex Lockheed, where I worked alongside the NASA software engineers building and testing and verifying software for human spaceflight in the ITL. 70 to 80 hour weeks happened quarterly, and people worked with it. Because an important thing is actually being built and deployed and billions of dollars and human lives depend on it. I jumped ship because things progressed slow AF, but there was no shortage of people who wanted to build cool things at reasonable salaries (yes low for software, but not low salaries generally).
This same thing is what has driven SpaceX and Blue Origin in the private sector. The same thing drives the whole nonprofit sector. The government is a similar employer, though in the past couple of years obviously not as good.
Big Tech self selects for money grubbing and willingness to chase it at expense of everything else in your life. Many others are happier at smaller companies with lower pay scales and healthier work/life balances, or where they get to work on interesting problems with huge scales and they are paid enough to not worry about money anymore (this is possible in most non VHCOL places).
Healthcare.gov was primarily developed by private contractor firms, not government employees.
> And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?
Some people are motivated by factors other than pay, a concept that seems to be foreign to many FAANG corporate mercenaries.
https://www.businessofgovernment.org/sites/default/files/Vie...
And you are going to tell me that some people would rather work for the government now where they are constantly insulted, had to desk with DOGE and every year there is a threat they might not get paid?
You are free to use those keywords on this site’s search function to find comments from those who both worked there and led it for more context.
Well, that's not the worst that can happen - Oregon had the idea to let Silicon Valley company Oracle do the job...
In the aftermath of what was likely the most spectacular failure among state-run Affordable Care Act health exchange site launches, the state of Oregon has filed a lawsuit against Oracle America Inc. over the total failure of the Cover Oregon exchange.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/oregon-attorney-...
As a result of the ongoing problems, in April 2014, the board of directors voted to close the state-run exchange and adopt the Federal HealthCare.gov exchange beginning in 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Oregon
Turns out Oregon even got some money out of Oracle in the end?
Gov. Kate Brown announced today the settlement of the six lawsuits the state and the company filed against one another after the failure of the Cover Oregon health exchange website.
The settlement, valued at $100 million, includes cash payments to Oregon as well as a six-year license agreement for products and services that Brown said can be used to "significantly modernize state government's IT systems."
I agree that randos on twitter are a bad source of information.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/layoffs-unemployment-jobs-econo...
Eventually the protected industries will be totally disconnected from global markets causing them to lose global competitiveness, to the point they cannot even compete with the black market markups. And then you are maga, er mega, fucked.
What markets do you have in minds? Can retail investors invest there?
So basically, everywhere else, proportionally. Even markets that have worse import/export restrictions, will still have relative changes in their attraction.
For a rough approximation non-US world index ETFs, which are available to retail investors.
sigh If only the department of education was as well funded as the department of war.
Estimates of criminal activity, for example, are frequently counted as GDP in places like the UK. And even if you’re working in violation of visa rules, the IRS will still expect and enforce taxes.
The larger point that they may be omitted on reports like this may still stand, but it’s not because every single one is unable to be tabulated in the count by definition.
That makes no sense...unless the economy is an a sort of death spiral where companies layoff employees, then stock goes, then companies layoff more, then stock goes up, so on and so forth.
Ouroboros. The economy is eating its own tail.
The price of stock is based in dollars. The value of the dollar goes down due to inflation, so the stock goes up, while not actually changing in value.
Cutting interest rates during a period of time when people were literally locked in their homes waiting for a vaccine to be manufactured? I mean, yea, there were mistakes made, and the PPP and Biden stimulus were very obviously bad decisions, but pretending that tariffs and literally threatening allies has nothing to do with this economy is just lunacy. Just look at what's happening to the American tourism sector. It's falling apart.
I'm a liberal guy, but this take is ridiculous.
Trump had a booming economy right before Covid, and took the brunt of the jobs cuts in 2020. Biden next year "created" the jobs per the numbers there.
Also, what's the breakdown between public & private sector jobs? Spending taxes on government jobs in not something to celebrate.
His solution to COVID was to tell the public to inject themselves with bleach. Or just go get infected and let natural selection figure it out.
It was no more a joke than the racist cartoon he posted the other day.
You need consequences.
JOLTS data for January 2026 has been delayed, but don't expect those tea leaves to change your opinion about what the future holds.
Otherwise, if so many jobs have disappeared, does that mean that my garbage company no longer needs to employ a staf on every truck to drive it and empty my trash recepticle into the truck?
Do… do you not want them to do this?