Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The job growth was good compared to recent months, but not actually good. The job growth was heavily concentrated in healthcare and social assistance. These are jobs caused by our aging society, but not good underlying economic growth.
The jobs numbers for 2025 were revised, and job growth was very low for 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSNZGWfitjM
“In 2022, Seattle became one of the first cities in America to pass a minimum wage law for food delivery drivers. The law went into effect in 2024, and the results were nothing short of calamitous. Food orders plunged to unprecedented lows, delivery costs exploded, and driver earnings appeared to crater.
Now, new research on Seattle’s delivery driver minimum wage ordinance shows that the law had no long-term effect on driver wages. And yet, Seattle’s city council shows no signs of changing course, even with higher consumer costs and zero growth in driver pay.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/20/seattles-delivery-minimum-wage-failed-drivers-and-raised-costs/
“The unemployment rate rose to 4.6 percent in November, its highest level in more than four years, the Labor Department said Tuesday. The economy gained 64,000 jobs that month after losing 105,000 in October, mostly the result of federal government workers taking buyouts.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/16/jobs-report-trump-employment-economy-00692500
“”On April 1, 2024, California raised its minimum wage from $16 to $20 per hour for fast-food workers employed at chains with more than 60 locations nationwide,” Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, and Jonathan Meer write in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that was first addressed by Reason’s Peter Suderman in the November print issue. “Our median estimate suggests that California lost about 18,000 jobs that could have been retained if AB 1228 had not been passed.””
https://reason.com/2025/11/10/californias-fast-food-minimum-wage-hike-is-killing-jobs/?itm_source=parsely-api
Jerome Powell says the Gen Z hiring nightmare is real: ‘Kids coming out of college…are having a hard time finding jobs’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/jerome-powell-says-gen-z-212422015.html
One reason BLS statistic revisions are so large is because it is underfunded. Trump funding it even less isn’t going to help this.
Another problem is that businesses are not responding to surveys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcdANjLeny8
The government sends out a survey to get employment data, but they don’t get responses in time for their initial reports, so those are usually off and have to be revised later.
The surveys are always incomplete, and a lot of statistical guesses have to be made.
The once a year reports are better; maybe they should only have the once a year reports?
The difficulty of measuring country-wide employment in a short period of time and methodological flaws are the causes of revisions, not political bias.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FWaWIbCuJE
“Eberstadt’s work shows that the decline in work force participation of American men has been steady and ongoing since the 1960s. It has continued steadily during periods when immigration has been high, and when it has been low.
Other economic factors also fail to explain this steady decline, as Eberstadt wrote in an essay for National Affairs in 2020: “The tempo of workforce withdrawal appears to be almost completely unaffected by the tempo of national economic growth, which varied appreciably over this period. Even recessions—including the Great Recession—appear to have scarcely any impact on the trend. Likewise, the NAFTA agreement, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, and other ‘disruptive’ trade events with major implications for the demand for labor in America do not stand out,” Eberstadt wrote in 2020.
In other words, it’s not the natcon boogeymen of free trade and immigration that are driving this outcome. Eberstadt has argued that a lack of educational options for low-income men is the primary cause, though a number of cultural changes have also played a role, including “family structure, government-benefit dependence, and mass incarceration.””
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“Contrary to Vance’s claim, it does not seem like most of those men have been forced out of the work force by employers who are eager to “import somebody from Central America who’s going to work under the table for poverty wages.” Rather, they’ve left the work force for a variety of reasons. Some are in jail, some are disabled, some are caring for family members or otherwise unable to commit to a full-time job. The notion that America has 7 million able-bodied men who would be working if only they could find a job is misguided.
Vance’s argument also ignores other relevant details, like the fact that men’s participation in the labor force has increased over the past four years. It’s not what you’d expect to see if the Biden administration’s immigration policies were forcing working-age American men out of jobs.”
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“”Inability to find a job has played a minimal role in men’s declining labor supply,” concluded Eberstadt’s colleague Scott Winship, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in an essay published last month by Fusion. After reviewing decades of data about why nonworking men are still without a job, Winship concluded that “only about a quarter of the increase in prime-age men who were jobless for a full year was explained by men who wanted a job.””
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“”The decline in work force participation among working-age men hasn’t been due to any deterioration in the labor market or economy,” Winship wrote in an email on Wednesday. “It mostly reflects rising school enrollment, increased responsibilities at home, earlier retirement, and especially increased receipt of disability benefits. The latter is primarily a problem with our disability policy rather than with our economy.””
https://reason.com/2024/10/17/j-d-vance-says-7-million-able-bodied-men-have-dropped-out-of-the-labor-force-where-are-they/
“Fears have ticked up since Friday because the unemployment rate has risen enough in the past year to trigger a statistical threshold, known as the Sahm rule, that has historically been a sign that we’re in the early stages of recession.
But the U.S. economy actually still looks fine: Joblessness is at 4.3 percent, which is only bad by comparison to 3.4 percent, where it stood in early 2023. A higher percentage of people in their prime working years are employed than at any point since 2001, and the unemployment rate — which measures the number of people looking to be employed against the total number of people participating in the labor force — has risen largely because more people are seeking work, including immigrants.
U.S. GDP grew at a 2.8 percent pace in the second quarter of the year, which is faster than would be expected, especially given how high interest rates are. (Recessions are associated with an economy that is contracting, not expanding.)
Claudia Sahm, the creator of the Sahm rule, said that she doesn’t think we’re in a recession and that this time her rule might not hold.
But one thing seems clear: The economy is now slowing. The question is how much and how fast.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/05/how-to-make-sense-of-market-turbulence-00172647
“One strange thing about the American unemployment insurance (UI) system — which provides weekly payments to jobless people who meet certain criteria — is that it’s not insurance against being unemployed. More accurately, it’s insurance against losing a job “through no fault of your own,” which makes UI more like “getting laid off insurance.”
Aside from a few exceptions in some states for things like escaping domestic violence or hostile workplaces, voluntarily leaving your job disqualifies you from receiving unemployment benefits. Allowing people who quit to receive those payments would be “contrary to one of the fundamental tenets of the UI program. The idea is that we want to incentivize people to work,” said Doug Holmes, president of Strategic Services on Unemployment & Workers’ Compensation (UWC), an association that has represented the interests of businesses in matters of UI reform since 1933.
So the point of the American UI system is not to make it easier to quit a job. But a few economists are now beginning to ask: Should it be?”
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“Boosting UI generosity doesn’t affect overall employment rates one way or the other. Instead of loafing around in subsidized unemployment, more generous benefits can support people to quit their jobs in search of better ones, which benefits workers through higher wages and better job satisfaction, and the economy through enhanced productivity as people find better uses for their skills.
Put simply, more quitting can be good for the economy. If UI made it easier for more workers to quit their jobs, people would still look for work and the economy could be better off overall. The real losers would be lousy jobs, which would struggle to retain workers with a greater cushion to quit and go looking elsewhere.”
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“In theory, working a job and buying that carton of eggs are both voluntary transactions. If you don’t like your job, you’re as free to find another as you are to choose a different, cheaper carton of eggs. In practice, especially for lower-wage workers who face relentless economic pressure and lots of debt, adding a job search on top of full-time work just isn’t feasible.
As a result, people trapped in jobs aren’t able to send signals to the labor market that their work sucks and leaves them too drained to find something better. Let this kind of labor market evolve over the course of decades or centuries and you can wind up with an economy full of jobs that make too many people miserable. Without enough freedom to quit, the core logic aligning labor markets with people’s preferences is flying partially blind.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/356461/unemployment-benefits-insurance-quitting-capitalism-economy