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

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421–430 of 514 posts

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

#421
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.

So the answer is payments per social security id are not reported to the social security Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS), employers only report aggregate payments. And workers and employers only report payments by individual in W2’s in January.

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

#422

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

Ranked Choice Voting (aka Instant Runoff Voting) is the single worst of the very many seriously proposed ranked ballots method; it retains most of what is bad about FPTP. It is somewhat easier to tally than the best (in terms of the logic of who wins) ranked ballots methods (methods satisfying the Condorcet criterion), but not particularly good even on that among all ranked ballots methods, e.g., it can be improved in that dimension by just adding all preferences of the next rank until a candidate crosses the maiority threshold without elimination, which also reduces the degree to which the system is prone to paradoxical effects (promoting a candidate causing them to lose by changing the order others are eliminated.)

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

#423
post #267
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember my parents being excited about the opportunity to refinance their mortgage to something in the high teens. And now these days headlines act like the apocalypse is occurring when mortgage rates are in the 6-7 range.

I'd rather owe 100k over 30 years at 15% than 300k at 4%.

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

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> The good news is that these economic problems are entirely the result of bad policies and can be reversed. I think one danger for western countries is having governments that just move from one bad policy of one kind to a bad policy from the other end of the political spectrum. Look at what’s happened recently with resignations at the highest levels of government in multiple countries. And in America, if Trump gets…

There will be no "reaction" to Trump, because all such policies would be struck down by the SCOTUS. This version of America is the one we're going to live in for a while.

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

#425
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you test and measure the effectiveness of that kind of curriculum in a standardless way for millions of school children?

elections.

I don't think my local school board will go along with that.

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

#426
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I think the ball is in _your_ court to start suggesting reasonable cofactors.

Debt cycles would be one. https://youtu.be/SoKr0QVCLPA?si=kKcXNetb-kAPr1S8

That is a bad thing. It doesn't mean there aren't other contributors to our economic challenges.

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

#427
post #225

Not to be a Doomer but the last time I recall a revision around this magnitude was during the GFC[1]. Summary of the benchmark revisions The March 2009 benchmark level for total nonfarm employment is 131,175,000; this figure is 902,000 below the sample-based estimate for March 2009, an adjustment of -0.7 percent. Table 1 shows the total nonfarm percentage benchmark revisions for the past ten years. https://www.bls.go…

Another GFC during a "cold war" with China and Russia? Great, just great.

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

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know economic data is not used only by "economists", right? Given that you seem to dislike the word "economic" data, focus only on the data part. Tell us how politicians/policy makers run the country without data? How do they know rates have to be increased/decreased if they don't have such numbers? Through wishful and magical thinking about focusing on the basics?

My point is that it should be more granular. I only ever hear it described in one of three things in tension with each other: markets, jobs, inflation. Do you think you can just watch those three things and guide a country/world into a prosperous one or could there be pitfalls?

Why are you saying only those three metrics are tracked by policymakers?

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You acknowledge inflation isn't high by historical standards yet went on to argue he's wrong because stocks went up when inflation wasn't high by historical standards? The last time we had sudden unexpected high inflation was 2022 and stocks crashed did they not? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA I have no opinion on whether the article is relevant I was only responding to the sentence you quoted whic…

Hmm. What else was going on around that time that might confound any conclusions? Also, a 'crash' that recovers in 90 days isn't much of a 'crash', but the fact that people consider it a 'crash' is admittedly kind of scary.

Not sure where you got 90 days from. Turns out there's a Wikipedia article:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_stock_market_decline

Perhaps you would have preferred if I said "bear market" rather than crash.

At any rate the first sentence of that Buffet article you hated didn't deserve your ire.

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

#430
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…

So uh, I'm the first person in my family to break the cycle of poverty. I have nobody I trust to follow advise with money. I do all the 'standard' boring investment strategies (401, index funds, roth, etc). I don't bother with crypto (scams). What does one do if stagflation is coming? Float more cash? Buy real estate?

Well there is another issue: trust in the dollar is waning, so central banks have been buying gold. If Trump messes too much with the fed's independence, this can only get worse.. One source theorizes that his admin. is doing this not so much to lower interest rates, but to get the fed to reduce interest it pays to banks for money they keep at the fed (a thing that started after the GFC). The idea is that then the banks would buy treasuries instead, which might reduce the debt payment burden on the government.

Anyway... gold is all about wealth preservation, not growth, so I don't know what to tell you. But it is up 44% over the last year.

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