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U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

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Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#201
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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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.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its hard to ascribe individual responsibility in that way when the only two choices were existentially awful. "You elected an idiot president...", the choices were Communism, or Fascism; which is recoverable and better for people. Certainly not the former, but to be clear neither are a real choice when you vote for democracy, and not voting is a vote for both fascism/communism at the same time. Such was a similar fai…

> First-passed-the-post voting is fundamentally flawed, and so is ranked choice... What voting system so you think is best? None are perfect but IMO ranked choice is the best as it keeps the good attributes of FPTP without suffering from the spoiler effect

When most people say "ranked choice" they seem to refer to IRV, which is broken in multiple ways, but most notably that it has the property that ranking someone higher can make them lose and ranking someone lower can make them win. That happens because IRV ignores all of someone's preferences except their top choice, until their top choice is thrown out, at which point IRV looks at their next preference.

There are much better systems: approval (for simplicity, at the expense of more accurate preference information) and Condorcet (for accuracy, at the expense of making it more difficult to explain tie-breaker corner cases to the average person).

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#203
post #53

If unemployment continues to rise, and the one-time impact on prices of tariffs leads to self-reinforcing high inflation, we'll have stagflation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation I sure hope not , because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themsel…

Just yesterday I was remembering my high school economics professor writing two words on the board: STAGFLATION = CLUSTERFUCK

Well it's already a clusterfuck so...

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its hard to ascribe individual responsibility in that way when the only two choices were existentially awful. "You elected an idiot president...", the choices were Communism, or Fascism; which is recoverable and better for people. Certainly not the former, but to be clear neither are a real choice when you vote for democracy, and not voting is a vote for both fascism/communism at the same time. Such was a similar fai…

> First-passed-the-post voting is fundamentally flawed, and so is ranked choice... What voting system so you think is best? None are perfect but IMO ranked choice is the best as it keeps the good attributes of FPTP without suffering from the spoiler effect

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Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#205
post #53

If unemployment continues to rise, and the one-time impact on prices of tariffs leads to self-reinforcing high inflation, we'll have stagflation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation I sure hope not , because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themsel…

The good news is that these economic problems are entirely the result of bad policies and can be reversed. If we were to also raise broad based taxes, it would allow the Fed to cut interest rates, stoking long term investment, loosen up the housing market (which would allow more people to move), lower the Federal deficit, and improve the trade balance (as if that actually mattered).

It's much easier to destroy than build, and some things once destroyed can't be rebuilt.

Trump's inconsistent tariff and policy flip flopping means no one trusts the US to behave rationally and predictably.

The fact that the US population elected him a second time means that the US as a whole can't be trusted to behave like rational adults.

Decades or centuries of reputation has been thrown away. That can't be changed just by a new face saying "sorry we want to take it back".

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#206
post #53

If unemployment continues to rise, and the one-time impact on prices of tariffs leads to self-reinforcing high inflation, we'll have stagflation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation I sure hope not , because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themsel…

Unemployment was continuously higher than the current level from approximately early 1970 to mid 1999: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1M4lw (click "Max")

Markets currently don't expect significantly higher inflation in the long term, as the "10 year breakeven inflation rate" ("The latest value implies what market participants expect inflation to be in the next 10 years, on average.") is fairly stable: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE By my understanding, this is supposed to trend towards 2.0% when everything is hunky-dory; things are not perfect, but they look fine to me in historical perspective. Similarly for e.g. this 5-year forward chart: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T5YIFR

> Raising rates to put stress on businesses and consumers is the only method known to work for ending self-reinforcing high inflation

Yes, and that's how we made sure that the inflation peak in 2022 didn't become self-reinforcing. And as far as anyone seems to be able to tell, it worked.

> It's what Paul Volcker did at the Federal Reserve in response to the stagflation that started in the early 1970's in the US and other countries, after OPEC raised oil prices. Volcker raised the federal funds rate in fits and starts to a high of 20% in 1981:

Right. Current circumstances are very different. Posting this much about what you "hope doesn't happen" comes across as fear-mongering, given the lack of reason to expect it to happen. The tariff discourse allows people to throw around large, scary-sounding percentages, but in practice the corresponding price increases are on average much smaller. And the employment situation in the US is still very good in historical terms. (There are valid concerns about the methodology behind the headline unemployment rate, but it's still the same methodology.)

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#207
post #50

I think it's interesting that everyone's immediate reaction now-a-days is to assume incompetence or maliciousness, rather than curiosity at the root cause (very telling this attitude has even permeated a forum for supposed 'hackers'). A high-level is that 80% of the economy is very easy to track b/c it's not very volatile (teachers, for example). What we have seen is a huge surge in unpredictability in the most volat…

Explain to me please why job numbers aren’t simply a matter of querying the Federal social security database? A longstanding process of polling businesses for what they want to report, followed by corrections up to one year later, has got to be a pantomime to fudge the numbers.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least on the US tariffs thing, congress can put Trump back in his box and revert to normalcy any time it wants to; the threat of stagflation might make it do that. The previous stagflation incident was more driven by outside forces.

> on the US tariffs thing, congress can put Trump back in his box and revert to normalcy any time it wants to We’ve already lost export market share. China, Russia and India have already begun building a trade bloc. FDI has already been trashed. We’re already in for a world of hurt. And personally, I’m eager to ensure it lands disproportionately on his voters and donors.

I think it's likely that if there was a rapid reversal, with Congress taking away the power to mess with tariffs and making it clear that it was permanently gone, there'd be some damage, but things would largely go back to normal. Not enough time has really passed for things to change _that_ much; many of the tariffs aren't _actually_ in place yet.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#209
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good idea, just keep not voting while trumpists win elections, that'll show them!

Well they really fucked up. Biden was visibly senile, almost like trump is now, and they pushed it till last minute when switch to Kamala happened... too little too late. Who is their counter-weight for future? As an outsider who doesn't watch US news regularly since they use pretty idiotic form most of the time, I know 0 powerful persona types of Clinton or Obama. A lot of blahs and farts in the wind, when you are a…

Biden was is literally more coherent now than trump was 12 years ago.

None of that changes people being willing to vote for a pedophile conman.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#210
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That also means that, unfortunately, it will take years to repair the damage. If you're old enough to be reading this comment today, it's unlikely that the full damage will be repaired in your lifetime.

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.
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