Not to pile on, but there is a huge public misunderstanding when it comes to economic data.

The data is lagging, usually by a full year. The policies that lead to that data are from the year before data collection, at a minimum, more likely two+ years.

Economic policies generally take time to ripple through the economy. Generally. There are exceptions. Interest rates tend to affect things pretty quickly relative to other changes.

Well, seeing as this is a record of jobs created last year ... yeah.

This data is from the Biden administration, predating the current Trump policies.

Agreed, the Trump administration is _heavily_ leaning on this as evidence to support their argument that "Biden's economy" was a "disaster":

> Today, the BLS released the largest downward revision on record proving that President Trump was right: Biden’s economy was a disaster and the BLS is broken.

> The benchmark revisions make clear the economy President Trump inherited was even weaker than we thought.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/09/bls-revisions-sh...

Please remember that the 'Third World' doesn't refer to countries in squalor. It referred to the bloc of nations that were not aligned with either the Western bloc (First World) led by the US or the Eastern/Communist bloc (Second World) led by the USSR. Quoting directly from Wikipedia:

> Strictly speaking, "Third World" was a political, rather than economic, grouping.

> Since most Third World countries were economically poor and non-industrialized, it became a stereotype to refer to developing countries as "third-world countries".

> Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the term Third World has decreased in use. It is being replaced with terms such as developing countries, least developed countries or the Global South.

it's almost like there actually isn't any innovation

There must be a way to opt-out by constructing a sane, parallel world where things just work.

Is this AI generated? Besides the em-dashes, I don't think anyone cites "Investopedia" as a source (not the specific entity, but in that format), or makes citations in (source, year) format.

> but there is a whole range of forces driving a sharp decline in jobs

Technically, there is no decline in jobs. There were more jobs as of March 2025 than a year before. Less than reported earlier, but the overall number of jobs is still growing.

I don't think tariffs affected the numbers for the entire year that drastically since Trump had only been in office for 2 months out of the entire years period that this was looking at.

> * Restrictive Immigration Policies – Tightened immigration and visa processes are straining labor supply, particularly in sectors that rely on immigrant workers (Axios, 2025 labor coverage).

I like how this is always framed as strained supply instead of upward pressure on wages, as if increasing wages is simply impossible and only supply matters. Then people look at graphs like this[1] and wonder: "What the heck is going on?"

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/