Job growth slowed sharply last month, with workers sidelined by hurricane effects and the continuing Boeing strike.
The Labor Department on Friday reported that the economy added a seasonally adjusted 12,000 jobs in October, versus a September gain of 223,000. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal, anticipating storm and strike effects, expected a gain of 100,000.
Still, the unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1%, in line with economists’ expectations.
Note that even the expected 100,000 gain was far below the replacement level.
If this were 20 years ago, that would be “October surprise” level scandal. With an election period of several months, many of the votes already having been cast, the impact is certainly much lower than it might have been. Still, it’s not nothing. It is likely to have an adverse effect on Vice President Harris’s election prospects.
Worse still is that the only remedial action that might be taken will add to inflation. Since inflation is a lagging indicator, it will take a while for it to materialize but fasten your seatbelts.
Can someone please explain to me what Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet are saying they want in this piece at The Hill?
Americans will make their presidential choice on Tuesday. Whoever wins then will be faced with their own choice. Will they resolve to win World War III and give a fireside chat of their own ahead of Thanksgiving? Or will they too continue blindly sleepwalking through this ever-growing global conflagration?
Increased defense budgets? More direct U. S. involvement in the various hotspots around the world? Let alone how those can be accomplished?
I won’t even delve into the peculiarly skewed worldview that is their premise. Suffice it to say that France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, South Africa, India, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Russia, China, etc. all have national interests and will pursue them regardless of what we do. So does the U. S. although I’m not entirely sure how what we’ve been doing for the last 30 years relate to those.
In that period we’ve been directly involved in three major wars only one of which resulted in even marginal success and a dozen more minor ones both directly and indirectly. Will greater involvement result in greater success?
When Jack and I were walking this morning I got a very fine example of what civilization means: a four-way stop. At a four-way stop the first vehicle to arrive at the intersection has the right of way. When two vehicles arrive at the same time the following rules apply
Always yield to the right
Straight traffic takes the right of way over turning traffic
Right turns take the right of way over left turns
So long as everybody knows the rules and by and large complies with them, traffic can proceed safely and quickly. Note that has two components: general compliance with the rules and the expectation of compliance. These rules aren’t laws of nature. They are rules that allow us to drive safely and quickly.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s announcement of a $300 million property tax hike in the city comes hard on the heels of a major increase in property taxes due to reassessment. Christian Piekos, Craig Wall, Mark Rivera, and Eric Horng report at ABC 7 Chicago:
CHICAGO (WLS) — Mayor Brandon Johnson said he plans to raise property taxes next year, walking back a major campaign promise as the city faces a nearly $1 billion budget deficit.
In a Wednesday morning City Council meeting, the mayor unveiled a budget proposal that includes a property tax hike of $300 million, as well as eliminating more than 700 vacant positions. More than half of those vacant positions are from the Chicago Police Department.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is pitching a $17.3 billion budget that avoids layoffs but relies on a massive $300 million property tax increase to close the city’s 2025 budget gap.
The budget proposal — Johnson’s second — marks a major flip-flop on his cornerstone campaign promise to not raise property taxes on Chicago homeowners, and comes on the heels of what the mayor’s office said was an “excruciating process” to close the gap.
I continue to wonder what those who voted for Johnson expected him to do. He’s doing exactly what I expected him to do—spending lavishly on himself (the City just spent $80,000 remodeling an office for his wife) and doing whatever the CTU wants him to do.
To place this in some perspective here are some comparative property taxes in major U. S. cities from the Civic Federation:
and there’s a rundown of city sales taxes from the Tax Foundation:
Houston’s sales tax ranks 80th or so. There is no city or state income tax in Houston.
Said another way we are taxed punitively here. Why? Corruption and mismanagement.
If you wanted an honest green eyeshades-type who would fix the City’s bloated budget, you should have voted for Paul Vallas. Also just to correct on of Mayor Johnson’s many items of misinformation property taxes are not a “tax on the rich”. They are a highly regressive form of taxation. Even renters pay property tax in the form of increased rent.
It appears that Liberalism has run out of steam, and if its advocates don’t come up with something soon, then feminism, LGBTQ rights, and multiculturalism were just an intermission of modernity. Certainly, their worldview still dominates the cultural and educational institutions in most Western countries but given the recent shift to the right by Gen Z, even that dominance has an expiration date. And that is no surprise: both locally and globally, the groups that are supposed to be most protected by the ideology of liberalism, increasingly find themselves left alone. I am not just talking about the issue of biological males in women’s sports or other issues that catch the attention of Western media, but about how a growing part of the non-Western world is turning its back on liberal ideas.
I don’t think that he or many of those in the West understand what’s happening. There was never any great fondness for liberalism in the developing world. It was always seen as merely instrumental in securing economic growth. The fact that for Americans liberalism was always more honored in the breach than the observance was not lost on them.
Now that we are sacrificing our economic power on the altars of environmentalism, DEI, and consumer spending, there’s even less reason for the “non-Western world” to turn to liberalism.
I largely agree with Paulo Aguiar’s analysis of the effects of Yahya Sinwar’s death on the war in Gaza in Geopolitical Monitor and for these reasons:
Hamas isn’t reliant on a single figurehead or a tight circle of leaders. It’s decentralized, with local commanders and a somewhat clear line of succession. This structure allows the group to continue operating even after losing prominent figures like Sinwar. Whoever steps into his shoes is likely to carry forward the same hardline stance, continuing Hamas’s resistance against Israel and their broader goal of reclaiming what they see as historic Palestine. In that sense, killing Sinwar is more of a symbolic victory than a strategic one – it may lift spirits in Israel, but it won’t dismantle Hamas or bring an end to the cycle of violence.
Furthermore, I think there’s a pretty simple reason that Israel’s “endgame” is so unclear. I don’t think the Israelis have a realistic plan for concluding the war. Hamas is the government of Gaza. The more militant it is, the more popular it becomes among Palestinians including on the West Bank.
I genuinely have no idea what the Israelis plan to do. Drive the Gazans out? Exterminate them? Fight wars with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Iranians all at the same time?
My concern is that they’re escalating to draw the United States farther into the conflict than it already is.
At RealClearMarkets David Hebert makes the case against tariffs, largely a response to Oren Cass’s defense of Trump’s plans. His arguments generally follow the standard neo-classical arguments with a soupçon of ad hominem tossed in:
Oren Cass has written several articles about the need for tariffs to save America. Like all his writings on this subject, he reveals that he has learned enough economics to be a nuisance but not enough to be helpful. In them, he accuses economists of only thinking about the costs of tariffs, such as the increased prices, the net loss of jobs, stagnated economic progress, and the retaliatory tariffs which other nations levy against America, which cost us dearly. At this point, anyone following his work can be left with but one conclusion: he will not let facts stand in the way of his agenda. While his tenacity is admirable, his economic prowess is not.
In these articles, Cass commits three fundamental errors: 1) a misapplication of what economists call “externalities,” 2) falling victim to the water-diamond paradox, and 3) a disregard of secondary effects.
I’m not arguing against him because I largely agree with him but I wanted to address some specific points that Dr. Hebert makes and explain where I differ from him.
By allowing innovations, even those from abroad, to proliferate in the American economy, new jobs that were previously unimaginable are created. In 1900, for example, there were no pediatric oncologists. Today, there are over 2,000.
This is a very complicated subject, too complicated for a blog post. First, people who work in the healthcare sector are compensated based on how much care they provide not based on how much health they provide. Now specialization is a necessity as the absolute amount of knowledge increases but it is also aligned with the incentive to provide more care.
From 1900 to 2000 life expectancy (a reasonable enough proxy for health) grew considerably but starting around 2005 that peaked and, indeed, has actually decreased in recent years. Some but not all of that decrease was due to COVID-19. Some was due to bad habit but I believe that some was a result of increased care having a limit in its marginal productivity. At this point while I think there’s a good argument that different care could produce additional benefits I don’t think the argument that more care will is quite as good as it used to be.
I suspect that here Dr. Hebert is succumbing to the flaw he criticizes—failure to consider marginal benefits. Does one more pediatric oncologist actually produce more health?
Equally impressive, in 1900, almost 40% of the American working population was employed in agriculture. Today, that number is less than 2%.
I’m going to use wheat production as a proxy for agricultural production here. As you can see from the graph above a decreasing number of people working in agriculture were able to produce an increasing amount of wheat. Until 1980 that is. What happened?
I don’t know. You tell me. I can think of all sorts of explanations but what happened is hard to argue. Starting around 1980 U. S. wheat production went flat (noisy but flat) and has remained so. My key point: production is how much wheat you are producing. I suspect that globalization played a role.
This post is starting to get long and I have several additional points to make. I’ll be as terse as I can. I understand comparative advantage but there are three problems. I have yet to meet a CEO who understands comparative advantage or one who does not understand absolute advantage. Chinese has an absolute advantage over the United States on a very wide array of manufactured goods. Under the circumstances comparative advantage makes little difference. And the Chinese leadership has sufficient authoritarian control to limit imports and regulate prices to give China comparative advantage as well as absolute advantage.
As I’ve said before I think that China is a special case and we have little recourse but to impose tariffs on China.
Finally, I think that Dr. Hebert is engaging in a certain amount of hand-waving. Consider the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s list of fast-growing occupations. Some don’t pay enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle (home health assistants and veterinary assistants); some are highly subsidized (wind turbine service technicians, solar photovoltaic installers); and some require qualifications that relatively few can satisfy (veterinarians, physicians assistants, data scientists). Every single one of them is tertiary production.
I think we need more primary and secondary production. Does Dr. Hebert believe we can support the American population based on tertiary production alone?
In much of America, a night out with the family has often meant a meal at TGI Fridays or Red Lobster. But those once-popular restaurant chains — and a few others — now find themselves struggling.
Big chains this year will “declare the most bankruptcies in decades,” said The Wall Street Journal. Among the list of battered restaurants: Red Lobster, Buca di Beppo, Hawkers Asian Street Food, Tijuana Flats and Roti. (TGI Fridays is also reportedly approaching bankruptcy, while Denny’s is planning to close 150 restaurants.) Same-store restaurant sales are down by 3.3% from last year. There isn’t any single reason. “You have the Covid hangover, labor costs,” said one executive. Some families have “pulled back on dining out,” said the Journal. But business decisions have also played a role. “High interest rates have hurt companies that gave priority to growth over profit.”
He mentions some of the factors including inflation, labor costs, and bad management but I think he’s missing some.
For example, meal kit companies are growing by leaps and bounds but experiencing many of the same things. And I’m not expert on either chain casual dining or meal kits but I suspect that they’re competing for the same customers. My cooking is better than any meal kit (not to mention Denny’s) and I know how to shop. I tend to avoid ordering from any restaurant where the food isn’t better than my cooking which is really narrowing the field. That pretty much limits me to pizza and ethnic cuisine.
To my untutored eye it looks like we’re enormously overbuilt on fast food and casual dining restaurants. I think that the fast food business model is fatally flawed for reasons I’ve explained before and I’ve never understood chain casual dining. I would rather support a mom and pop shop than a store operated by some mega-business.
Afghanistan’s Taliban faces growing opposition to its three-year post-conflict rule, rising threats that are gnawing at the stability the one-time insurgent group has sought to impose on the nation.
The Islamist regime appeared to be riding high just recently in celebrating the third anniversary of its second time in power with a military parade showcasing fighter aircraft and weapons seized after the US-led coalition withdrew in chaos in August 2021.
But behind the celebration and military flexing, the Taliban is contending with potent challenges on multiple fronts.
The article goes on to outline the problems today’s Taliban is having with Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K), the Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF), and the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF). It would be comical if there weren’t human lives at stake.
Regardless of who wins the US presidential election on November 5th, Pax Americana’s obituaries are now being drafted. They should be long ones. The Atlantic alliance was one of the most distinctive and seemingly durable features of post-war Europe. It brought security and freedom to tens of millions of people for decades, first by preventing Communism’s spread, then by winning the Cold War, and thereafter doubling NATO membership from 16 in 1989 to 32 now.
True, the American-led security order was never healthy and lived riskily. The European end was cranky and often unreliable. Endemic underspending on defense strained American patience over many decades; so too did idiosyncratic decision-making, especially in France. Ungrateful or paranoid “peace” campaigners depicted the US nuclear presence in Europe as a menace, not a safeguard. Many Europeans were outraged by failed American wars in Indo-China in the 1960s and 1970s, by the “Global War on Terror” after 2001, and shunned the looming hard confrontation with China.
He concludes
No flowers, please. Instead, donations to any European military budget will be gratefully appreciated.
He says it died of neglect. Perhaps. I think it starved to death. The surplus we needed to feed it was exhausted.