Don’t worry, Trump can just keep firing the people who make the statistics until he’s proven right :-/
That has me shaking my head. He fired the BLS person claiming they were reporting inaccurate stats to make him look bad. A claim of partisan bias - could maybe be some truth to that. But to fire them and replace them? Then it will certainly be biased reporting. I suppose that makes sense if all you care about is image and not actually making things better.
She had been doing crap job going back to Biden. I don't think she was fired for optics.
I am harsh on Walter because he tends to argue in bad faith in order to support some weird pro-business libertarian world view. He's super active on HN (as am I) so I have argued with him and there are multiple times he has said things that are outright dishonest (like once claiming that incompetent workers immediately get fired from corporations, a post I can't find quickly but is in my history somewhere, or trying…
The Fed is the cause of endemic inflation. Look at the chart I linked to. By the way, I have never read Rand nor quoted her.
> By the way, I have never read Rand nor quoted her.
Fair enough. I tend to use Rand interchangeably for libertarian stuff.
It's true that NYC private sector employment is different from the US labor market as a whole, but NYC private sector employment is better representative of what readers of this site care about than overall US employment. Readers are much more likely to be affected by changes in the professional services and information sectors than, say, agriculture.
The agricultural section indicators are that there's about to be a big, expensive bailout for ag: > “Right now, we have zero bushels of soybeans on the books with China for this fall harvest that has begun in the Deep South,” Ragland said. “Normally by this time, close to 40% of our sales for the marketing year are on the books. And with zero on the books right now, it is alarming for American soybean farmers.” https…
It's part of the plan. Small farms will be the ones to go bankrupt. The large corporate, black rock et al owned, "farms" (read businesses) will be bailed out and allowed to scoop up the little ones for pennies onto the dollar.
I’d like to lay out an argument about why tariffs are good. The only businesses that are derailing with tariffs issues are those that import goods to sell. The argument against tariffs is that they make goods more expensive. Of course, this argument is true. But that’s not the end of the story. Because prices are higher for imported goods, demand for domestically produced goods increases. This increase in demand lead…
How does this argument apply to a good like coffee? We drink a lot of coffee, and it makes us more productive, but we produce very little of it. Maybe we could increase coffee production in Hawaii, but since we can use the land and the labor for more high-value purposes, it would cost a lot more than importing it from Brazil or Colombia. So when we slap a 50% tariff on Brazil, the average American ends up consuming l…
They also grow coffee in Puerto Rico. Nevertheless, these few small islands have much less area available for coffee growing than Brazil. And coffee is grown in many other countries than Brazil, all of which are under Trump's trade assault. There is no way to substitute US-grown coffee for foreign-grown coffee.
I don't understand why there isn't a market or company that develop already to move all items to low tariff area before sending to US. I know that manufacturing things here in Europe, there already used to be round trip by airplane and co to try to lower VAT paid on purchases to the maximum.
Mexico has a huge network of importers for doing exactly this and it predates both administrations.
The invoicing system there is highly gamed and corrupt (not that anywhere isn’t).
All of this tariffing has created a lot of new opportunities for businesses who operate in grey areas.
"very wealthy" is heavily understating just how ludicrously wealthy some of these people are compared to the vast majority, and it's reflected in historical numbers.
I am wondering why "very wealthy" would be so stressed by increased taxes. Don't they have ludicrous wealth, shouldn't it have almost no material impact for them? Are there money games I am unaware of that means they are running brittle houses of cards and marginal percentage increases in taxes would topple their empires? I just don't understand the fear or concern, but I am not ludicrously wealthy so I suppose I wou…
They are so ludicrously wealthy that even a very small increase in percentage points of tax ends up being a very large number, and no one likes to see a very large number of their “hard-earned” dollars get “taken away”. The marginal value of each dollar to them I don’t think is a calculation that is very accessible to our emotional human minds.
In NYC, for the first 6 months of 2025, 994 new private sector jobs were created [1]. During the same period last year, there were 66,000 new jobs created. Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in. NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/nyregion/nyc-jobs.html
I know that this is the result of summing a much larger gain + a slightly smaller loss, but it's weird reading this number in isolation and knowing that my company is responsible for roughly 5% of this gain.
See this is what I don't understand. Everything you just said about China is a positive. Everything you said about China is achievable in the USA, and we at least HAD a head start on soft-power influence. Instead we should just have tariffs instead of actually making the lives of Americans better while FIGHTING affordable housing, high speed rail, and EVs. We've got an entire team of goons who would rather rack up pe…
I do think the state of progress in China is vastly underestimated by the west. It has been fast and messy, not evenly distributed, but it is staggering. The rhetoric around them is changing too, I think they are making significant soft power gains. I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.
China has been making soft power gains for a decade. They are everywhere in Africa. When I went to Macedonia five years ago, there was a giant screen in the main square explaining how their medical cooperation with China was such a boon for the country. China already is a diplomatic giant.
I think American are partially blinded by the crazy negative propaganda against China you see all the time in the US. They significantly underestimate where China stands and overestimate the impact American tariffs can have.
In NYC, for the first 6 months of 2025, 994 new private sector jobs were created [1]. During the same period last year, there were 66,000 new jobs created. Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in. NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/nyregion/nyc-jobs.html
This is, in some sense, exactly what Trump wants -- to hurt the cities/liberal regions that oppose him. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
That was the entire point of hiking interest rates, to slow down the economy and stop inflation. Tariffs are universally acknowledged to cause inflation, and we would be in a recovery path if it weren't for the delays that tariffs are causing right now. It is rather interesting to see the difference in standards of accountability for different presidents. Some are responsible for the economy even if its behavior is n…
Let's be clear on who has these different standards: primarily Republicans, members of the party whose lifeblood is hypocrisy.
They sold us out in the name of holy apocalyptic chaos and destruction