I’m not sure whether to call this article a report, an analysis, or an opinion piece. In the Business section of the Washington Post Taylor Telford, Jaclyn Peiser and Federica Cocco have a piece saying the U. S. has its toughest job market in years.

It’s the toughest time in years to be searching for work in America.

New data last week showed a fourth month of tepid job growth and propelled joblessness to its highest level since late 2021, when the economy was still recovering from the effects of the covid-19 pandemic. Now, as companies wrestle with inflation, economic uncertainty and trade policy whiplash, many are shredding payrolls and shifting tasks to artificial intelligence while pulling in higher profits. And some executives are pointedly broadcasting sizable layoffs as wins, a sign they’re making workforces leaner and more efficient.

Hardly any corner of the economy is untouched by jobs cuts and slowdown: Employment in all goods-producing industries slumped in August, with the deepest losses coming from manufacturing and mining. The service sector was racked by steep layoffs in business and professional services and IT.

The graphic at the top of the page illustrates what they’re talking about. I’ve criticized the BLS Employment Situation in the past but I think what it’s reporting this month is directionally right if not right in detail. Note that although its numbers are slightly different from those reported by the payroll processing company Automatic Data Processing (ADP) (in which I have more confidence) they both point to a very tough jobs market. You need only to read posts on Glassdoor or LinkedIn to recognize that.

But wait! There’s more. Consider these charts of real total annual revenue 2019-2025 for some big outsourcing companies




My understanding is that TCS’s revenue has declined sharply in the current fiscal year-to-date. I can only guess what this level of stagnation or even decline is doing in India.

The U. S. labor market is even a little worse than suggested by what has been reported. Since so much of healthcare funding comes from tax dollars in one form or another, the entire sector is effectively underwritten by governments if not paid from tax dollars outright. Anything that bears the slightest risk is either stagnant or contracting. That’s not a good sign.

Like many people these days, I suppose, my browser remains open on my computer all of the time with twenty or more tabs, some of them weeks or even months old. Most of those tabs are opened to articles I plan to post on when I find the right “hook” for posting on them. I commend David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column to your attention if for no other reason than it has provided me the hook to clear a number of my open tabs. Its title is “Why I Am Not a Liberal”.

Here’s the opening of Mr. Brooks’s column:

Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 amonth. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.

These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security. A study that gave $1,000 a month did not produce better health, career, education or sleep outcomes or even more time with their children.

Several of my open tabs were that essay and several reactions to it. Arguendo if no worthwhile benefit is achieved by such exercises why should they be done? As far as I can tell there’s only one rational answer and it has nothing to do with individual welfare, ameliorating poverty, liberalism, progressivism, or any -ism other than radical egalitarianism.

Mr. Brooks goes on to point out the problems with what passes for conservatism these days which are manifest. They undoubtedly have William F. Buckley turning in his grave. That brings me to the point of this post. The problems we face today are not progressivism or liberalism or conservatism or socialism or fascism or authoritarianism or any other -ism. They are the ideologues who espouse the -isms while disdaining other ideologues who espouse other -isms which denies their essential dignity as human beings. That is the inescapable risk of any such -ism. Beware. Beyond here be dragons.

I’m afraid I was not convinced by Jason Riley’s WSJ column asserting that more police officers is the key to reducing crime:

The Democratic reaction to President Trump’s federal crackdown on crime was as predictable as the dozens of shootings in Chicago over the holiday weekend, which left at least seven dead.

Chicago’s violent-crime spikes during the warmer months have become too commonplace to shock us as they should. CBS News reported that during Independence Day weekend five people were killed and 36 were injured. Over Labor Day weekend in 2023 and 2024, a total of 13 were killed and 67 wounded in shootings around the city.

When Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was asked repeatedly in a television interview last week whether putting more police officers on the street would help curb crime, he called that approach “antiquated” and tried to change the subject: “I believe the city of Chicago and cities across America would be safer if we actually had, you know, affordable housing.”

I will readily stipulate that Mayor Johnson is a buffoon and one could do much worse than doing the opposite of anything he suggests. Mr. Riley goes on to quote a number of studies supporting his view that more police = less crime. I genuinely wish that columnists would actually cite the studies they quote. It would be helpful.

I did a little quick research of populations, police officers, and other factors. I limited my research to the ten largest cities and the homicide rate as an epitome of violent crime. The results are a little hard to read—click on the table for a larger version:

Since it’s a bit difficult to discern any patterns from the table, I created a scatterplot:

That’s not dispositive but I think it’s highly suggestive: there is no straightline relationship between the number of police officers and the homicide rate. A scatterplot of the area of the cities is even more interesting:

I would also make the claim that factoring demographics into the findings would be revealing.

I would summarize my findings that

1. There is no strong relationship between the number of police officers per 100K population and the homicide rate.
2. There is a stronger relationship between population density and homicide rate with New York City being the great outlier. New Yorkers are a breed apart.
3. Otherwise the causes of a high homicide rate are multifactorial including population density, demographics, and how law enforcement is performed including police officers, states attorneys, and judges.

Yesterday afternoon in reaction to President Trump’s announcement that he would be deploying the National Guard to Chicago, the governor of Illinois, State Attorney General, Cook County Board President, and mayor of Chicago gave a rare joint press conference expressing their anger, dismay, and opposition. At WGN Tahman Bradley and Ethan Illers report:

CHICAGO (WGN) – President Trump renewed his push to send federal help to Chicago and announced Tuesday that he’s made up his mind about a federal surge.

“We’re going in. I didn’t say when, but we’re going in,” Trump said. “If the governor of Illinois would call up, call me up, I would love to do it. Now we’re going to do it anyway. We have a right to do it.”

This comes after Chicago saw a violent Labor Day weekend that ended with 58 people shot, eight of them fatally.

Meanwhile, the city, county and state’s Democratic leaders do not want this, but they’re bracing for federal immigration agents and another state’s national guard.

Also on Tuesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker spoke at a press conference along with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, saying there is no emergency warranting the deployment of federal law enforcement to Chicago.

Pritzker said he’s learned armed agents are preparing for sweeping federal immigration raids. Those agents, Pritzker said, will be supported by the Texas National Guard.

When I heard about the multiple mass shootings in Chicago over Labor Day weekend, I turned to my wife and said “That’s going to be very bad timing for Pritzker and Johnson”. JB Pritzker is governor of Illinois and Brandon Johnson is mayor of Chicago. Both have been denying vehemently that Chicago had a violence problem.

All of the officials condemned the use of the National Guard as illegal. Mayor Johnson made a lengthy statement blaming violence in Chicago on the lack of national gun control laws or attention to “root causes”, generally maximalist policy positions.

I agree with them that President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to address local crime is illegal. That isn’t the president’s job. I also agree with State AG Kwame Raoul’s observation that effective law enforcement requires collaboration among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. I wish he had elaborated on how the state’s and City of Chicago’s “sanctuary” status facilitates that but he didn’t.

Mayor Johnson frequently alludes to the “root causes” of crime but has never provided a succinct definition of what he thinks they are so I will. I think the root causes of urban crime are urban black social dysfunction, particularly the erosion of the nuclear family among blacks, decline of entry-level job opportunities for young black men, criminal street gangs, private and public tolerance of street gangs, and weak enforcement of the law.

I do not believe that you can make intelligent comments about crime without referring to race or ethnicity. In Chicago the Hispanic homicide rate is four times the white homicide rate and the black homicide rate is 15 times the white homicide rate. I think that much of the reason for the difference is street gangs.

It is true that there has been a sharp decline in homicide this year over last year. Courtesy of HeyJackass!:

The decline in rate has been sharpest among Hispanics.

Where I come from when something changes it’s prudent to consider what else has changed. Neither gun laws nor the “root causes” of crime have changed materially since last year. What has? I would point to two things. First, President Trump’s enforcement of immigration law and, second, Cook County has a new states attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke, who is prosecuting crime more enthusiastically than her predecessor.

Ms. Burke was conspicuous by her absence among the worthies in yesterday’s press conference. I don’t know whether that’s because she’s not considered one of the “cool kids”, because she had other commitments, or for some other reason.

David Ignatius’s most recent Washington Post column on ending the war in Ukraine is such a mish-mosh of contradictions, things with which I agree, and fantasies with which I disagree, I’m not sure what to make of it:

Chess players sometimes fall into a situation they call “zugzwang,” in which any move worsens their position. The impasse in the Ukraine peace talks feels like that. But unlike chess players, statesmen aren’t bound by rules. They can escape disaster.

Here’s the deadlock: Ukraine and its European supporters want a peace deal, perhaps freezing the current front line, so long as Kyiv gets “security guarantees” for the future. But Russia demands that the West first address “root causes” of the war, which amounts to its own version of a security guarantee.

He divides “security guarantees” into “offensive guarantees” and “defensive guarantees”. Here’s an example of an “offensive guarantee”:

One tough Western approach would be reciprocity. If Putin continues to attack cities and civilian infrastructure across Ukraine, then Kyiv’s allies would give it the means to respond in kind. The weapons are ready: Anglo-French Storm Shadow cruise missiles with a range of 155 miles; German Taurus cruise missiles with a 300-mile range; U.S. ATACMS and Precision Strike ballistic missiles with ranges of 250 miles.

and here are some “defensive” ones:

I can imagine an array of military options — from a no-fly zone over Ukraine, to a rotating training and advisory force inside Ukraine, to new retaliatory capabilities if Russia keeps attacking civilians or energy infrastructure. These would be security guarantees — not for the future but immediately.

Once upon a time Mr. Ignatius was the voice of the diplomatic establishment. Is that still the case? If so, the diplomatic establishment has fallen on hard times and not merely because it’s being pressed by Donald Trump.

Our most recent experience with Anglo-French offensive capability was in 2011 during the Libyan civil war. Within a couple of days the British and French had reached the end of their ability to fly missions. Has it improved since then? I doubt it.

Who would maintain a “no fly zone” in Ukraine? Clearly, not the British and French. It would be up to us. How would we accomplish it?

Similarly, with the cruise missiles and ATACMS he mentions. We could supply the Ukrainians for a few days, perhaps a month. Then what?

Mr. Ignatius mentions an unfortunate truth:

When they approached the brink in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated mutual security guarantees: Russia pulled its nuclear missiles from Cuba in exchange for America’s pledge not to invade the island (and to secretly remove nuclear missiles from Turkey).

Said another way the crisis was ended through reciprocity. The Soviets agreed to withdraw its nuclear missiles from Cuba and we agreed to withdraw ours from Turkey. That’s an account that differs somewhat from the popular account but it is reciprocity. We don’t put nuclear weapons on your border and you don’t put them on ours. What would the equivalent version of reciprocity be in the context of Ukraine and how does that differ from the appeasement we are being warned about by opponents of ending the war who never seem to propose a resolution to the conflict that we can actually accomplish and that doesn’t involve pushing Russia’s back to the wall, risking global thermonuclear war?

Mr. Ignatius concludes with this advice:

The strategist Fred Iklé wrote a brilliant little book called “Every War Must End” during the agonizing final years of the Vietnam conflict. Two comments seem especially appropriate now. “Inflicting ‘punishment’ on the enemy is … an ineffective strategy for ending a war,” Iklé cautioned. To end conflicts, he said, “nations on both sides tend to see a peace settlement that will bring greater and more lasting security than existed before the fighting broke out.”

If Russia chooses unwisely to fight on, then Europe and the United States should begin providing security guarantees for Ukraine now, not later. This isn’t chess. When a game is heading toward defeat, step away from the board.

In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle ruminates on the termination for cause of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. After explaining her tolerance of a small amount of misconduct among officials and what “occupancy fraud” is, Megan summarizes the problems:

Retailers adopted hands-off policies that prevented employees from stopping thieves, which minimized employee injuries, legal liability and bad publicity from employee mistakes. That trade-off made sense as long as the public didn’t realize just how much it could get away with. When the internet taught us that brazen shoplifting was tolerated, those policies contributed to a shoplifting explosion — and stores were forced to take stronger measures, such as banning bags and locking up merchandise, making everyone worse off.

I worry that the Trump administration has put us, and Cook, in a similar bind.

Protecting the Fed’s independence is much, much, much more important to the health of the banking system than reducing a small amount of occupancy fraud to a slightly smaller amount. The president appears to be using government agencies such as the Federal Housing Finance Agency to pursue personal political goals, like settling scores, or replacing Fed governors he dislikes with someone more pliant. Bill Pulte, that agency’s director, should not have abetted this.

But now that he has, can we afford to say, “Well, occupancy fraud is really not a big deal, it happens all the time, and, realistically, almost no one is ever punished”? Because that’s a good way to ensure that occupancy fraud really does happen all the time, or at least more of the time, forcing banks to do whatever the banking equivalent is of putting the Target deodorant aisle on lockdown. And I don’t love that solution, either.

So unless Cook explains why this really wasn’t occupancy fraud, we’re left with two unpalatable choices: letting a public official get away with something the system can’t afford to publicly condone, or letting Trump get away with something that no one can afford to publicly condone.

The only way out of that conundrum is for Cook to tell us why what looks like occupancy fraud was actually no such thing. So I sure hope she does, and soon.

While I could focus my remarks on the problems that Congress has created in its loosey-goosey definition and oversight of the Federal Reserve, I will merely note that out in passing and instead point out the context in which Fed Gov. Cook’s termination has taken place. Recently, a record-breaking civil judgment against Donald Trump has been voided by an appeals court. The judgment was levied under a novel theory of law in which there were no victims and for which no one had ever been prosecuted before. Some are calling Dr. Cook’s termination “retribution”. An alternative framing might be consistency.

What I think we are seeing is an extraordinary decline in trust. When you can’t trust Federal Reserve governors, Presidents of the United States, cabinet officers, lawyers, judges, banks, physicians, journalists, or ordinary customers of brick-and-mortar retail stores, whom can you trust?

The answer, rather obviously, is no one. We will miss our higher trust society now that it’s gone. It means a higher level of scrutiny, policing, and more restrictive laws will inevitably be necessary.

I have had some difficulty in developing any enthusiasm for this subject. When human-caused tragedies like the shooting in Minneapolis last week take place, it is natural to search for reasons and there has been no lack of explanations. Minneapolis officials immediately blamed lax gun control laws. Other blamed mental health issues, drugs, and the problems posed by excessive societal focus on self-actualization.

I did a little research on school and church shootings. What I found is that they back to the beginnings of the Republic but have been quite rare. Even rarer are shootings in which children are the primary targets. It might be prudent to recognize how difficult it is to draw meaningful conclusions from rare occurrences.

Are they increasing in number or savagery? I can’t distinguish between those and greater public publicity.

The picture that appears to be emerging from the Minneapolis shooting incident is one in which a family was crying out for help. Apparently, the police had been dispatched to that home on multiple occasions to deal with mental health crises.

I agree that the shooter should never have been able to obtain firearms legally—the multiple police calls to that home should have been disqualifying. But even more importantly mental health resources should have been offered to that family. If they had been and had been accepted, multiple other families would not be in mourning today.

Good public policy should be the least restrictive measures that have a chance of working not the most restrictive measures which if implemented with undeviating perfection have a minimal chance being effective. Let’s think about what those might be.

I’m not interested in celebrity engagements (congratulations!) so I’ll ignore the news of the day.

Let’s talk about a security guarantee for Ukraine. That’s something Ukraine needs for a ceasefire let alone for a more permanent peace.

My proposal is that France and the United Kingdom should provide security assurances for Ukraine. The U. S. should not.

There are many advantages to that. Although their forces are somewhat delipidated today those two countries have had armed forces at a high level of readiness in recent memory. No other European country (other than Russia) has. They do not border Russia or, presumably, have territorial ambitions there.

Neither France nor the UK has invaded Russia in force in two hundred years (they did invade Russia a century ago but not in force).

Poland borders Russia and has territorial disagreements with it. Germany invaded Russia in force 85 years ago, killing an entire generation of Russians in the process so Germany is out.

Guarantees from France and the UK would, presumably, not be as threatening to Russia as a U. S. guarantee. And the U. S. already guarantees France’s and the UK’s security. We provide their backstop as it were. Consequently, if anything short of President Putin’s maximalist demands (acknowledgement of Russia’s possession of Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk; “de-Nazification” of Ukraine; demilitarization of Ukraine; Ukraine not admitted to NATO) is to lead to an end of the war in Ukraine, I would think that a ceasefire, a path to EU membership for Ukraine, and French and British security guarantees might be minimally acceptable.

Lately I’ve been reading complaints from British, French, and German pundits that Europeans don’t want to risk their lives to provide Ukraine with a security guarantee. That may be the nub of the problem.

In a 1977 amendment to the Federal Reserve Act the Fed received the so-called “dual mandate” of maximizing employment and maintaining stable prices. Its mandate is not to maintain stable inflation which is how it has construed its mandate. It is to maintain stable prices.

Being able to redefine your goals yourself to what is relatively easy to do rather than something that’s quite hard to do is a pretty cushy gig.

Whatever its goals the Fed failed miserably in achieving them from 2020 to 2024. I don’t see how anyone can defend the Fed in good faith with that recent track record.