U.S. Economy SHRANK 0.5% in 1st Quarter 2025

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The Bixmarck has songs sung about it, the Allies sank it after only 8 months
Conservative Economist, E. J. Antoni, previously of the Heritage Foundation, Trump's new head of Labor Statistics?
That guy?
Yeah, that picture, on his office wall? It's the Bismarck.
He literally has a picture a Nazi battleship as his office background. A Nazi warship.
(Note: Due diligence on this one. Multiple images. It's real)

Image: https://scontent-sea5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/ ... e=68A181C7

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CBO breaks down who benefits
https://scontent-sea5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/ ... e=68A1628E

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USMCA says no to Trump
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 2OFYRBrrLQ

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Holy cow!
https://bsky.app/profile/robertscotthor ... z5awlgek2y

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It is actually impressive to be this wrong
https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/ ... e=689C5629

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"Read what a US aluminum manufacturer has to say about the reality of Trump's tariffs:
"We are the kind of company that should be thriving under President Trump’s tariffs.
At Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, we melt aluminum and cast it into precision parts for trucks, medical equipment and satellites at our facilities across the northern Midwest. Our inputs are sourced locally. Our labor is old-fashioned American industrial grit. Our customers are national champions of industry. We are the poster child for the type of company the president seeks to support.
In theory, the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act should boost our production.
Reality has turned out to be different.
When Trump won the election, like many manufacturers, we were hopeful. The prior two years had brought shrinking demand for manufactured goods. The morning after the election, I sent a gushing note to employees saying that while I had voted differently, I was excited for what might come. Tariffs could spur reshoring. Tax cuts and deregulation might lift business sentiment. As we waited for clarity on the president’s policies, I wrote in a LinkedIn post that it felt like metal manufacturing in America was on the cusp of renewed vitality.
Six months into his presidency, that optimism has faded. U.S. manufacturing has stalled, input costs from tariffs are rising at the fastest rate in nearly two years, business investment has slowed and demand readings hover at contraction levels.
What became clear when the president finally announced his tariff policy is that it lacks any genuine understanding of the businesses it claims to support.
A few weeks ago, I joined 15 other industrial CEOs for a meeting in Washington, D.C. We hosted one of the top congressional Republicans. She began by saying she meets with the president two or three times a week and that he remains firmly committed to the tariffs he launched on “Liberation Day.” It was meant to be reassuring.
It wasn’t. Her comments landed with a thud. The room, filled with manufacturing executives from across the country — including the CEO of one of the largest Wisconsin manufacturers, many of them longtime conservatives — went silent. After she left, one CEO turned to me and said, “Wow, that was frosty.”
The sentiment wasn’t anger; it was disorientation.
What should have been a home-field crowd felt anything but. These are the people the policy is supposed to help. And yet none of us supported the tariffs. Not even a company like ours, which arguably benefits the most. Even the venerable National Association of Manufacturers opposes the tariffs. It may surprise you to learn that our voices aren’t part of the conversation.
The tariff policies are increasingly looking like the misguided conviction of one person: the president. Even among his political allies, there is no real support. Congress has taken no action to codify this approach into law. Instead, the future of the tariffs is being fought over in courtrooms. Seemingly, there is no serious constituency behind this policy other than President Trump himself.
The deeper irony is this: We’ve always said uncertainty is bad for business. But at this point, the bigger fear is that the uncertainty might end, and we’ll be left with certainty around bad policy.
We saw it again May 31, when Trump doubled the Section 232 aluminum tariffs from 25% to 50%. The stated goal was to revive domestic smelting. But since he first launched aluminum tariffs in 2018, one U.S. smelter has shut down and two more have gone idle. Not a single new smelter has broken ground. Why would they? Building one costs $4 to $6 billion and takes five years. And in an energy-intensive industry like ours, no company is going to make that bet without a long-term national strategy to produce lower-cost electricity.
Meanwhile, aluminum costs have spiked. The Midwest premium has nearly tripled this year, putting pressure on every industry that relies on aluminum, from automakers to aerospace suppliers. Customers are putting programs on hold. Costs are up. Demand is falling. We recently announced layoffs at our plants in Indiana and Iowa, the first time we’ve reduced headcount after a year of steady growth.
This is what a flawed policy looks like on the ground.
One of our customers in Florida builds power equipment for AI data centers. He approached us to reshore a casting program currently being produced in Canada. In theory, the tariffs should have made our offer more attractive. But when we submitted our quote, we couldn’t come close. The very tariffs meant to help us had raised input costs to the point that we were no longer competitive.
This is the complexity the current policy refuses to acknowledge. Manufacturing supply chains are deeply interconnected. You can’t bludgeon one link in the chain and expect the rest to fall into place.
Tariffs can be useful. But they are not a substitute strategy. What we need is a clear national industrial policy, one that identifies sectors vital to our economic and national security, and then supports them with targeted tools: public investment, tax credits, workforce development, R&D — and yes: tariffs, too.
At Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, we’ve expanded our capacity, acquired new capabilities and hired hundreds of workers in the past few years. We’re ready to keep investing. We need policymakers to match our seriousness. That means articulating long-term goals and creating the conditions for domestic industry to compete fairly, strategically and sustainably.
If even a company like ours, the supposed winner from tariffs, is struggling to find a benefit, it’s time to ask: Who, exactly, is this policy helping?"

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Canada replacing US
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpny5JHRIN0

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FORD is not happy
https://reason.com/2025/08/05/ford-paid ... n-america/

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Host correct Trump
https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/ ... e=689973E0

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Just to make things a bit more personal. The way forward for Washington state under the BBB
https://scontent-sea5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/ ... e=6897D754

$5 Trillion frickin dollars CBO says

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-0 ... ervice.pdf

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On the firing of the Bureau of Labor Stats chief
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/ ... dsu4q@jpeg

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James Greenberg:
"For all the talk of strength and resurgence, the economic logic of Trump’s second term is unfolding as accelerated collapse—not from neglect, but from design. This isn’t a return to industrial America or a defense of the forgotten working class. It’s a systematic transfer of risk, wealth, and control—an extraction economy wearing the mask of governance.
The false premises of Trump’s tariff policies were clear from the start. Framed as tools to rebalance trade and protect American jobs, they provoke retaliatory measures, drive up consumer costs, and disrupt long-standing supply chains. Farmers—once promised protection—face collapsing export markets. Manufacturers pay more for parts and pass the costs down. What begins as a trade war becomes a self-inflicted wound.
Trade agreements, too, are no longer about negotiation but disruption. Deals are torn up or hastily redrawn for spectacle, not substance, leaving uncertainty in their place. Long-term trading partners are alienated. Diplomatic capital is spent for domestic headlines. The result is an erosion of stability that no executive order can reverse.
The mass deportation apparatus, already in motion during Trump’s first term, has expanded in both scale and impunity. Migrant labor, long essential to sectors like agriculture, construction, food processing, and elder care, is treated as disposable. Entire regions dependent on immigrant labor find themselves without workers. Crops rot. Projects stall. Small businesses close. This isn’t about restoring order—it’s about creating chaos that can be exploited.
That same logic extends to the privatization of public services. Core functions once considered government’s responsibility—healthcare, education, disaster response—have been handed off to contractors and profit-driven intermediaries. The effect isn’t greater efficiency. It’s greater opacity, reduced oversight, and a transfer of public wealth into private hands. Where there should be accountability, there’s a contract. Where there should be care, there’s a bill.
The consequences play out quietly. A diabetic pays $600 for insulin. A retired teacher loses her job when her district eliminates “controversial” curriculum. A farm in California can’t find workers to harvest its crop after an ICE sweep. These aren’t isolated events—they’re how policy lands.
Tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans further tilt the economy toward extraction. Under the rhetoric of growth, the federal government hemorrhages revenue while offering little relief to those who need it. The benefits are uneven by design: windfalls for billionaires, crumbs for workers. That shortfall—created at the top—is then used to justify cuts to the social safety net below.
Meanwhile, the economic landscape grows more volatile. Market chaos isn’t an accident. It’s a feature. These disruptions aren’t the byproduct of mismanagement. They are part of a deliberate strategy: to destabilize public systems, drive confusion, and create conditions where those closest to power can extract wealth while everyone else bears the risk. Crisis becomes profitable: when you already control the exit.
Insider trading has proliferated under cover of deregulation. Federal officials wink through the chaos, offering quiet tips that make fortunes for those who know when to buy. Bankruptcies surge, especially among small and midsized enterprises. The large absorb the weak. Capital concentrates further into the hands of the few. Monopoly power expands across nearly every sector—from food and freight to finance, energy, and tech.
Regulatory protections have been stripped away under the guise of freeing the market. In practice, that means removing guardrails that keep corporations from polluting, exploiting, or defrauding with impunity. Deregulation advantages those who already have leverage and leaves the rest of us to absorb the risk. Public lands and leases are sold off at bargain prices to extractive industries. These aren’t isolated decisions. They reflect an ethos that treats the country not as a society to be governed, but as an asset to be liquidated.
Public institutions have been gutted alongside public protections. Universities lose funding. Scientific research becomes contingent on political loyalty. Agencies lose experienced staff and institutional memory. Expertise is treated as a liability. The social safety net—already fraying—is slashed: Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, housing support. What remains is a patchwork that leaves the most vulnerable exposed and asks the rest to fend for themselves.
In the name of decentralization, responsibility for everything from pandemic response to climate adaptation is offloaded to states, local governments, and individuals—most without the resources to confront the scale of the crisis. What looks like flexibility is abandonment. And that abandonment hits hardest in the very communities already stretched thin—rural counties, inner cities, tribal nations, aging towns where industry left long ago and investment never returned.
Inflation surges, driven in part by these disruptions. But the response doesn’t address root causes. It weaponizes the pain, pits neighbor against neighbor, and blames the cost of living on immigrants, trans people, or “woke” universities rather than on the billionaires quietly profiting from scarcity.
We’re left with a politics of abandonment layered on top of an economy of dispossession. A dollar once seen as the stable currency of global trade is now being questioned abroad. Confidence in federal data declines, not because of error, but because of manipulation. Jobs reports are revised. Environmental data softens. Budget projections skew. Reality itself is reshaped to fit the message.
This is no accident. The erosion of trust, the institutional hollowing, the engineered instability—these are part of a political economy that rewards volatility for those who know how to ride it. The playbook isn’t new. It’s a textbook case of accumulation by dispossession, where crisis becomes a means of profit and disorder a source of control.
Anthropologist Roy Rappaport warned decades ago of what happens when lower-order systems capture and repurpose their regulators—when corporations begin to define the state rather than be governed by it. It’s the logic behind the old line: what’s good for General Motors is good for the country. We’re living through the consequences. That belief was never true.
From an anthropologist’s view, this is a cultural restructuring. Public knowledge—once understood as a shared resource—is now treated as a threat. The systems we used to rely on—universities, public media, statistical agencies—are recast as partisan, elite, or untrustworthy. Once discredited, they become easier to ignore, then defund, then remake.
Power doesn’t just operate through budgets and laws—it works through stories. By painting public institutions as corrupt, elites as enemies, and private profit as neutral, the regime manufactures consent for its own consolidation.
What we’re seeing is not just bad policy. It’s a deliberate reshaping of the economy to benefit those already at the top. The rest of us are left to compete for what’s been carved away.
And that’s the real Trump economy—not a boom, not a revival, but a funnel.
And if that happens, we won’t just lose arguments over policy—we’ll lose the institutions that make public argument possible. What’s dismantled won’t come back quickly, and what replaces it won’t answer to us."

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Jim Wright:
"Yesterday, after firing the Commissioner of Labor Statistics because the numbers show his drunk uncle grasp of economics is taking the country in the opposite direction from the "golden age" he keeps promising, Trump then announced he had sent letters to the heads of every major pharmaceutical company "directing" them to lower drugs costs.
Apparently Republicans are good with government just issuing orders to business, because that's totally how their vaunted free market capitalism now works.
Then Trump went on Newsmax to explain how it's all going to work: "I think we're gonna be very successful fairly soon. We'll have drug prices coming down by 500, 600, 800, even 1,200 percent."
He's going to bring down drug prices by 500%, 600%, 800%, even 1,200%
Wow.
I'm not good at Republican math, but I gotta say I am looking forward to getting a check from Pfizer every month."

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No doubt July will be the last month that we'll have reliable stats for for the duration of his admin.

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Bureau of Labor Statistics head fired because the numbers are ugly:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3xrrzdr0o

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Proctor & Gamble announce $1B
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/07/trum ... ur-grocery

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Job growth was a lot weaker than expected—and a lot weaker than earlier reported, with big revisions downward. Per The Guardian:
___
The US economy added 73,000 jobs in July, far lower than expected, amid ongoing concerns with Donald Trump’s escalating trade war.
Forecasters surveyed by Bloomberg had predicted the July jobs report would show a drop in added jobs of around 109,000. The unemployment rate rose to 4.2% from 4.1% in June.
The Bureau of Labor also slashed the number of jobs added in recent months. May’s jobs figure was revised down by 125,000, from 144,000 to 19,000, and June was revised down by 133,000, from 147,000 to 14,000 – a combined 258,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.

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Oh, and inflation was at 2.7 percent in May.

[pasayten]

https://apnews.com/article/economy-tari ... fc0a956942

Guess we could expect this from a failed businessman...