Trumpian Nonsense on Employing Native-Born Workers
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
There are so many absurdities coming out of the Trump administration on the economy that it’s hard to keep up. But one recurring theme with a solid basis in a misunderstanding of statistics is the claim that employment of native-born workers is exploding under Trump, after plummeting under Biden. We even got an official tweet of this ignorance from the Labor Department over Thanksgiving weekend.
The problem, as I and others have explained, is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has no direct count of native-born workers. It derives a number for native-born workers from its population controls, which are set in stone at the start of the year from Census data, and the number of foreign-born people, which it gets from the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS).
The number of native-born people is calculated by subtracting the number of foreign-born people from the CPS. The number of employed native-born workers is then calculated from the percentage of native-born people who report working. This methodology means that if fewer people answer the survey saying they are foreign-born, it will automatically increase the number of people that are reported as native-born, thereby raising the number of native-born workers.
There are three obvious reasons why the CPS would show fewer foreign-born workers. The first is that some number of immigrants have actually left the country, either through deportation or “self-deportation.” There is little doubt that our foreign-born population is lower today than it was a year ago.
The second reason is that immigrants might refuse to answer the survey. In the current environment, an immigrant, even someone here legally, may be reluctant to answer the door when someone says they are from the government doing a survey.
The third reason is that immigrants may not answer the survey accurately. In the current climate, many foreign-born residents who choose to answer the survey may simply say that they were born in the United States. This is especially likely since the current administration insists it does not have to respect commitments of confidentiality.
Anyhow, we know that the number of people reporting that they are foreign-born has plummeted. As of September, it was down almost 400,000 from the prior year. By contrast, the number of native-born people over age 16 had risen by more than 5.5 million. In the prior year the native-born population over age 16 had shrunk by more than 400,000.
That implies more people died than turned 16 in the year from September 2023 to September 2024. That may not be accurate, but that is the nature of the population projections that underly the jobs numbers in the CPS. The population controls are set at the start of the year and then the number of native-born reported is calculated by subtracting the number of foreign-born people reported by survey.
The Trumpers apparently want us to believe that Trump somehow got an additional 5.5 million native-born people to turn 16 in the last year. That is how they get the explosion in employment for the native-born they are boasting about.
The simple point that any serious person should understand is that the numbers on native-born workers reported in the CPS are essentially meaningless, given its construction. However, the CPS does give useful information about the labor market for native-born workers. The data on employment to population ratios (EPOP) and unemployment rates are reasonably accurate.
Here the picture was pretty good under Biden, with little change during Trump’s current term.
The EPOP quickly bounced back from its pandemic troughs, and by the summer of 2023 it was just below 60 percent, less than 1 percentage point below its pre-pandemic peak. This number is depressed somewhat in the post-pandemic period by the large-scale retirement of the baby boom cohorts, most of whom are now over age 65.
This can be controlled by just looking at prime age workers (ages 25 t0 54) or alternatively by focusing on the unemployment rate for native-born workers. The latter shows a better performance under Biden than Trump. The low point for the unemployment rate under Biden was 3.1 percent in April of 2023, compared to a first-term low for Trump of 3.4 percent for three months in 2019. The unemployment rate for native-born workers was 4.3 percent for September, the most recent month available.
That is still a relatively low unemployment rate by historical standards, but it is not anything to brag about compared to the Biden years or even Trump’s first term. As with so many other great things about the economy Trump touts, the employment boom for native-born workers exists only in Donald Trump’s head.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
How Trump Fueled an Affordability Crisis
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The clients begin arriving at the Lansing Community Food Pantry, about 25 miles southeast of Downtown Chicago, before the doors even open on Tuesday mornings.
Some line up in their cars. Others arrive on bicycles. These days, clients are even known to bring suitcases to carry away the fruits, vegetables, canned goods, and other items that Jim Lange and other volunteers ready for them.
While all of these signs of need and struggle sadden Lange, he’s bothered most of all by the sight of seniors who trudge to the pantry pushing empty carts, their shoestring budgets stretched to the breaking point by America’s growing affordability crisis.
Donald Trump won the election in 2024 with a promise to bring down costs of groceries and other items on “day one” of his administration.
He failed. Instead, he’s making life harder, observed Lange, a longtime member of the United Steelworkers (USW).
Americans spend more on groceries and other essentials today than they did a year ago. The cost of beef alone soared 15 percent, while the prices of bananas and coffee jumped about 7 percent and 19 percent, respectively.
Yet it’s more than food. Electricity bills spiked 5 percent, and families also have to dig more deeply into their pockets to pay for cars, homes, household goods, house insurance, mortgages, baby supplies, and many other items.
In all, the average U.S. household shelled out an additional $700 monthly between February and September due to inflation under Trump.
Rather than honor his pledge to ease the pain, Trump denies it even exists, calling the cost-of-living crisis a “con job” that he doesn’t want to discuss. Lange knows the growing demand at the food pantry tells the true story.
“It’s a real thing,” declared Lange, calling the lines there the longest he’s seen in the decade or so he’s served as a volunteer. “When you see older people walking six or eight blocks to get food, you know it’s a real thing.”
“People don’t want to ask for food,” he added. “It’s a tough decision to have to come here. But when the time comes, they’re going to come here.”
As a union member, Lange learned to look out for others and leave no one behind. That’s why he joined the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) and began volunteering at the food pantry after he retired 12 years ago, after a 28-year career in Republic and LTV steel mills.
It angers him to see Trump not only abandoning his own obligation to help working families but also using the power of his office to inflict additional harm.
“Everything he’s done has aggravated it,” Lange said of food insecurity, referring to cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as well as large-scale layoffs of federal workers and the slashing of child care programsthat helped to keep families in the workforce.
In addition, Trump’s ham-handed economic policies—such as indiscriminately applied on-again, off-again tariffs—continue to kill jobs and investment while fueling higher prices. At the same time, his mass deportation campaign is shrinking the economy, imperiling businesses, and gutting still more jobs.
It’s only going to get worse, Lange said, noting that the Republicans’ unprecedented cuts to Medicaid and refusal to address skyrocketing Affordable Care Act premiums will devastate millions more families.
“They’re going to skip health care as long as they can. Eventually, it will get them,” he said, describing Lansing as a largely middle-class town.
If people here are already struggling, he pointed out, that means the economy in much of the country is also slipping.
“It’s got to be close to catastrophic elsewhere,” he said.
Yet Trump brags about having “solved” inflation. He blithely dismisses growing public concern about affordability as “fake.” He claims Thanksgiving dinners from Walmart cost less in 2025, when that patently isn’t the case.
His incompetence and callousness make the efforts of good-hearted Americans like Lange and his fellow union activist, Gerry Parzino, ever more important.
Parzino, president of the Twin Cities SOAR chapter in Minnesota, asked members to bring donations of canned goods and other staples to an upcoming meeting. He plans to transport the food to one of a number of local food banks, all of which he described as “tapped out” and needing help.
Parzino benefited from strong union contracts during his career in the paper industry. His children are employed and doing well. He doesn’t have to support his grandkids.
But he knows that many families aren’t as fortunate. They’re resource-strained and hanging by a thread, just one financial hit away—like an unusually severe winter that pushes up heating costs for Minnesotans—from financial disaster.
In addition to all of the other rising costs, Americans find it tougher and tougher to cover mounting utility bills, according to research by The Century Foundation and Protect Borrowers. Some families already went into debt trying to keep the lights on, the study found.
“These are the things on seniors’ minds,” Parzino said.
But while everyday Americans struggle, Trump prefers to party with the rich.
He hosted a tacky Roaring ’20s party at his Florida golf club during the government shutdown in October, a perfect metaphor, in Parzino’s view, for a billionaire who exploited working people all his life and has no intention to start helping them now.
“That’s completely obscene,” Parzino declared. “It’s robber baron. It’s Gilded Age. It’s such a slap in the face.”
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
The Biggest Heist in America Is Being Sold as a Gift to Children
Image by Avinash Kumar.
America loves a good illusion. It loves the performance of generosity from people who built their fortunes on systems that leave everyone else scrambling. That’s why the country is celebrating Michael and Susan Dell dropping $6.25 billion into “Trump Accounts.” Twenty-five million kids will get $250 each in a special savings account that they can’t touch for almost two decades. It sounds like generosity. It plays like hope. It sells like opportunity. But it isn’t any of that. It’s a corporate heist dressed up as philanthropy, and America is too exhausted or too desperate to notice.
The Dell announcement isn’t about helping children. It’s about normalizing a future where the only people who can fix failing systems are the same corporations and billionaires who helped break them. The government could’ve built real support for families. It could’ve raised wages, stabilized housing, funded public education, or given parents actual resources instead of symbolic ones. Instead it built a program where kids get locked into market accounts, and then it waited for a billionaire to swoop in and finish the job. That isn’t policy. It isn’t progress. It’s the privatization of the public good.
A one-time $250 deposit isn’t lifting anyone out of anything. At best it turns children into unwilling investors in a financial system that’s already eaten their parents alive. At worst it shifts the entire idea of welfare into something that only functions if wealthy people feel like playing savior for a news cycle. This isn’t social support. It’s a handshake between private wealth and a government that no longer knows how to govern unless the market approves.
The trick here is simple and old. You starve the public systems until they’re so weak that anything looks like relief. Then you let a billionaire deliver a drop of water and call it a miracle. Americans have been trained to applaud the spectacle. They forget to ask why one of the richest men in the country gets to decide how twenty-five million children experience their first introduction to money. They forget to ask why the richest people get public praise for giving back pennies compared to what they extract. They forget to ask why children need investment accounts instead of stable housing, food, medical care, and schools that aren’t falling apart.
The applause is the point. When billionaires are cast as heroes, no one has to admit that the system has collapsed so thoroughly that private charity is now doing the work of the state. This is how the social contract dies without anyone calling it what it is. People look at the $250 and say at least it’s something. They say maybe it’ll grow. They say maybe it’ll help someday. They don’t say what’s obvious. They don’t say the quiet part. They don’t say that America now expects the financial markets to raise children because the country has decided it won’t.
There’s also the quiet financialization happening underneath. These accounts invest in index funds. That means millions of new dollars flowing into the same corporate structures that already dominate the economy. Kids become passive capital generators before they can read. Their “gift” enriches the very companies that helped create the inequality this program is pretending to solve. It’s a perfect loop. The wealthy get to look generous while reinforcing the machine that made them wealthy. The public gets a story about hope. The corporations get the money.
The cruelty of it is that it works. It works because people are tired. Everything’s expensive. Everything feels unstable. Families will take whatever crumbs show up because the alternative is nothing. They’re told this is opportunity. They’re told this is investment. They’re told this is how you get ahead. They don’t ask why a country with the wealth of America is giving children numbers in an account instead of conditions they can survive.
The real collapse is right here. It looks like a billionaire being framed as a public institution. It looks like a government outsourcing its responsibilities to private wealth and calling it innovation. It looks like children being turned into financial products. It looks like the normalization of scarcity. It looks like the public begging for symbolic solutions because no one can imagine real ones anymore.
This isn’t generosity. It isn’t progress. It isn’t a path out of inequality. It’s the same old ownership playing out in a new costume. A billionaire writes a check, the headlines glow, the markets smile, and everyone pretends it’s a step forward. But look at the scale of the theft underneath. Look at the stories we tell ourselves to avoid saying the truth out loud. A country that expects billionaires to fund children has already chosen its future. It’s a future where the public good is a privilege and every solution is a product. It’s a future designed to keep people grateful for scraps.
The Dells aren’t giving children a head start. They’re giving everyone a warning. This is what it looks like when a nation forgets how to take care of its own people and starts handing the responsibility to the highest bidder.
Trump Crazy #27542: Replacing the Income Tax with Tariffs
December 2, 2025
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Everyone in my public school third-grade class learned arithmetic. Apparently, this puts us way ahead of Donald Trump and much of the punditry. They somehow take seriously the idea that we can replace $2.6 trillion in annual income tax revenue with $280 billion in Donald Trump tariff revenue. My third-grade class all know better.
While this is absurd on its face, Donald Trump keeps repeating the idea. He draws approving nods from Republican politicians and the conservative punditry.
The arithmetic here is straightforward. We currently are running annual budget deficits of around $1.7 trillion, a bit less than 6.0 percent of GDP. The deficit, measured as a share of GDP, is projected to rise gradually over the next decade as the growing debt leads to a larger interest burden.
This is the context in which Donald Trump is saying that he wants to replace the income tax with his tariffs. This is the story on the relative size of the two taxes.
We are currently raising around $2,600 billion a year from the individual income tax. If we take tariff collections over the last three months for which there is data (Sept-Oct) and annualize the amount, it comes to around $280 billion. (This is the increment to tariff revenue that resulted from Trump’s tariff hikes. The full amount of tariff revenue would be around $360 billion a year.)
If the government relied on $280 billion in new tariff revenue to replace an income tax that pulled in $2,600 billion, almost ten times as much, it would raise the annual deficit by roughly $2,300 billion. That would push the size of the deficit to around $4 trillion, roughly 13 percent of GDP.
The government ran deficits of this size during World War II, but at no other time. The current deficit of 6 percent of GDP is already extraordinarily large. I’m about as far from being a deficit hawk as anyone around, but I would be very worried about the consequences of running deficits of 13 percent of GDP. It would almost certainly be inflationary, and it would likely lead to the sort of run on the dollar and generalized financial panic that the deficit hawks always warn about. I am certain that none of Trump’s economic advisers would advocate this sort of switch.
It is also worth noting that, contrary to what Trump seems to think, the story gets worse over time, not better. If we actually brought back manufacturing jobs to the U.S. and imports fell, there would be less tariff revenue over time. That would make the Trump budget deficits even larger.
This raises the question of whether Trump has any clue what he is talking about? Does he really not know that the income tax raises almost ten times the amount of revenue that he is getting from his import taxes (tariffs)?
If Trump is really that clueless about the basics of the federal budget, then it should be 25th Amendment time. The president doesn’t have to be a budget wonk, but he should have some idea of where federal revenue comes from. Suggesting we can replace a tax that raises $2.6 trillion with a tax that raises $280 billion indicates Trump has no clue.
Perhaps Trump is just lying, but this is the sort of question that media need to be asking. Is Trump just spewing crazy lies or is he crazy? The American people have a right to know.
One other point, if Trump actually does put up legislation to replace the income tax with his tariffs, the Democrats should all abstain. Rather than play a role in Trump’s craziness, let the Republicans all go on record saying that Trump is nuts or go ahead and wreck the economy. There is no reason for Democrats to get involved in this idiocy.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment