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New Data Show Trump Tariffs Are Ruining Job Market

Unemployment claims have risen for the second-straight week, exceeding economists' expectations at the highest level in eight months, the Department of Labor announced on Thursday.

Initial jobless claims stood at 247,000 for the week ending on May 31, higher than the 236,000 claims that economists had been projecting. That jump caused the four-week moving average to increase by 4,500.

"New jobless claims are ticking up. The numbers are still low, but there's an upward trend. This is key to watch. The main reason the US economy has been so resilient is 159.5 million people are still employed and getting paychecks. If that goes down, a downward spiral will start,” Heather Long, the chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote on X.

According to the Labor Department, the biggest surge in new unemployment claims was in Michigan, where 8,490 people filed claims—up 3,259 from the week prior. The state’s job losses came from the manufacturing industry, which is being hit hard by President Donald Trump's steel, aluminum, and automobile tariffs.

Indeed, a number of automobile manufacturing companies have announced layoffs, including Stellantis, Ford, General Motors, and a handful of other companies that manufacture car parts.

Ultimately, the increase in jobless claims comes after the payroll company ADP said that just 37,000 private-sector jobs were created in May—a major slowdown and possibly the first tangible signs that Trump's idiotic tariffs are now impacting the job market.

Economists said that Trump’s tariffs would cut into companies’ profit margins, leading to increased prices, layoffs, or both. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday that the tariffs would cause the U.S. economy to shrink.

“If the president does not reverse course, he will increase the unemployment rate to recessionary levels,” Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told CNBC in April.

All eyes are now on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which will release its monthly jobs report Friday morning. Should that number come in under economists’ expectations, it will be more proof that their fears of Trump’s tariffs are coming true.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Americans Oppose Trump On Immigration, Want Garcia Returned From Salvador

New polling finds President Donald Trump underwater on his handling of immigration policy, historically one of his strongest issues.

The poll, released on Wednesday and conducted by YouGov for The Economist, finds that 45 percent of Americans approve of Trump's handling of immigration, while 50 percent disapprove. That's a massive swing from the previous Economist/YouGov poll on the matter. The older poll, which was fielded April 5-8, found that 50 percent approved of his handling of immigration policy, and 44 percent disapproved.

The decline may be due to Trump's policy of deporting immigrants to a notorious Salvadoran prison without offering them due process and in direct violation of a judge’s orders.

In the past few weeks, it's been reported that most of the people Trump has deported to CECOT—where inmates are packed into inhumane and overcrowded cells without mattresses, pillows, or proper nutrition, and with limited access to legal representation—have no criminal record at all.

The poll finds that a plurality of Americans (49 percent) say Trump’s approach to immigration policy has been “too harsh,” compared with the 38 percent who believe it's "about right" and five percent who say it’s been “too soft.”

In another eye-popping finding, 50 percent of Americans believe Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a Maryland man Trump wrongly deported to CECOT—should be returned to the United States, which the Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to do. Just 28 percent side with Trump, who said he cannot and will not bring Garcia back.

The Trump administration has accused (without credible evidence) Garcia of being a member of MS-13—but that messaging appears to be failing. According to the poll, just 27 percent of Americans believe Garcia is a member of the gang.

The poll’s results are similar to a Civiqs poll conducted for Daily Kos, which found 51 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 49 percent approve.

The polling suggests that Democratic lawmakers' condemnation of Trump’s deportations, as well as their efforts to bring Garcia back, have hurt Trump's standing with voters—a sign Democrats should keep up the pressure.

“Approval of Trump’s handling of immigration fell 10 points over the last week,” G. Elliott Morris, the former polling director at the now-defunct news outlet 538, wrote in a post on X. “Obviously the backlash to the [Kilmar Abrego Garcia] case worked, and it would have been a mistake not to talk about this — from both a rights perspective and the POV of moving opinion against POTUS.”

For example, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland recently traveled to El Salvador to meet with Garcia, as did a handful of House Democrats, where they highlighted the dangers of deporting people to a foreign prison without due process.

“Donald Trump and his Administration are running a government-funded kidnapping program– illegally arresting, jailing, and deporting innocent people with zero due process. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is Trump’s latest victim,” Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, one of the Democrats who traveled to El Salvador, said in a news release.

While the immigration data from the Economist/YouGov poll is bad for Trump, other data from the survey is even worse for him. A plurality of Americans (42 percent) give Trump’s first 100 days in office a failing grade.

In fact, a plurality or outright majority of nearly every demographic polled gives Trump an “F” grade, including white Americans (38 percent), every age and income demographic, and independents (46 percent). The only groups that this isn’t true for? Republicans, ideological conservatives, and Trump voters.

That’s likely because Trump has a net-negative approval rating on every issue included in the poll: jobs and the economy (-12 percentage points), immigration (-5 points), foreign policy (-14 points), national security (-3 points), education (-12 points), crime (-1 point), criminal justice reform (-6 points), and inflation and prices (-20 points).

It appears it’s just shy of 100 days in office for political gravity to pull Trump back down to earth.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Trump's Lackeys Blame Harris For Rate-Induced Market Drop

On Monday, stocks tumbled globally following Friday’s release of a weaker-than-expected jobs report, which economists have pinned on the Federal Reserve for not cutting interest rates earlier. According to CNN, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and NASDAQ each plunged by several percentage points when trading opened.

Yet former president and current GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump used his Truth Social account to baselessly cast blame on likely Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for the market tumble. Following Trump’s posts on the “Kamala Crash,” right-wing media figures also picked up this framing.

Financial news outlets reported that stock markets declined globally in reaction to weaker-than-expected jobs report

According to CNBC, “Fears of a U.S. recession were the main culprit for the global market meltdown after Friday’s disappointing July jobs report.” The Wall Street Journalsimilarly reported on the market decline that “concerns about a slowing U.S. economy are front and center after job growth slowed sharply in July.” Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at The Budget Lab at Yale, explained that the U.S. is currently not in recession.

Both outlets also reported worries that the Federal Reserve was too slow to cut interest rates. Professor Jeremy Siegel of The Wharton School said on CNBC in response to the market selloff that the Fed should make a large emergency rate cut. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman also suggested that the time is ripe for an emergency rate cut by the Fed.

Recently, multiple economists have been blaming the Trump-appointed Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for his failure to timely cut interest rates prior to the weaker-than-expected jobs report last Friday. Trump sycophants tried to blame the weak jobs report on Harris, too.

Trump and MAGA media try to blame stock market drop on Harris

Trump posted on Truth Social: “Of course there is a massive market downturn. Kamala is even worse than Crooked Joe. Markets will NEVER accept the Radical Left Lunatic that DESTROYED San Francisco and California, as a whole. Next move, THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2024! You can’t play games with MARKETS. KAMALA CRASH!!!” Trump blamed the market decline on Harris in multiple other posts as well, including one that read simply, “TRUMP CASH vs. KAMALA CRASH!” [Truth Social, 8/5/24, 8/5/24, 8/5/24, 8/5/24]

Former Trump official and current Newsmax analyst Ric Grenell: “The Kamala Crash.” [Twitter/X, 8/5/24]

Rumble host Donald Trump Jr.: “It's the #KamalaCrash!!!!” [Twitter/X, 8/5/24]

Project 2025 contributor Stephen Moore said on Fox News, “I think a lot of people on Wall Street … are a little worried about the agenda she [Kamala Harris] would bring in.” When co-anchor Sandra Smith asked, “Do you think a lot of this is about what’s to come with the election?” Moore replied: “Yeah, I do. … If you look at what Kamala Harris is saying, she wants to double the capital gains tax, she wants to tax unrealized capital gains, she wants to re-regulate virtually anything that moves in the economy. And she’s basically totally embraced the Biden agenda.” [Fox News, America Reports, 8/5/24; The Guardian, 2/29/24]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Nobel Economists Warn Foolish Trump Schemes Would 'Reignite Inflation'

A coalition of the world's top economists are sounding the alarm over a potential second wave of massive inflation if former President Donald Trump is elected to a second term in the White House.

In a recent open letter, chiefly authored by economist Joseph Stiglitz, 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists warned that the ex-president's economic policies would have a disastrous impact on the global economy. Newsweek reported the economists wrote that even though "each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies," they still believe President Joe Biden's economic agenda is "vastly superior to Donald Trump."

"Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast," the letter read. "There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets."

Under the Biden administration, inflation hit a peak of 9.1 percent in June of 2022, largely as a result of the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic and actions the Federal Reserve took to stabilize the economy. The Fed responded to inflation by increasing interest rates, which, while alleviating inflation, have made it harder for Americans to finance major purchases like homes and vehicles. The Fed hasn't yet reduced interest rates, though Newsweek reported that inflation is back down to 3.3 percent as of May 2024.

Despite that initial inflation spike, the economy has performed well under Biden's watch under all traditional metrics, like unemployment rates, GDP growth and consumer confidence. Real wages (adjusted for inflation) are up, meaning that more Americans have more money in their pockets. Gains by lower-income Americans have been the most significant in recent years: According to data from the St. Louis Fed, the net worth of the bottom 50% has increased by roughly two-thirds since 2019.

Trump has attempted to cast himself as the better president on economic issues, though his proposed policies have raised red flags from economic experts warning that the American working class would suffer significantly. The former president has proposed a universal 10 percent tariff on imported goods and tariffs as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods — the cost of which economists say would simply be passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices. Michael Strain, who is the director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that Trump's policies "would result in price spikes" for most Americans.

In the letter, which Axios first obtained, Stiglitz and his colleagues maintained that Trump's policies "would have a negative impact on the U.S.'s economic standing in the world, and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.'s domestic economy."

Trump's plans to round up, detain and deport millions of immigrants would also be harmful to the economy, given the dependence multiple sectors of the economy have on immigrant labor. Strain wrote that the former president's hardline immigration agenda would "cause a severe supply shock to the labor market." And in analyzing his mass deportation policy, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan wrote earlier this month that production decreasing and labor becoming more scarce would naturally result in higher prices.

"For example, if farmers could not find enough workers to pick all their crops, there would be a smaller supply of produce and it would get more expensive," they wrote. "And businesses would be forced to offer higher wages to attract or retain workers — passing on some of their higher costs to consumers."

Stiglitz was joined in his letter by Nobel Prize winners George A. Akerlof (2001), Sir Angus Deaton (2015), Claudia Goldin (2023), Sir Oliver Hart (2016), Eric S. Maskin (2007), Daniel L. McFadden (2000), Paul R. Milgrom (2020), Roger B. Myerson (2007), Edmund S. Phelps (2006), Paul M. Romer (2018), Alvin E. Roth (2012), William F. Sharpe (1990), Robert J. Shiller (2013), Christopher A. Sims (2011) and Robert B. Wilson (2020).

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

New Data Show Trump Tariffs Are Ruining Job Market

Americans Oppose Trump On Immigration, Want Garcia Returned From Salvador

Trump's Lackeys Blame Harris For Rate-Induced Market Drop

Nobel Economists Warn Foolish Trump Schemes Would 'Reignite Inflation'

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