- Since the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations.
https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
- It's even crazier when you look at the data since the end of the cold war in 1989. Then the ratio of jobs created is 50:1 for democrats.
- How am I supposed to consolidate my power if the market doesn't crash so I can purchase residential and commercial real estate at bargain prices? Every third restaurant and business on Las Olas was shuttered in 2009, the buildings sold for next to nothing. Today there's one after another—Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, Maserati—parked on the street in front of those same buildings, all the while, Steve B. and I enjoy that coal fired pizza! /s
- I'll see if I can dig it up, but I remember reading that on average, under democratic presidencies going back to FDR, the economy in general performs better than it does under a republican presidency. If I'm remembering right, it's not as simple as mere ideological differences because there has been changes within the parties in those intervening ~75 years but the trend still holds.
- Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy.
- > Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy
Why? What if constantly launching foreign wars, leveraging up the financial system and running up deficits isn’t sound economic policy?
- Wasn't trying to be political, just making an observation that 4 years is probably too short of a time to credit policy changes within a single administration.
- Threatening all of our allies with war and tarrifs is a great way to tank confidence in the US and its businesses. Ask me how I know.
- I suspect the administrations are as much a sign of the shifting tides than a cause.
Conservative approaches tend to be…. Conservative. Which is the opposite of growth.
- WW2 really got the US economy going, so maybe the issue it a lack of scale in the warring?
- Congress has a substantially greater impact on the business climate than the President.
- There are many marginally employable swing voters who vote Republican when they have jobs and the Democrats in charge ask for taxes, then vote Democratic when they get put out of work and need a social safety net.
- CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.
JOLTS is where stress shows first. Openings fall,[1] hiring slows,[2] quits drop,[3] and layoffs rise later.[4] Biden in particular shows the weakness of your provided stats.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSHIL
- Jesus Christ. Not everything has to be political.
- Macro-economic policy is political. I'm sorry.
- Are you serious arguing that managing the economy isn’t political?
- Job loss is not political?
- It apparently does when one major party is full of destructionists who have had much success at politicizing everything, including a lot of what used to just be basic core American values.
- Someone is in a financial position to absorb the fallout, huh?
Good for you.
- the idea that the US economy is apolitical is, itself, ideological. and that ideology is called neoliberalism
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- Which is really neither here nor there.
Anyone implicated by the Epstein files should go to jail. That can remain true while also not being relevant to a discussion of which party's economic policy has historically performed better.
- It means they're both servants of Israel. Israel is very much 'there' and not the United States of America. America needs a Declaration of Independence from Israel.
- Nothing happened in 2020 to affect this chart I'm sure. I would expect nothing less from the publication that falsely claimed Russians hacked into the US energy grid before an election.
- Ok, but there were also 36+ months prior to covid in Trump's first presidency...
- Many publications have made that claim about a Russian hack. Is it inaccurate?
- Post WW2 was a time of labor scarcity the US benefited from - but eventually that went away with global competition. The tech boom years were another labor scarcity time, and that’s also going away.
Both these times were plausible ways of entering the middle class.
What does economic theory say should happen to labor when scarcity ends but capital is strong? Does the economy expand until there’s more labor demand? Or will structural and monopolistic problems cause capital to benefit while suppressing wages - making us all serfs?
- Supply and demand of labor is partially blind to the productive or social value of said labor, it seems
- Any system based on exponential growth will have almost all people become serfs as even if their capital grows it falls behind the growth of older capital
- The big question is “whose jobs”?
If it’s federal government employment that is dropping, or illegal alien jobs dropping, then some will view it positively (I’ve seen this perspective advanced on x.com).
- Mostly Transportation, Technology, and Healthcare [0].
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/layoffs-unemployment-jobs-econo...
- As it turns out, no one wants to invest in infrastructure when all the inputs are going to be tariffed to oblivion. All else equal why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper? Protectionism isn't enough to overcome losing access to world markets.
Eventually the protected industries will be totally disconnected from global markets causing them to lose global competitiveness, to the point they cannot even compete with the black market markups. And then you are maga, er mega, fucked.
- > why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper?
What markets do you have in minds? Can retail investors invest there?
- These perspectives bother me a lot, because I want to invest passively, but if people are out there thinking like that, maybe nothing is priced right...
- > maybe nothing is priced right
What does "priced right" even mean? For whom? When a public company makes billions in profits by selling insanely overpriced hardware, then that's "priced right" for the shareholders.
When a supermarket gives out 25% discount stickers to use, then the price of the good is closer to being priced right for the consumer, as long as you apply the sticker. There is, of course, no reason to assume that the supermarket would operate at a loss or close to cost. These 25% are already priced in and anyone not using the stickers is paying extra.
Nothing has been priced right ever since they've (the collective of anyone willing to sell something) figured out that they can ask for however-much people are willing to pay, which is quite more than what MY FELLOW HUMANS would need to pay.
For everyone else, who aren't willing to pay deliberately inflated prices, there's usually always some form of discount for some product, somewhere to be found.
- Well those are incredibly ignorant and mostly likely strongly biased beliefs. When I worked for NASA and the DoE, I was surrounded by the most competent, hard-working, productive people I've ever known. Silicon Valley engineers are a joke compared to government engineers. Silicon valley people have newer toys and more flexible funding and no oversight, but government employees have vastly more impact and actual measurable utility. Only morons born into enough safety and security that they can be completely ignorant of how the actual world works believe the government is unnecessary and as many government jobs as possible should be deleted. The owner of that twitter platform you linked to killed several hundred thousand people last year, and again this year, and again next year, through sheer narcissistic incompetence. Is that a good source for any information at all?
- The people looking to view this positively will find or imagine a reason to do so, regardless of which jobs it is.
- Ahh, yes, all the undocumented people working in tech...
- Mostly SWEs (especially the type who act pissy on HN).
- Yes, the illegal alien jobs that are being reported to the government by big corps are dropping. You're spot on /s
- You think illegal aliens working - by definition- illegally, show up on reports like this?
sigh If only the department of education was as well funded as the department of war.
- Yet housing costs keep increasing. The working class is being squeezed between employers who are suffering lost revenue and can't pay US wages, and landlords and mega-corp shareholders who won't budge on price. I foresee a slow protracted "collapse" (or really renegotiation) that will bankrupt stuck-in-the-mud billionaires (like Elon) as their means of recourse - law enforcement and the military - come under such powerful social coercion that no amount of money will stop them from siding with working-class-friendly new leadership like Mamdani, as the workers (who, despite what Elon tells himself in his robot fantasies, are still needed en masse), use their REAL voting power - moving their home to jurisdictions that are working-class-friendly.
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- can we also blame the DNC for not holding an election for who would run against trump?
Or the DNC for throwing Bernie under the bus in 2016 (he would have beaten trump)?
Maybe the two party system has grown rotten to the core
- No, DNC picking a bad candidate should be responsible for a D electoral loss, it is not responsible for Trump's electoral win. A lot of people seem to think only the DNC has agency in elections, only they should be responsible for outcomes.
- No. You had a choice. I voted for Harris (who I do not like as a progressive) instead of chaos and destruction, others had the same choice. To not vote out of protest was a vote for this.
Better luck next time. ~2M voters 55+ age out every year. Can we do better? Remains to be seen.
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- You can blame the DNC for all the badness of Harris (the minimum badness you were able to choose in the election). You can't blame the DNC for all the difference between Kamala and Trump. That was entirely up to you.
- I voted for Bernie in the primary, for Hilary; Biden; and Harris in the general elections. At no point did I think to myself "Now is the time to be an idealist about the DNC, right when we're combating fascism"
The DNC is an embarrassment, the two party system is a democratic disaster, but accelerationists? They're evil.
- That's rather reductionist for such a complex set of circumstances and events that led to the eventual results
- > That's rather reductionist for such a complex set of circumstances and events that led to the eventual results
I think this is usually true, but there hasn't really been a global shock of the sort we had in 2020 or 2008 or 2001.
What would you say are the salient circumstances now?
- It's not a shock, it's a natural consequence of the rot continuing its course.
The USA is an empire founded in bloodshed and hatred, and it is only becoming more so as it decays. Until you rewrite what the USA means, this will only continue.
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- Can you stop inserting yourself in every post talking about immigration?
- When you are Asian American, the conversation is deeply personal.
And I feel pointing out how a commonly repeated trope in our industry is backfiring is important.
Alternatively, you can bury your heads into the deeper and deeper hole that is being dug.
- The scariest party is the uniparty.
- Every post you make on this site is essentially the exact same H1B propaganda. It's tiresome to watch someone use this community like this.
- Barely a couple weeks ago resorting to H1B bashing was the norm on HN. Now that the chickens have come home to roost you want to ignore it.
- For me, it seems like a logical consequence of overheating the economy by cutting interest rates to zero during the COVID period.
- You are off by several years on the interest rates, which have an 18-24 month impact. Also we have this idiotic and unlawful tariff war the US administration is currently perpetrating. But I'm certain AI is having a huge impact as well.
- I'm unconvinced of the AI impact outside of the tech sector. But there's certainly a lot of uncertainty generally. Probably more senior people with reputations are in a better position but likely tougher for people with no records.
- Graphic design and copywriting are possibly affected even worse than the tech sector, for one.
- I don't have much involvement with graphic design but I agree that the impact on journalism and adjacent is pretty awful. Not sure how much is AI per se but certainly the economics have been pretty unfavorable. I'm not convinced it's just AI slop but but quantity can displace quality.
- Chicken Little already told us. Armageddon is also coming, don't forget about that.
JOLTS data for January 2026 has been delayed, but don't expect those tea leaves to change your opinion about what the future holds.
- I hear that the Washington Post just fired 1/3 of all of it's reporters.
Otherwise, if so many jobs have disappeared, does that mean that my garbage company no longer needs to employ a staf on every truck to drive it and empty my trash recepticle into the truck?
- > does that mean that my garbage company no longer needs to employ a staf on every truck to drive it and empty my trash recepticle into the truck?
Do… do you not want them to do this?
- No, but the garbage will need fewer pickups if consumption drops. Fewer pickups means fewer trucks means free drivers.
115 points by alephnerd 2 hours ago | 71 comments
