How am I supposed to consolidate my power if the market doesn't crash so I can purchase residential and commercial real estate at bargain prices? Every third restaurant and business on Las Olas was shuttered in 2009, the buildings sold for next to nothing. Today there's one after another—Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, Maserati—parked on the street in front of those same buildings, all the while, Steve B. and I enjoy that Luigi's coal fired pizza! /s
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.
That Thatcher example was brutal. I have an interest in social housing (Vienna, Singapore). The idea of selling it like that is insane to me, like if Taiwan sold TSMC for pennies on the dollar. And made it illegal to start another chipmaking company.
> Ultimately, the new homeowners were also borrowers and paid portions of their yearly income as interest on long-term mortgages
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.
The solution can be quite simple when you consider money created as debt. The ever increasing private wealth must be proportional to the ever increasing debt, of which governments hold the most of. Its simple imbalance, the ~3000 bucks annual interest doesnt have to be the problem of the many, because their wealth wasnt increasing proportionally.
I'll see if I can dig it up, but I remember reading that on average, under democratic presidencies going back to FDR, the economy in general performs better than it does under a republican presidency. If I'm remembering right, it's not as simple as mere ideological differences because there has been changes within the parties in those intervening ~75 years but the trend still holds.
There are many marginally employable swing voters who vote Republican when they have jobs and the Democrats in charge ask for taxes, then vote Democratic when they get put out of work and need a social safety net.
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.
Wrong. What's also in the data is that Ds also create the most economic growth. Sorry. Rs just believe in things that are not true, as evidenced by the current admins wacky tariff theories that are disproved in Econ 101.
Carter has good employment, but terrible inflation making everyone poor in miserable. His Fed appointee, Paul Volcker raises interest rates, kills inflation, puts the country in recession, and drives unemployment up during Reagan's first years in office. Carter's job numbers look better than they should, and Reagan's worse, unless you look at the bigger picture.
Reagan supported those interest rate changes. Reagan than continued to push deficit spending well after the recovery from those first couple years, a huge lasting trend in Republican administrations ever since.
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!
I don't think presidents have all that much to do with the economy (vs. the legislature). Well... maybe the most recent example is to the contrary with certain actions that historically should have been the role of Congress.
Sort of. I've done a lot of thinking about this one, and realize that it's really not just "one person" but a very large team of individuals, along with the "politics" of everything. If the President brings on a good staff, makes solid cabinet appointments, and they themself being a singular large part of the legislative process in modern years--given that it's usually fairly difficult to get 2/3rds of Congress to agree on anything--you can see the President actually has significantly more influence than you'd think.
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.
Mostly coincidence. There aren't that many data points. There are under a dozen Presidents in the last half century. Too small to attribute significance.
I do believe that there could be a small causative effect, but there is usually a very long delay between cause and effect.
Wonder if it's more of the activist having an affect? During democrat administrations, groups like NRA scream "they're coming for your guns" causing gun sales to go up during democrat admins and then drop off during GOP admins as the rhetoric drops off.
Horseshit. We have 70 years of evidence to back it up, you cannot call it coincidence without another counter theory. Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant. It's clear as day in the data. You could say that the Ds govern with facts and science, the Rs govern with emotion. But what's far more likely is that the Rs believe in theories that run counter to economic principles.
Man all kind of inferences get made on HN that new jobs will just appear after AI takes existing jobs because... jobs appeared in the past. This party/president assumption seems much more likely that that one which is based on zero actual data points but seems to be gospel to half of HN.
It seems silly to blame these on the president though, consider just the past two recessions and how little they had to do with the actions of POTUS...
The funny thing is that both Trump or Biden handled the COVID shock reasonably well, but now that there isn't a global crisis, the former is hard at work creating a local one.
Depends. If it's a Republican president in office, we must look at many factors, it's a difficult thing, y'see, many variables and such, market fluctuations, etc. etc. etc.
If it's a Dem president in office? 100% the Dem's fault.
Biden was hated so much that large groups of people chanted "Let's go Brandon" (fuck Joe Biden) in public. There is video evidence of this.
No Democrat politician has ever stated that Republicans have a mental illness for hating Joe Biden. Nor have they come up with a phrase similar to Trump Derangement Syndrome to describe it.
This is why I don't like "both sides" people. Overall Republican voters and their representatives are worse people.
Let's not omit the fact that Covid hit in Trump's last year in 2020, where he had a booming economy and lowest unemployment late historically amongst minorities.
Was handed a booming economy from Obama and largely didn't do anything except cut taxes for the rich a bit. Mostly grownups in his cabinet stopping him from doing stupid shit. The Greenland thing started back then and they thought it was a joke.
Let's not omit the fact that Trump's handling of Covid was selfish (deny it exists), reckless (deny it exists even harder), foolish (inject bleach), and destabilizing (constantly spewing conflicting information and undermining scientists and experts, you'll to this day still find a steady stream of HN commenters that hold an eternal vendetta against Anthony Fauci for some perceived unforgivable inarticulable wrong he's done.)
Wasn't trying to be political, just making an observation that 4 years is probably too short of a time to credit policy changes within a single administration.
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?
> making an observation that 4 years is probably too short of a time to credit policy changes within a single administration
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.
And the president has enormous influence over what congress does (veto).
Of course everything is nuanced; the trend is merely interesting especially juxtaposed against people consistently voting for republicans for "economic" reasons.
That’s unless you have a Congress that lets the President usurp the pose of the purse that should be theirs and Supreme Court that rubber stamps everything he does
If you are referring to the current administration, SCOTUS has barely "rubber stamped" any of his actions, and has rejected several already (though we will see with tariffs... but Polymarket has it only 31% in favor of the president so at least the odds are in our favor).
You mean like he is now able to fire government workers, impound funds, fire people who were supposed to be independent of the executive branch, and basically saying he could commit crimes and send the national guard to states?
This president will also veto your congressional seat if you cross him. See what happened to the people who voted to impeach him, they got primaried out.
I'm not so sure either have much impact. Economic policy doesn't change much between administrations and Congress has been ineffective for a long time. Politics is mostly culture war things these days.
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.
CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.
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.
>CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.
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?
It's a lagging indicator meant to credit or discredit administrations for past administrations' actions, handpicked to obfuscate cycle capture. CES is backward-looking by definition, so it is being abused here.
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.
That seems like sarcasm because it is an overused excuse that republicans give for the bad usa economies under republican presidents.
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.
>S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color.
Democratic administrations also engage in and promote discriminatory hiring policies which flagrantly violate the civil rights act (Title VII specifically).
Based on that link, I don’t think I want the jobs that were created.
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.
We're looking for a change in slope based on overarching economic policy as a means of comparing two political parties. A global disaster is not a policy.
Yes, but as a person with good number sense I am pretty good at discounting absolute levels for population change, and I feel like most people aren't any good at that, so I like to mention it. The majority of press articles that are about "[[Thing]] hits record high" turn out to lose their novelty when recast per capita.
There has to be some lag, and it is more about who controls Congress.
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?
Yea, you can create programs that create jobs, by spending taxes. So this should be zero surprise.
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?
I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term. That spending is the jobs. If you tighten spending to cut waste or rebalance the books, growth slows and jobs shrink, but that’s kind of the tradeoff when you’re trying to fix long-term issues.
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.
> I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term.
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.
And Clinton (mostly Gore as VP) cut the federal civilian workforce by about 20%, while following the both the letter and spirit of the law, and not causing chaos.
Fair enough, I didn't dig too deep though here's what I have come up with - I'm sure there are many factors, but it is quite interesting here:
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.
Nothing happened in 2020 to affect this chart I'm sure. I would expect nothing less from the publication that falsely claimed Russians hacked into the US energy grid before an election.
Correct. The unemployment rate was 4.7% in January 2017 and was 3.6% in January 2020. Or if we look at total private sector employment that went from 123,300,000 to 129,300,000 (its highest ever, at the time). That's an average of 125,000 jobs per month, or equivalent to Obama (although Obama's unemployment was significantly higher for both terms).
"January was the worst start to a year for job cuts in the United States since 2009, with high-profile layoffs at UPS and Amazon fueling a tumultuous beginning to 2026 on the labor market, according to a private firm's report, as official government reports remain delayed."
But this is only one giant mail order company and the shipper that services its deliveries
"Which Companies Are Cutting The Most Jobs?
UPS announced last month it would be cutting 30,000 jobs this year, after it eliminated 62,000 positions in 2025, The New York Times reported. The company's new layoffs are triggered by the company ending its relationship with Amazon, according to the report, which noted Amazon was also a leader in layoffs. Amazon announced in late January it would lay off around 16,000 corporate employees as it continues to restructure its business model."
What about all the other companies
Maybe there is more to the US economy than one giant company
Tariffs are bad for the economy. Foreign countries are ditching US partnerships, contracts. Less travelers are coming to US. Wow I wonder when will we open our eye. In the middle of all these, US is ditching its allies and planning to invade sovereign countries (Greenland).
Tariffs, forcing capital into 7 very large companies instead of small startups, wage suppression through weird offshoring and immigration schemes so on and so forth. There are seemingly unending number of issues that all contribute to the same outcome we're seeing today.
It seems strange not to mention ICE or even treatment of transgender individuals if you mention travelers. We've effectively taken out round-the-clock advertisements saying "If you're not a fire-breathing, straight WASP, tread lightly". Normally, out of a sense of egalitarianism for even conservatives, I would tag on "even though it's not true", but I fear the evidence simply doesn't bear this out anymore.
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.
would you care to clarify on this? are you saying the current administration has been corrupted by foreign adverseries? or has the administration been outsmarted by foreign adverseries?
Russia has been working on Trump for decades, he's an amusing idiot. They manipulated him, people around him, the electorate, and the election to engineer the situation where this fool is in the presidency. They have hard power over him (compromising pictures, information, loans, etc) and soft power over him (he admires strongmen autocrats).
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.
The Heritage Foundation, billionaires and a lot of other people who want this are all US citizens, and they planned for this for a long time. Let's not blame others for something entirely US-homegrown.
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.
Post WW2 was a time of labor scarcity the US benefited from - but eventually that went away with global competition. The tech boom years were another labor scarcity time, and that’s also going away.
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?
Any system based on exponential growth will have almost all people become serfs as even if their capital grows it falls behind the growth of older capital
"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."
Allowing individuals to hoard enough wealth to corrupt, at will, the system that gave them their wealth - maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all.
It's not like the Soviets fared much better with regards to corruption and institutional decay, to the part where the rampant corruption of the Brezhnev-era was a major contributing cause to the eventual collapse of the union.
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.
Not sure I follow the link to the Soviets, but yes they certainly excelled at letting too few people accumulate too much power too. If only we were able to learn a little more from history.
Important context is January is historically the month where most layoffs are enacted. Not saying the number is insignificant, just not entirely unexpected.
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).
As it turns out, no one wants to invest in infrastructure when all the inputs are going to be tariffed to oblivion. All else equal why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper? Protectionism isn't enough to overcome losing access to world markets.
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.
I foresee something closer to a proportional increase of investment in all the remaining accessible markets, as US relative attractiveness decreases, rather than it moving to a specific other place.
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.
These perspectives bother me a lot, because I want to invest passively, but if people are out there thinking like that, maybe nothing is priced right...
Priced right if money is moving from the bottom 90% to the top 10%. Stock market growth is because theres excess money and people need to invest the money. Supply and demand. There's reason why you can buy any ultra luxury car right(look at ferrari's revenue growth) and private jet industry is booming.
What does "priced right" even mean? For whom? When a public company makes billions in profits by selling insanely overpriced hardware, then that's "priced right" for the shareholders.
When a supermarket gives out 25% discount stickers to use, then the price of the good is closer to being priced right for the consumer, as long as you apply the sticker. There is, of course, no reason to assume that the supermarket would operate at a loss or close to cost. These 25% are already priced in and anyone not using the stickers is paying extra.
Nothing has been priced right ever since they've (the collective of anyone willing to sell something) figured out that they can ask for however-much people are willing to pay, which is quite more than what MY FELLOW HUMANS would need to pay.
For everyone else, who aren't willing to pay deliberately inflated prices, there's usually always some form of discount for some product, somewhere to be found.
In the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present. There is one remaining parameter (the exchange rate between future payouts on different dates, the "discount rate"), but all the subjectivity reduces to that one number.
However if everyone is deluded about what the future payouts of different insturments will be, you can get $10 for $1 in one place and $0.001 for $1 in another (given that in both cases the influence weighted participants think they're selling you a dollar). That invalidates the picture of reducing the unknowns to the discount rate.
In your examples, you're talking about goods and services, which have different values to different people. They have an equilibrium price but as you say, that's not the "right price for everyone," like there is for say a bond.
The reason the stock market is generally "priced right", which we see in the strong long term returns of index funds, is because the winners get more money and get more influence, and the losers get less.
So you have a self selecting system, that have (over time) proved itself. Whatever you might think of the effect of certain effects (such as immigrant labors) you can end up reflecting in your investments, as others do - and if you end up being correct, you'll have more power to influence the price in the future.
> In the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present.
This doesn't make sense though. The only reason I would buy an investment is if I believe it will grow in value from the point that I bought it. That means I'm pricing it at its future ccost.obviously other people are doing the same, so the actual cost of the investment will always rise above current value if people believe its a good investment.
The Challenger report contains large companies' announced future cuts. Not government, not small and medium business, not actual job losses. So neither, really.
Well those are incredibly ignorant and mostly likely strongly biased beliefs. When I worked for NASA and the DoE, I was surrounded by the most competent, hard-working, productive people I've ever known. Silicon Valley engineers are a joke compared to government engineers. Silicon valley people have newer toys and more flexible funding and no oversight, but government employees have vastly more impact and actual measurable utility. Only morons born into enough safety and security that they can be completely ignorant of how the actual world works believe the government is unnecessary and as many government jobs as possible should be deleted. The owner of that twitter platform you linked to killed several hundred thousand people last year, and again this year, and again next year, through sheer narcissistic incompetence. Is that a good source for any information at all?
Also a good bs indicator: 'illegal alien jobs'. As if the demand vanishes with the poor souls to uganda. It just framing in hope of twisting a win out of it, because if you would have stated that sub-minimum wage jobs are in decline, this would be a terrible economic indicator for the US.
The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.
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
> The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.
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.
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 arguing that everyone is as money driven as you are. Plenty of people who are more altruistic people take employment based on non money factors all the time.
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.
Yes I’m sure your anecdotal bubble is more statistically valid than telling a 22 year old if they have a choice between working at BigTech making $160K+ a year or work in government and make $70K, they are going to choose to work for the government.
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).
Because they want to build cool things or tasteful things or things that actually help people.
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).
The entire “BigTech doesn’t have work life balance” is copium and the DMV isn’t exactly a low cost of living area. How many departments outside of what NASA are doing anything exciting? Maybe in medicine the CDC.
I agree with your opposition to the comment above, but I feel like the condescension towards silicon valley, and non-government employees is not a way to start a healthy dialogue. Like you are not going to convince anybody by calling 80+% of people here (private sector employees) "a joke".
I agree that randos on twitter are a bad source of information.
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.
You’re talking about something that happens in a country that wants free markets. It doesn’t really apply to countries that want oligopolies or monopolies.
Rephrased: Trump inherited a strong economy, did not know how to govern or appropriately wield the power of his office (zero experience), did not have a good relationship with congress so made no progress there unlike most presidents, and was constrained from his worst impulses by his own staff. Finally when Covid occurred and he was actually required to lead it all came crashing down because he was and is incapable. A geriatric democrat had to come and right the ship again immediately after.
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.
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.
Yet housing costs keep increasing. The working class is being squeezed between employers who are suffering lost revenue and can't pay US wages, and landlords and mega-corp shareholders who won't budge on price. I foresee a slow protracted "collapse" (or really renegotiation) that will bankrupt stuck-in-the-mud billionaires (like Elon) as their means of recourse - law enforcement and the military - come under such powerful social coercion that no amount of money will stop them from siding with working-class-friendly new leadership like Mamdani, as the workers (who, despite what Elon tells himself in his robot fantasies, are still needed en masse), use their REAL voting power - moving their home to jurisdictions that are working-class-friendly.
I recall similar predictions from stimulus from the mortgage crisis. Things did not seem to play out predictably, I'm not sure all the old rules are as hard and fast anymore as people think.
You are off by several years on the interest rates, which have an 18-24 month impact. Also we have this idiotic and unlawful tariff war the US administration is currently perpetrating. But I'm certain AI is having a huge impact as well.
I'm unconvinced of the AI impact outside of the tech sector. But there's certainly a lot of uncertainty generally. Probably more senior people with reputations are in a better position but likely tougher for people with no records.
There's a lot of reason to think companies citing AI as the reason for their layoffs are just lying because it looks better to shareholders, and that AI kinda sucks and isn't used for much yet.
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-lab...
I don't have much involvement with graphic design but I agree that the impact on journalism and adjacent is pretty awful. Not sure how much is AI per se but certainly the economics have been pretty unfavorable. I'm not convinced it's just AI slop but but quantity can displace quality.
I agree generally as far as immediate losses. But I think longer term with AI soaking up a lot of investment dollars we see other places not seeing investment or hiring growth.
So, we're just doing whatever it takes to blame the Democratic Party, huh?
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 hear that the Washington Post just fired 1/3 of all of it's reporters.
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?
Since the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations.
https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
It's even crazier when you look at the data since the end of the cold war in 1989. Then the ratio of jobs created is 50:1 for democrats.
Financial looting is not good for the labor market. Who could guess.
How am I supposed to consolidate my power if the market doesn't crash so I can purchase residential and commercial real estate at bargain prices? Every third restaurant and business on Las Olas was shuttered in 2009, the buildings sold for next to nothing. Today there's one after another—Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, Maserati—parked on the street in front of those same buildings, all the while, Steve B. and I enjoy that Luigi's coal fired pizza! /s
Yeah, they call this "accumulation by dispossession" and it's been a mainstay of neoliberal economics since it's inception roughly ~50 years ago:
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.
That Thatcher example was brutal. I have an interest in social housing (Vienna, Singapore). The idea of selling it like that is insane to me, like if Taiwan sold TSMC for pennies on the dollar. And made it illegal to start another chipmaking company.
> Ultimately, the new homeowners were also borrowers and paid portions of their yearly income as interest on long-term mortgages
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.
The solution can be quite simple when you consider money created as debt. The ever increasing private wealth must be proportional to the ever increasing debt, of which governments hold the most of. Its simple imbalance, the ~3000 bucks annual interest doesnt have to be the problem of the many, because their wealth wasnt increasing proportionally.
I'll see if I can dig it up, but I remember reading that on average, under democratic presidencies going back to FDR, the economy in general performs better than it does under a republican presidency. If I'm remembering right, it's not as simple as mere ideological differences because there has been changes within the parties in those intervening ~75 years but the trend still holds.
Found your article for you, as I was looking it up the other day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...
There are many marginally employable swing voters who vote Republican when they have jobs and the Democrats in charge ask for taxes, then vote Democratic when they get put out of work and need a social safety net.
This is largely the crux of it.
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.
Wrong. What's also in the data is that Ds also create the most economic growth. Sorry. Rs just believe in things that are not true, as evidenced by the current admins wacky tariff theories that are disproved in Econ 101.
Rs just believe in things that are not true, as evidenced by the current admins wacky tariff theories that are disproved in Econ 101.
I'm happy to see many Democrats now supporting free trade, but that's traditionally been a conservative position.
Dems been largely on board since the 90s. Recall NAFTA was under Clinton admin.
Why are you pretending like no tariffs is the democratic plan.
Carter has good employment, but terrible inflation making everyone poor in miserable. His Fed appointee, Paul Volcker raises interest rates, kills inflation, puts the country in recession, and drives unemployment up during Reagan's first years in office. Carter's job numbers look better than they should, and Reagan's worse, unless you look at the bigger picture.
Carter gave up the presidency to save America then. Volcker did the right thing.
The bigger picture being that this is political nonsense. We all know Reganomics.
They did not pay their bill for their own agenda then, and they have still not paid their bill for trillions in follow-on expenses.
They cut taxes and debt-financed war, which forced the US further into debt.
In modern times republicans got US into most wars. Nixon also got Vietnam extended.
Reagan supported those interest rate changes. Reagan than continued to push deficit spending well after the recovery from those first couple years, a huge lasting trend in Republican administrations ever since.
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!
I don't think presidents have all that much to do with the economy (vs. the legislature). Well... maybe the most recent example is to the contrary with certain actions that historically should have been the role of Congress.
That's true. Though in this case the administration is taking a much more active hand in the economy than any in almost a century.
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.
Sort of. I've done a lot of thinking about this one, and realize that it's really not just "one person" but a very large team of individuals, along with the "politics" of everything. If the President brings on a good staff, makes solid cabinet appointments, and they themself being a singular large part of the legislative process in modern years--given that it's usually fairly difficult to get 2/3rds of Congress to agree on anything--you can see the President actually has significantly more influence than you'd think.
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.
I disagree, but my personal belief is the economy and the government stewardship thereof work much the same way as WH40K ork technology
If that were true then why would there be such a glaringly clear example that presidential party influences economic performance?
Mostly coincidence. There aren't that many data points. There are under a dozen Presidents in the last half century. Too small to attribute significance.
I do believe that there could be a small causative effect, but there is usually a very long delay between cause and effect.
Wonder if it's more of the activist having an affect? During democrat administrations, groups like NRA scream "they're coming for your guns" causing gun sales to go up during democrat admins and then drop off during GOP admins as the rhetoric drops off.
So the actual data is irrelevant because you can dream up of minor hypothesis?
Horseshit. We have 70 years of evidence to back it up, you cannot call it coincidence without another counter theory. Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant. It's clear as day in the data. You could say that the Ds govern with facts and science, the Rs govern with emotion. But what's far more likely is that the Rs believe in theories that run counter to economic principles.
Man all kind of inferences get made on HN that new jobs will just appear after AI takes existing jobs because... jobs appeared in the past. This party/president assumption seems much more likely that that one which is based on zero actual data points but seems to be gospel to half of HN.
I looked this up. "10 of the 11 recessions between 1953 and 2020 began under Republican administrations”. It seems Republican = Recession.
It seems silly to blame these on the president though, consider just the past two recessions and how little they had to do with the actions of POTUS...
They are still responsible for making the recession easier or harder or longer
The Tarifs and the way trump acts, for example, massively disrupts markets.
The funny thing is that both Trump or Biden handled the COVID shock reasonably well, but now that there isn't a global crisis, the former is hard at work creating a local one.
I mean egg prices went up because of avian flu and that was Biden's to own so seem perfectly reasonable.
Is this the avian flu that didn't turn into another worldwide pandemic?
Ok, but is it cause or effect? Maybe Republicans do well when there is fear about the economy and a recession is coming.
Depends. If it's a Republican president in office, we must look at many factors, it's a difficult thing, y'see, many variables and such, market fluctuations, etc. etc. etc.
If it's a Dem president in office? 100% the Dem's fault.
Isn't literally this, but unironically, what dem supporters are doing in the least voted comments here?
Why try to make it as if it was the "opposite side" doing it while I'm reading it?
Because practical measurable result of republican policies are comparably systematically bad.
But, the way pundits and journalists write about it makes, the way discpurse goes systematically pretends literal opposite of reality.
Because Trump is an exception due to his abuse of executive power.
The TDS on hacker news is as bad as reddit. The worst thing about him is he's an Israeli puppet. Which the TDS sufferers never bring up.
Biden was hated so much that large groups of people chanted "Let's go Brandon" (fuck Joe Biden) in public. There is video evidence of this.
No Democrat politician has ever stated that Republicans have a mental illness for hating Joe Biden. Nor have they come up with a phrase similar to Trump Derangement Syndrome to describe it.
This is why I don't like "both sides" people. Overall Republican voters and their representatives are worse people.
Nothing wrong with being close friends with Epstein? The post about Obama's is just a funny joke?
Are we seriously still doing the TDS meme in this, the Year of Our Lord 2026?
At this point even his own people know he's a psychopath. "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is just another term for "being right all along."
>The worst thing about him is he's an Israeli puppet. Which the TDS sufferers never bring up.
TDS is real, as proven by your post.
Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy.
The fact that consecutive Republican administrations in this graph fared even worse suggests that is not the case.
I’d have called Reagan very conservative, am I missing something?
Are you misreading the word consecutive as conservative?
Yes.
Let's not omit the fact that Covid hit in Trump's last year in 2020, where he had a booming economy and lowest unemployment late historically amongst minorities.
Was handed a booming economy from Obama and largely didn't do anything except cut taxes for the rich a bit. Mostly grownups in his cabinet stopping him from doing stupid shit. The Greenland thing started back then and they thought it was a joke.
Let's not omit the fact that Trump's handling of Covid was selfish (deny it exists), reckless (deny it exists even harder), foolish (inject bleach), and destabilizing (constantly spewing conflicting information and undermining scientists and experts, you'll to this day still find a steady stream of HN commenters that hold an eternal vendetta against Anthony Fauci for some perceived unforgivable inarticulable wrong he's done.)
> Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy
Why? What if constantly launching foreign wars, leveraging up the financial system and running up deficits isn’t sound economic policy?
Wasn't trying to be political, just making an observation that 4 years is probably too short of a time to credit policy changes within a single administration.
Threatening all of our allies with war and tarrifs is a great way to tank confidence in the US and its businesses. Ask me how I know.
Oh, so every Republican administration dating back to FDR did the same?
Did you look at the graph?
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?
> making an observation that 4 years is probably too short of a time to credit policy changes within a single administration
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.
Why aren't you trying to be political? What exactly do you think "political" is?
Yet it tracks for decades with successive D/R presidents, suggesting that this 4 year excuse is not enough to dismiss the correlation
I suspect the administrations are as much a sign of the shifting tides than a cause.
Conservative approaches tend to be…. Conservative. Which is the opposite of growth.
WW2 really got the US economy going, so maybe the issue it a lack of scale in the warring?
Is it possible that can be attributed to lagging effects of their predecessors’ policies?
The consecutive GOP events don't seem to point to that.
Congress has a substantially greater impact on the business climate than the President.
And the president has enormous influence over what congress does (veto).
Of course everything is nuanced; the trend is merely interesting especially juxtaposed against people consistently voting for republicans for "economic" reasons.
That’s unless you have a Congress that lets the President usurp the pose of the purse that should be theirs and Supreme Court that rubber stamps everything he does
If you are referring to the current administration, SCOTUS has barely "rubber stamped" any of his actions, and has rejected several already (though we will see with tariffs... but Polymarket has it only 31% in favor of the president so at least the odds are in our favor).
You mean like he is now able to fire government workers, impound funds, fire people who were supposed to be independent of the executive branch, and basically saying he could commit crimes and send the national guard to states?
Where does threatening allies, tariffs and kidnapping foreign leaders fit into this?
He creates uncertainty and it’s hard to see how that helps the US economy.
And Congress is controlled by the president as overriding a veto is extremely difficult.
This president will also veto your congressional seat if you cross him. See what happened to the people who voted to impeach him, they got primaried out.
I'm not so sure either have much impact. Economic policy doesn't change much between administrations and Congress has been ineffective for a long time. Politics is mostly culture war things these days.
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.
Except they have abdicated most responsibility, especially when the president is of the same party, for decades.
Many now talk like they work for the president.
CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.
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
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUL
[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL
Thanks for providing actual data and contributing to the discussion instead of the knee-jerk responses in the rest of the replies here.
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.
The biggest change to me the acceptability of falsehoods on the left. It is a battle they will not win.
Maybe read the top comment and examine the graph.
>CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.
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?
It's a lagging indicator meant to credit or discredit administrations for past administrations' actions, handpicked to obfuscate cycle capture. CES is backward-looking by definition, so it is being abused here.
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.
I've always heard market forces and policies dont take effect until the following presidency.
That seems like sarcasm because it is an overused excuse that republicans give for the bad usa economies under republican presidents.
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.
The top comment has a graph. If you ignore single term presidents, the pattern remains the same.
>S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color.
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...
Based on that link, I don’t think I want the jobs that were created.
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.
Is there a line chart or a stacked area chart of this over time?
This seems to confirm that Joe Biden created the most jobs of any president in recent modern history.
Joe Biden "created" jobs the way covid "created" job vacancies. Maybe time periods with worldwide upheaval should be taken with a little salt.
That doesn't make sense. Could you explain what you mean?
Here we're looking for a change in the slope of that job creation line
We're looking for a change in slope based on overarching economic policy as a means of comparing two political parties. A global disaster is not a policy.
Joe Biden also presided over the largest America that ever existed, and took power at a moment when a huge rebound in jobs was inevitable.
So you haven't disagreed that Joe Biden is the greatest job creating president ever?
You've just helped explain that job creation was necessary due to the disaster performance of his predecessors.
Why are you ignoring Covid? Any president woulda ended 2020 with jobs losses.
Yes, but as a person with good number sense I am pretty good at discounting absolute levels for population change, and I feel like most people aren't any good at that, so I like to mention it. The majority of press articles that are about "[[Thing]] hits record high" turn out to lose their novelty when recast per capita.
There has to be some lag, and it is more about who controls Congress.
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?
Or Covid when roughly 22 million jobs were lost in March and April 2020 alone
Yea, you can create programs that create jobs, by spending taxes. So this should be zero surprise.
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?
It's the ratcheting mechanism of bipartisanship.
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.
I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term. That spending is the jobs. If you tighten spending to cut waste or rebalance the books, growth slows and jobs shrink, but that’s kind of the tradeoff when you’re trying to fix long-term issues.
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.
> I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term.
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...
And Clinton (mostly Gore as VP) cut the federal civilian workforce by about 20%, while following the both the letter and spirit of the law, and not causing chaos.
I’m not sure how true this is given that both Clinton and Obama cut the deficits and in Obama’s case he did it despite complaints from the left.
Democratic administrations see less spending growth, though. Definitely not more. Look it up.
You're confusing rhetoric with policy.
Fair enough, I didn't dig too deep though here's what I have come up with - I'm sure there are many factors, but it is quite interesting here:
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.
If you think republicans lowered spending I have a bridge to sell. See two Santas strategy.
Nothing happened in 2020 to affect this chart I'm sure. I would expect nothing less from the publication that falsely claimed Russians hacked into the US energy grid before an election.
9/11, 2008, and now AI job displacement is also bad luck
Many publications have made that claim about a Russian hack. Is it inaccurate?
Ok, but there were also 36+ months prior to covid in Trump's first presidency...
Correct. The unemployment rate was 4.7% in January 2017 and was 3.6% in January 2020. Or if we look at total private sector employment that went from 123,300,000 to 129,300,000 (its highest ever, at the time). That's an average of 125,000 jobs per month, or equivalent to Obama (although Obama's unemployment was significantly higher for both terms).
"January was the worst start to a year for job cuts in the United States since 2009, with high-profile layoffs at UPS and Amazon fueling a tumultuous beginning to 2026 on the labor market, according to a private firm's report, as official government reports remain delayed."
But this is only one giant mail order company and the shipper that services its deliveries
"Which Companies Are Cutting The Most Jobs?
UPS announced last month it would be cutting 30,000 jobs this year, after it eliminated 62,000 positions in 2025, The New York Times reported. The company's new layoffs are triggered by the company ending its relationship with Amazon, according to the report, which noted Amazon was also a leader in layoffs. Amazon announced in late January it would lay off around 16,000 corporate employees as it continues to restructure its business model."
What about all the other companies
Maybe there is more to the US economy than one giant company
How much of the US economy is small businesses
Tariffs are bad for the economy. Foreign countries are ditching US partnerships, contracts. Less travelers are coming to US. Wow I wonder when will we open our eye. In the middle of all these, US is ditching its allies and planning to invade sovereign countries (Greenland).
Tariffs, forcing capital into 7 very large companies instead of small startups, wage suppression through weird offshoring and immigration schemes so on and so forth. There are seemingly unending number of issues that all contribute to the same outcome we're seeing today.
It seems strange not to mention ICE or even treatment of transgender individuals if you mention travelers. We've effectively taken out round-the-clock advertisements saying "If you're not a fire-breathing, straight WASP, tread lightly". Normally, out of a sense of egalitarianism for even conservatives, I would tag on "even though it's not true", but I fear the evidence simply doesn't bear this out anymore.
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.
Foreign adversaries are getting exactly what they wanted, their manipulation of US politics has been extremely successful.
We did this to ourselves. Let’s not make excuses.
It's clear that we did this to ourselves towards the very ends of both foreign and domestic people that want to end the current order.
From Russia to Peter Thiel in the Epstein files, they all want the US to undergo an even worse Brexit.
those adversaries would not have been able to crank the volume if the conditions had not existed
Ad slop and AI slop have served their purpose in destroying people's confidence in information.
But if there were a healthy public discourse, there would be little acceptance of the slop economy, absurd lies, and repulsive rhetoric.
would you care to clarify on this? are you saying the current administration has been corrupted by foreign adverseries? or has the administration been outsmarted by foreign adverseries?
Trump is rumored to be heavily influenced by Russia and supposedly goes under the codename "Krasnov".
There were photos of him kissing the kremlin wall.. just saying..
Russia has been working on Trump for decades, he's an amusing idiot. They manipulated him, people around him, the electorate, and the election to engineer the situation where this fool is in the presidency. They have hard power over him (compromising pictures, information, loans, etc) and soft power over him (he admires strongmen autocrats).
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.
I see - thanks for taking the time by writing this up and adding a little more texture to the debate
The Heritage Foundation, billionaires and a lot of other people who want this are all US citizens, and they planned for this for a long time. Let's not blame others for something entirely US-homegrown.
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.
Post WW2 was a time of labor scarcity the US benefited from - but eventually that went away with global competition. The tech boom years were another labor scarcity time, and that’s also going away.
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?
Any system based on exponential growth will have almost all people become serfs as even if their capital grows it falls behind the growth of older capital
The population grows exponentially. Why would you think the system would work against that?
Populations grow logistically as they hit carrying capacity, it just looks exponential when it’s far from K
Doesn’t that make the situation even more dire? (If true, hard to believe when global population has negative second derivative)
Ideally our political systems act as a sigmoid filter over the growth, benefits, and harms
Labor supply and demand do not reliably reflect the productive or social value of labor.
An explanation to your analysis:
"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
Allowing individuals to hoard enough wealth to corrupt, at will, the system that gave them their wealth - maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all.
But who knew?
It's not like the Soviets fared much better with regards to corruption and institutional decay, to the part where the rampant corruption of the Brezhnev-era was a major contributing cause to the eventual collapse of the union.
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.
Not sure I follow the link to the Soviets, but yes they certainly excelled at letting too few people accumulate too much power too. If only we were able to learn a little more from history.
apparently a lot of people knew based on the treasure trove of their communications
Important context is January is historically the month where most layoffs are enacted. Not saying the number is insignificant, just not entirely unexpected.
Yes. And this January's numbers are comparable to January numbers during the Great Recession.
It’s a disaster when compared to other Januarys.
Link to report PDF: https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CR...
So much winning
The big question is “whose jobs”?
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).
Mostly Transportation, Technology, and Healthcare [0].
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/layoffs-unemployment-jobs-econo...
As it turns out, no one wants to invest in infrastructure when all the inputs are going to be tariffed to oblivion. All else equal why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper? Protectionism isn't enough to overcome losing access to world markets.
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.
> why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper?
What markets do you have in minds? Can retail investors invest there?
I foresee something closer to a proportional increase of investment in all the remaining accessible markets, as US relative attractiveness decreases, rather than it moving to a specific other place.
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.
These perspectives bother me a lot, because I want to invest passively, but if people are out there thinking like that, maybe nothing is priced right...
Priced right if money is moving from the bottom 90% to the top 10%. Stock market growth is because theres excess money and people need to invest the money. Supply and demand. There's reason why you can buy any ultra luxury car right(look at ferrari's revenue growth) and private jet industry is booming.
> maybe nothing is priced right
What does "priced right" even mean? For whom? When a public company makes billions in profits by selling insanely overpriced hardware, then that's "priced right" for the shareholders.
When a supermarket gives out 25% discount stickers to use, then the price of the good is closer to being priced right for the consumer, as long as you apply the sticker. There is, of course, no reason to assume that the supermarket would operate at a loss or close to cost. These 25% are already priced in and anyone not using the stickers is paying extra.
Nothing has been priced right ever since they've (the collective of anyone willing to sell something) figured out that they can ask for however-much people are willing to pay, which is quite more than what MY FELLOW HUMANS would need to pay.
For everyone else, who aren't willing to pay deliberately inflated prices, there's usually always some form of discount for some product, somewhere to be found.
In the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present. There is one remaining parameter (the exchange rate between future payouts on different dates, the "discount rate"), but all the subjectivity reduces to that one number.
However if everyone is deluded about what the future payouts of different insturments will be, you can get $10 for $1 in one place and $0.001 for $1 in another (given that in both cases the influence weighted participants think they're selling you a dollar). That invalidates the picture of reducing the unknowns to the discount rate.
In your examples, you're talking about goods and services, which have different values to different people. They have an equilibrium price but as you say, that's not the "right price for everyone," like there is for say a bond.
The reason the stock market is generally "priced right", which we see in the strong long term returns of index funds, is because the winners get more money and get more influence, and the losers get less.
So you have a self selecting system, that have (over time) proved itself. Whatever you might think of the effect of certain effects (such as immigrant labors) you can end up reflecting in your investments, as others do - and if you end up being correct, you'll have more power to influence the price in the future.
> In the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present.
This doesn't make sense though. The only reason I would buy an investment is if I believe it will grow in value from the point that I bought it. That means I'm pricing it at its future ccost.obviously other people are doing the same, so the actual cost of the investment will always rise above current value if people believe its a good investment.
I didn't write out enough to fully explain the idea. Here is the wiki page where you can find the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_discount_factor
The Challenger report contains large companies' announced future cuts. Not government, not small and medium business, not actual job losses. So neither, really.
Well those are incredibly ignorant and mostly likely strongly biased beliefs. When I worked for NASA and the DoE, I was surrounded by the most competent, hard-working, productive people I've ever known. Silicon Valley engineers are a joke compared to government engineers. Silicon valley people have newer toys and more flexible funding and no oversight, but government employees have vastly more impact and actual measurable utility. Only morons born into enough safety and security that they can be completely ignorant of how the actual world works believe the government is unnecessary and as many government jobs as possible should be deleted. The owner of that twitter platform you linked to killed several hundred thousand people last year, and again this year, and again next year, through sheer narcissistic incompetence. Is that a good source for any information at all?
Also a good bs indicator: 'illegal alien jobs'. As if the demand vanishes with the poor souls to uganda. It just framing in hope of twisting a win out of it, because if you would have stated that sub-minimum wage jobs are in decline, this would be a terrible economic indicator for the US.
The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.
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
> The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.
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.
Not true it was managed by the government
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?
Yes, that was what the US Digital Service was built on. People who were competent who cared more about service than top Big Tech comp.
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.
You are arguing that everyone is as money driven as you are. Plenty of people who are more altruistic people take employment based on non money factors all the time.
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.
Yes I’m sure your anecdotal bubble is more statistically valid than telling a 22 year old if they have a choice between working at BigTech making $160K+ a year or work in government and make $70K, they are going to choose to work for the government.
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).
Because they want to build cool things or tasteful things or things that actually help people.
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).
The entire “BigTech doesn’t have work life balance” is copium and the DMV isn’t exactly a low cost of living area. How many departments outside of what NASA are doing anything exciting? Maybe in medicine the CDC.
I agree with your opposition to the comment above, but I feel like the condescension towards silicon valley, and non-government employees is not a way to start a healthy dialogue. Like you are not going to convince anybody by calling 80+% of people here (private sector employees) "a joke".
I agree that randos on twitter are a bad source of information.
The people looking to view this positively will find or imagine a reason to do so, regardless of which jobs it is.
Ahh, yes, all the undocumented people working in tech...
A big part of the job losses were driven by Amazon and the end of their UPS contract.
You think illegal aliens working - by definition- illegally, show up on reports like this?
sigh If only the department of education was as well funded as the department of war.
It’s a non trivial question.
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.
These people don’t have an SSN. You can’t pay taxes without one
They can and do pay taxes with ITIN instead of SSN, and some non-citizens are eligible for SSN anyway. Undocumented immigrants have paid billions in taxes annually. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/how-do-undocumented-imm...
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.
There’s plenty of cases where illegal aliens are using the SSN of someone else, as reported by NYT, WashPost etc.
Yes, the illegal alien jobs that are being reported to the government by big corps are dropping. You're spot on /s
Mostly SWEs (especially the type who act pissy on HN).
The country desperately needs antitrust action to vastly increase.
We need all these monopolies and cartels broken up so that there is a dynamic competitive environment in all sectors of the economy
You’re talking about something that happens in a country that wants free markets. It doesn’t really apply to countries that want oligopolies or monopolies.
It's more nuanced as usual.
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.
Rephrased: Trump inherited a strong economy, did not know how to govern or appropriately wield the power of his office (zero experience), did not have a good relationship with congress so made no progress there unlike most presidents, and was constrained from his worst impulses by his own staff. Finally when Covid occurred and he was actually required to lead it all came crashing down because he was and is incapable. A geriatric democrat had to come and right the ship again immediately after.
And yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH.
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.
> And yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH.
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.
If you think of the DJIA as being denominated in dollars the ATH looks less impressive.
Yet housing costs keep increasing. The working class is being squeezed between employers who are suffering lost revenue and can't pay US wages, and landlords and mega-corp shareholders who won't budge on price. I foresee a slow protracted "collapse" (or really renegotiation) that will bankrupt stuck-in-the-mud billionaires (like Elon) as their means of recourse - law enforcement and the military - come under such powerful social coercion that no amount of money will stop them from siding with working-class-friendly new leadership like Mamdani, as the workers (who, despite what Elon tells himself in his robot fantasies, are still needed en masse), use their REAL voting power - moving their home to jurisdictions that are working-class-friendly.
I don't see any signs of that
For me, it seems like a logical consequence of overheating the economy by cutting interest rates to zero during the COVID period.
I recall similar predictions from stimulus from the mortgage crisis. Things did not seem to play out predictably, I'm not sure all the old rules are as hard and fast anymore as people think.
You are off by several years on the interest rates, which have an 18-24 month impact. Also we have this idiotic and unlawful tariff war the US administration is currently perpetrating. But I'm certain AI is having a huge impact as well.
I'm unconvinced of the AI impact outside of the tech sector. But there's certainly a lot of uncertainty generally. Probably more senior people with reputations are in a better position but likely tougher for people with no records.
Graphic design and copywriting are possibly affected even worse than the tech sector, for one.
There's a lot of reason to think companies citing AI as the reason for their layoffs are just lying because it looks better to shareholders, and that AI kinda sucks and isn't used for much yet. https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-lab...
I don't have much involvement with graphic design but I agree that the impact on journalism and adjacent is pretty awful. Not sure how much is AI per se but certainly the economics have been pretty unfavorable. I'm not convinced it's just AI slop but but quantity can displace quality.
I agree generally as far as immediate losses. But I think longer term with AI soaking up a lot of investment dollars we see other places not seeing investment or hiring growth.
Combined with stimulus and PPP
So, we're just doing whatever it takes to blame the Democratic Party, huh?
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.
Chicken Little already told us. Armageddon is also coming, don't forget about that.
JOLTS data for January 2026 has been delayed, but don't expect those tea leaves to change your opinion about what the future holds.
I hear that the Washington Post just fired 1/3 of all of it's reporters.
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?
Is that an argument of some sort? I can't quite identify the point.
I feel the same way about the article
No, but the garbage will need fewer pickups if consumption drops. Fewer pickups means fewer trucks means free drivers.
> 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?