Aug
5
2025

Always Look For the Silver Lining

James Freeman finds a pony in the BLS stats: Trump’s Best Jobs Number. (WSJ gifted link)

Friday brought disappointing news from the Labor Department on U.S. job growth. President Donald Trump’s decision to fire the official responsible for the report will do nothing to increase U.S. hiring. But there was at least one encouraging note in Labor’s otherwise unimpressive release on July employment.

The Journal’s Rachel Wolfe and Justin Lahart quote Jed Kolko of the Peterson Institute for International Economics:

Federal-government layoffs continued to drag on payrolls, with that sector losing 12,000 jobs. Compared with 1.3% growth in 2024, Kolko said, employment in the sector has fallen at an annualized rate of 5.5%.

This is progress in addressing the country’s most important challenge—a government that has grown far beyond the country’s ability to afford it. So far, federal spending hasn’t shown the same decline, although a Commerce Department report earlier last week noted a welcome second straight quarter of falling real federal consumption expenditures and gross investment.

Of course, there's still a long way to go.

Also of note:

  • I suppose actual seppuku would be too much. Jonathan Turley notes the lights going out next month at 401 9th Street, NW, Washington DC: After Years of Refusing Reforms, the CPB Accepts Death Over Political Dishonor. Skipping to the bottom line:

    Conversely, CPB is laying off its entire staff in a righteous, indignant huff. None of these people needed to lose their jobs if their leadership served their organization by listening to views beyond their own insular circle of enablers. The demise of the CPB now stands as the most impressive and unnecessary act of self-termination since the appearance of Judean People’s Front Crack Suicide Squad:

    "That showed 'em, huh?"

  • It's not just something you do to a flat tire. Kevin D. Williamson asks: Remember Inflation? And brings his usual brutal honesty to bear:

    Trump has inflated many things over the years—his assets on bank statements, his romantic résumé, his book sales—and inflation is the sort of thing that must come naturally to such a gasbag. Prices are already creeping up, with firms such as Adidas, Procter & Gamble, and Stanley Black & Decker announcing tariff-driven price increases. Groceries aren’t getting any cheaper, and neither is housing, the main driver of the late-summer uptick. But prices are getting higher across the marketplace, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics runs the numbers, finding higher prices for “household furnishings and operations, medical care, recreation, apparel, and personal care.” The few bright spots include used cars and airfares, which may indicate that people are simply putting off car purchases and skipping summer vacations under economic pressure.

    Tariffs are a tax—let me emphasize here that Republicans’ key achievement in the Trump years has been the unconstitutional enactment of a national sales tax by the unilateral directive of president, without congressional authorization—and, as a tax, a big tariff should be anti-inflationary: The more money you pay in taxes, the less money you have to spend on cars and vacations and such.

    But tariffs are an especially dumb and destructive kind of tax in that they do not produce a great deal of revenue in proportion to the economic distortion they introduce. Given that the tariffs are being implemented in parallel with what Republicans insist is “the largest tax cut in American history”—the cut-by-not-raising measure in their poorly conceived and idiotically named tax-and-spending bill—whatever counter-inflationary effect the tariffs might have had is likely to be overwhelmed by the inflationary effects of large cuts to other taxes, even if the extension of the 2017 cuts was far from unexpected. And here it is probably worth pointing out that Republicans are cutting taxes while running a deficit that is projected to be the third largest in American history.

    I suppose it's time to liquidate my investments and buy … gold?

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