I mean…
Laura Ingraham: “Well, then why are people saying they’re anxious about the economy? Why are they saying that?”
President Trump: “I don’t know that they are saying that. I think polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” pic.twitter.com/QDrM3Q4olu
— RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) November 11, 2025
Not to mention firing BLS workers because he didn’t like the stats, which even Biden didn’t do. Given how dubious most BLS stats relating to inflation are already, that’s some impressive cope.
The fact is that prices keep going up, and if you aren’t in the golden AI Ponzi Scheme, the economy sucks.
Rosenberg Research did some analysis:
If they aren’t in expansion, they’re in contraction. This is also known as a recession, even if they didn’t shade it.
Some further supporting data:
Sure doesn’t look like those tariffs are causing manufacturing to flood back into the US, does it? Data centers and power station building are both AI-related, and as for hospitals, they are part of a protected oligopoly, or, they were until the ACA subsidies were cut. That’s not likely to be good for the health “industry,” which would be wonderful — except that people will die and suffer as a result. “Get rid of part of the shitty way we provide health care now without replacing it with something else.”
Anyway, unless you’re in a monopoly/oligopoly, and have some control, or you’re connected to the AI spigot, the economy is ass. And remember, major tech companies are engaging in mass layoffs, so just working for tech companies won’t protect you; the reverse is true. Unless you’re actively working on AI, you’re first to the gallows, as their workers are where they’re starting with the replacements.
For decades, I warned coders (“engineers”) that their days of being King Shit of Turd Island, pretending their skills were super-special, would eventually come to an end. The moment senior management could figure out how to replace them, they would. Unless you’re truly at the very top of your field, you’re always replaceable — mediocre isn’t as good as average, but it’s usually a LOT cheaper.
Anyway, the end days are nigh. There isn’t much left of the middle class in America, with little left for the rich to steal. The US either changes its politics radically (and Trump has always been a billionaire whose policies are good for billionaires) or the US continues its descent to becoming an unutterable shithole for about 80 percent of its population.
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NR
Another eye-popping stat I saw recently: the top 10% are now responsible for 50% of consumer spending.
We’re in a new Gilded Age.
guilliam
Speaking as a competent but not particularly ‘great’ coder, I strongly disagree AI is anywhere near replacing most software development work (except perhaps in very well structured enterprise type systems, such the big tech companies themselves) although it does help a lot. AI is admittedly very good at creating new code from scratch, giving examples for ‘common use cases’ and saving time working out how to do very specific things or broad plans for designing systems. But the vast majority of coding is the stuff in between, making changes to large existing code bases where the devil is in the detail. All of this stuff is way too specific and abstract for AI to give useful answers and it’s not even clear what the ‘right’ answer is without checking carefully with all the concerned parties, often in different parts of the organisation, etc. Good coding is at least as much about good communication as the technical stuff. Obviously bosses will try to replace coders with AI, but pretty sure that will lead to at least a few cases of rapid catastrophic failure and fired bosses which will presumably cause some rapid backtracking on the matter.
Failed Scholar
@guilliam
It’s not going to be just “AI” that does the replacing, it will be “AI” + outsourcing in combination with Indians, either outsourced directly to India or some subcontractor based there or by literally importing your replacement via H1B/OPT/F1 or whatever other work visas they come up with for the task. It’s almost the exact same playbook as when the United States outsourced its industrial base to China and other countries, except that this time with software and engineering, India is taking the role that China took previously, with the boost enabling it all in this scenario being given by advancements in information technology. And our ‘rulers’ don’t give a crap about quality, exhibit A being the Boeing 737 MAX disaster with 346 deaths in total (so far?).
https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/boeings-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers “Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers”
Boeing personified the Shrek meme, “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make”.
Like & Susbcribe
Polls are dubious and self-serving so he’s somewhat right about them being fake. He’s also not wrong about the economy being great. It’s great for the people he truly represents. Wealth is concentrating exponentially. This is why he has not been JFK’d. Well, there are other reasons he’s still breathing and his head hasn’t been split open like a melon but that’s certainly part of it.
Mark Level
“I think polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”– Well, he’s “running things”, he imagines he is the greatest deal-maker, brander and entrepreneur that has ever walked the face of the earth, so– QED it’s his economy, it’s therefore the “best.” They had a Great Gatsby soiree at Mar-a-Lardo last week, oligarchs and dancing girls, that’s proof. Miriam Adelson and the rest are still writing the checks, he’s going to have his gaudy “ballroom”, & though his “best people” are actually clowns & other con-artists. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and their court is what he’s aiming for, the peasants can dumpster-dive, or sex-traffick their children, he groomed Virginia Guiffre for his friend Jeffrey Epstein, after all.
Yes, it’s a bipartisan enterprise. Brian Berletic is among those who note that the Political Class are simply the front-office representatives for the 0.1%, pretending to serve the Plebs but doing the bidding of the Zionists, White-Collar Criminals, War Criminals, as it was in the beginning . . . Rove’s Law reigns ever-supreme, “We’re an Empire Now and we create our own reality . . . ”
The shit’s really hitting the fan early next year. So yesterday, one week to the day after Cheney died, the oligarch-hated Zohran Mamdami won election over the old guard, and the Dimmies won multiple seats across the country, the Dimmies did what they do do, Bush Senior’s “deep doo-doo”, caved on the government shutdown, unless the House is braver than the Senate (don’t count on it) the social safety net will be further degraded though it’s already shit, even “Obamacare” will get downgraded to something shittier, maybe a $2,000 annual check to households which will cover one person’s visit for Health “Care” for a minor issue . . . those checks worked well during Covid (though they didn’t get the Donald re-elected.)
Uber Shit-Lib Erik Loomis of the LG&M ShitLib and Ukraine Victory website finally got broken, responding to the Dimmie betrayal (#3,182 was the one that broke the camel’s back) with, see here, “Fuck the Democratic Party. I am ashamed of it and you should be too.” https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/11/democrats-caving-like-the-losers-that-they-are
Well, better years and years too late than never I guess. Trump lost a considerable part of his MAGA base with the refusal to release the Epstein Files, which the R’s had been running on for more than a decade, and when they have no housing or healthcare that will accelerate. But there’s nobody in the political class who will come to the rescue.
Let’s just recall some of the DJT greatest hits viz “ideas” of his last term: Suggesting after the New York City Hurricane that we could stop tornadoes and hurricanes with thermonuclear bombs, suggesting that Covid could be treated by cutting open the skin and either pouring in bleach or sunlight . . .Yes, Donald J. Trump the middle initial stands for Jenius!!
Bush Jr. was barking, gibbering mad, Genocide Joe was brain-bleed mad, Donald is Glory and Power Mad. Yet he swings wildly like a weather-vane in a hurricane, We’re going to have boots on the ground to “protect Christians in Nigeria”!! (Not in the West Bank or Gaza or Israel, however.) We’re going to regime-change Venezuela . . . We’re going to beat Ghina, although the Ukraine failure will be blamed on Trump, he picked up Sleepy Joe’s War seamlessly when he could’ve had a victory, which is what his base voted for.
It’s a madhouse. They are creating a pre-revolutionary environment. Not to worry, however, the US populace in “the greatest country that has ever existed in the history of the world” they all tell us, will not lift a finger, they will die quietly and behave I guess is the calculation? It could be so, people kept voting for these looting scum in the last election as if it mattered, so probably it is hopeless.
The Data Centers chart is brilliant, thank you to Ian for sharing. We can see what the priorities are. Oh, and let’s not forget that last week Trump met in the Oval Office with and did an apologia for the al-Qaeda Ahmed al-Sharaa, now a great ally and freedom-fighter (a la the Contras, ISIS which Jake Sullivan exulted about being a US ally in an email that Assange and Wikileaks revealed), is our friend!! “He had a tough background and so did a lot of us” Trump said (paraphrasing.) Yes, 9/11 was a little tough, slaughtering Alawites, Christians, etc. is “a little tough” but we’ve done worse so it’s all okay. Donald felt bad when he and Daddy were sued for keeping the n——s out of their housing, it was “so unfair” just like the “stolen election” in 2020.
During the early Iraq War we were asked to “Pray for President Bush, he has it so bad.” David Cross did a great piece where a dying soldier in one of the War theaters was using his last moments to pray for poor President Bush. I couldn’t find it on YTube, but here’s something from around the same time period: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yIXXnz9xy0
Coincidentally, it mentions building a “missile defense shield,” some insane grifts never go away, Trump is proposing a multi-trillion $$$ MDS called “the Golden Dome”, we gotta compete with the Zionist entity for “Greatness” of course, they have an Iron Dome (their love of Blood and Iron, like some other country) we will have a Golden One like the toilets in his new ballroom. That’s greatness, NOT feeding, housing, or educating your citizens, not rebuilding the shitty infrastructure that’s falling apart under your feet, etc.
Well, the MSM is mostly on board whichever War Pig Looters of the duopoly rule, so I guess the road ahead goes nowhere but down into Hell.
KT Chong
Last week, China announced a two-prong move to purge foreign (read: U.S.) chips from its ecosystem:
• Public sector: All state-funded data centers are now banned from using foreign chips. New projects must use Chinese-made processors only. (This prong has been widely reported in the Western media.)
• Private sector: Provinces will cut electricity subsidies for companies still using foreign chips. Data centers running on domestic chips continue to receive steep power discounts from the government; those using NVIDIA or AMD pay full electricity prices. (This prong has NOT been widely reported in the West.)
So Beijing is purging U.S. chips by law and by cost. The ban locks them out of state projects, and the energy policy prices them out of the private market. China no longer wants U.S. chips in its market, whether the chips are low-end, mid-range or high-end. China is looking for a complete decoupling.
KT Chong
The U.S. keeps claiming China is only the “second” largest chip market in the world, implying that the U.S. is number one. That is either wrong or deliberately misleading. Data actually shows that, if you consider all the chips China consumes, China is ahead. Most analyses only count the chips China “directly” uses — in servers, data centers, PCs, etc. — and ignore all the chips that go into the products China manufactures for the world: EVs, drones, appliances, phones, solar panels, gadgets, and so on. Once you include those, it becomes obvious that China consumes far more chips than the U.S., because its manufacturing output dwarfs America’s.
Data: https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SIA-2024-Factbook.pdf
China is number one at 29% of the world’s consumption. The U.S. is second at 26%.
And now, China has cut off the world’s biggest market for U.S. chipmakers.
Dan Lynch
Very typical of a narcissist to deny their problems and to shoot the messenger. Meanwhile, Trump is redecorating the White House with tacky gold trim while Americans wait in long lines at food banks.
Some of MAGA will stand by Trump no matter what, but enough will see the light to ensure MAGA will keep losing at the ballot bot until Trump is gone. Unfortunately, R’s will be simply replaced by the other wing of the conservative corporate warmonger party and not much will change for the nation, though the R party may eventually turn away from Trump and toward a new fake populist like MTG or Tucker.
Feral Finster
The United States is well on its way to being Brasil, albeit a Brasil with less attractive females, worse weather, and a more hyperbelligerent foreign policy. AKA an empire. Such a state of affairs suits the oligarchs just dandy. They wouldn’t have it any other way.
Trump is simply the empire dropping any remaining pretense of being anything other than an empire.
The reason that the empire was so opposed to Trump in the past was that he said the quiet parts out loud. Now that there no longer are any quiet parts, now that the empire openly relied upon naked force, Trump has proven quite useful.
spud
we are well past the point where tariffs on their own will work. and that point was reached in 1933.
it was obvious that tariffs alone could no longer work in a world economy ravaged by free trade.
it was the new deal, coupled with tariffs that worked.
this is why all of a sudden, trump wants to give us helicopter money.
but to little, to late.
not only would you need a new new deal, tariffs, reversing bill clintons and the supreme courts hideous, disastrous policies, massive capital gains taxes and capital controls.
another words, shock therapy.
capital controls were pretty much written out of the picture under bill clinton,
https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2019/06/GallagherCapContr24PB55.pdf
“Focus needs to turn to the numerous
barriers to capital controls erected during the decades of
skepticism toward them. One such barrier is trade policy.
Many trade and investment agreements, especially those of
the United States, do not permit the use of capital controls
without significant penalty.”
as far as statistics are concerned. in the late 1990’s i spoke with John Williams of shadowstats, that in 1994, bill clinton rigged the unemployment stats, that in turn rigged the poverty stats.
i explained if they are no longer counted, this will give a very rosy outlook on unemployment and poverty.
Williams did not know this at the time.
after achieving low unemployment and poverty, bill clinton and the pseudo human robert rubin, were in the white house celebrating the rosy picture on poverty.
https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
“Alternate Unemployment Charts
The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.”
bruce wilder
Delusion and denial appear to me to be shared in large portions by very nearly the entire political class.
“Everyone seems deluded but me and thee and I am having doubts about thee” may not seem like anything but a conceit, but I feel like that is near where I am, especially when the winds of the perpetual red v blue typhoon are blowing especially hard.
I would think Trump would be politically vulnerable, but the unwillingness of any Democrat to abandon partisan talking points to sincerely embrace a principle as a principle continues to astonish me.
I think the U.S. has driven off an economic cliff and we are waiting for gravity to kick in, but without any hope that the political system will be able to generate reform. One Party put Trump into office as the Crisis escalated over a 20-year period and the Other Party refused to offer any alternative to corruption and incompetence.
When MTG starts making sense, things are pretty far gone, but I don’t know what makes her a “false populist” other than being practically the ONLY populist in either Congressional caucus.
different clue
Will the good people at Naked Capitalism start speaking of the Collective Trump the way they started speaking of the Collective Biden?
If not, why not?
ibaien
@feral
one of the big differences between america and brazil is that we don’t yet have any informal economy and governance – there aren’t american favelas where you can eke out a meagre existence without much (or any) state interference. america still treats all our serfs like temporarily embarrassed millionaires, which makes it even harder to be poor. once we start seeing no-go neighborhoods where the organs of the state don’t even bother showing up, we’ll know we’re there.
Feral Finster
@ibaien: you bring up an interesting point, but there’s a huge informal economy in the US, featuring all manner of interesting monkeyshines.
Moreover, the fall of my the Soviet Union provides an example of how quickly informal economies can spring up.