The U.S. Economy, as a Job Creating Machine, Has Been Shut Off & Will Soon Be Hemorrhaging Jobs
Kitchen table economics - affordability and job security - will likely determine the outcome of the mid-terms and as such, a miserable job market may save the free world
What a terrifyingly insane start to 2026. Only two weeks into the new year, Venezuela is now being run by the U.S., occupied Minneapolis is being terrorized by lawless, masked, gestapo thugs that have murdered one citizen and shot another, the Fed and its Chair are under serious attack, and NATO forces have sent ships and troops to Greenland to prevent a U.S. invasion.
The madness is nearly beyond comprehension but a handful of front pages from just the past week capture well the horror of where we are these days.
As Dexter Filkins from The New Yorker summarized the state of things talking to Chris Hayes, “It feels like we’re standing outside of a very expensive jewelry store just watching a bunch of children have a party smashing everything.”
Hyperbole long since dead, we truly stand at the precipice of the abyss just a few weeks into an election year with things certain to continue degrading at an accelerating clip between now and November. And as truly fucked up as everything is everywhere, it may still be the economy that largely determines the outcome in November (assuming, of course, that we have one). And on that front, our dumpster fire of an economy just might end up saving the free world.
To be clear - in no way, shape, or form does GDP growth, corporate earnings, the market (no matter how big the bubble gets), the balance of trade, PMI, productivity, or any other esoteric or intangible measure of the economy have any relevant bearing here. Nor does consumer spending which is wildly skewed by sustained spending (for the time being) by the most affluent; the only thing that matters is kitchen table economics for average Americans - affordability (not a hoax) and employment.
And on those fronts, it’s also not the traditional measures of inflation and unemployment that matter but rather how frustrated people are about the cost of living and how worried they are about their job. The Vibecession has never been so real and the natives are beyond restless.
As the WSJ notes in a January 16th article entitled “It’s Trump’s Economy & Voters Are Unhappy With It:
By 15 percentage points, more voters rate the economy as weak rather than strong, a deterioration from July, when negative views predominated by 4 points. About half of voters say the economy has gotten worse in the past year, compared with 35% who see improvement. That finding continues a yearslong disconnect between traditional measures of inflation and economic growth, which are relatively positive, and a negative public outlook.
On the jobs front, things couldn’t be uglier. Excluding the pandemic, the 584,000 jobs gained to date in Trump’s economy were the worst since 2009 in the depths of the financial crisis.
Not counting healthcare and social assistance jobs, private sector job growth was effectively zero this past year. And even those miserable numbers will likely get revised downward in future BLS releases.
As we said earlier this month when we forecasted weaker than consensus job gains in December, “the U.S. economy, as a job creating machine, has literally been shut off.”
As abysmal as ‘official’ job growth was in 2025, it was likely much worse in actuality. As the Fed Chair indicated late last year looking ahead to the revision that is calculated every year based on state-level data, monthly job gains have likely been overstated by at least 60,000 per month since April and most estimates are closer to a downward revision of 900,000 jobs.
Keep in mind, too, that we are literally in the very earliest stages of what AI is going to do to annihilate employment. While labor demand and hiring have dropped off a cliff, companies have yet to start laying off people en masse. But make no mistake, those days are coming and not only does everybody know it, they also know (or soon will) that no one in this kakistocracy is going to do a thing about it.
Tax cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill will do nothing to douse the firestorm enflaming households, nor will the imminent rebate checks, as pathetically inept as they are brazenly transparent. In fact, with the recent, rapid escalation of tariff chaos and ICE terror, this kleptocracy’s sole priority, aside from plundering the nation, appears to be pouring more and more gasoline on the inferno ravaging the nation.
So as horrific as things are these days, we’ve seen nothing compared to what’s coming. There’s a reason behind the growing prevalence of serious discussion around (and a corresponding proliferation in popular media about) revolution, civil war, and the end of basically everything - i.e., capitalism, democracy, and the world as we know it.
Happy MLK Day.