Trump Economy: One Doll, Multiple Dolls
December 22, 2025
Sasquatch doll, Portland, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The government shutdown made the November jobs report especially hard to read. There was not just the problem of missing a month of jobs data for the first time in many decades, but also the difficulty in trying to determine how much impact the shutdown had on the data.
In principle, the shutdown should have had little direct impact on either the household or the establishment survey. In the household survey, people who had been furloughed should have been back at work during the reference period and therefore answered that they were employed. With the establishment survey, government employees were always on the payroll, so should have been listed as employed.
But there are indirect ways in which the shutdown could have affected the data. For example, the number of workers who report that they were involuntarily working part-time jumped by almost 900,000. This number is always erratic, but that is still an extraordinarily large increase. It is possible that the rise is at least in part connected to government workers returning after the shutdown who may still not be working full-time.
One on the ironies of the surge in people working part-time because of the economy is that Republicans endlessly screamed about the increase in part-time employment under Biden. However, that increase was voluntary.
People have all sorts of good reasons, such as family obligations, school, or hobbies, for preferring to work less than 35 hours a week (the definition of a part-time job). Now, when we see a big increase in people working part-time because they can’t get full-time work, these politicians are silent.
If One Job is Good, Two Jobs Must Be Better
The other way in which there was an unusual change that could be at least partly explained by the shutdown was a surge in the percentage of workers who report that they were working multiple jobs. This measure, which is not seasonally adjusted, hit 5.8 percent in November, up from 5.4 percent last November. This is the highest share reporting they are working multiple jobs in this century.
If the rise in multiple jobholders is not an anomaly, it suggests that workers are having increasing difficulty getting by on their wages. That would not be surprising given a reported slowing in wage growth, coupled with the recent uptick in inflation. The year-over-year rate of growth in the average hourly wage fell to 3.5 percent, down from 4.0 percent in 2023 and 2024. (The annualized rate by my preferred measure — the average wage for the last three months compared to the prior three months — was 3.7 percent.) With inflation at 3.0 percent as of September, this means real wages are just barely rising.
Homegrown Confusion on Native-Born Workers
One of the main rationales given for Trump’s mass deportation campaign is to open up jobs for native-born workers. The world doesn’t work that way, but that’s a longer discussion. The immediate issue is that the Republicans are celebrating their confusion about how the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates native-born workers.
The basic story is that BLS has a set of population controls that it puts in place at the state of the year. New ones for 2026 will be included with the January jobs report. These controls determine population levels for the household survey. They are independent of whatever actually happens in the world over the course of the year.
These controls put the civilian non-institutional population at 274,633,000 for November. Suppose that half of us had died from another pandemic. Because of the BLS population controls, the civilian non-institutional population would still be at 274,633,000 for November. Suppose Kristi Noem’s ICE crew gets really ambitious and deports half the population, both citizens and non-citizens. Because of the population controls, the civilian non-institutional population will still be at 274,633,000 for November.
The point is that the civilian non-institutional population is fixed by construction. BLS gets an estimate of the foreign-born population from the monthly household survey. The number of people reporting they are foreign-born has fallen sharply in 2025. This is partly because some have been deported or left voluntarily. It is also partly because many foreign-born choose not to answer the survey. And some foreign-born undoubtedly just say they are native-born on the survey.
In any case, we know that the survey is finding many fewer people saying they are foreign-born. But the number of native-born is not calculated from the survey. BLS just subtracts the number of foreign-born estimated in the survey from its population controls. This means that every time the number of foreign-born workers in the survey declines, the number of native-born workers mechanically rises. If the number of foreign-born workers reported in the survey fell by 2 million, there would be a reported increase in the number of native-born people working of 2 million even if not a single additional native-born worker had a job.
This is what the Republicans are celebrating when they tout a huge boom in jobs for native-born workers. If anyone is really interested in how native-born workers are doing, the data are right there in front of their face. The unemployment rate for native-born workers was 4.3 percent in November. That’s up from 3.9 percent in November of 2024.
Recession Level Unemployment for Black Workers
One of the most shocking trends in the labor market in 2025 has been the jump in unemployment among Black workers. It hit 8.3 percent in November, a rate that white workers would only see in a severe recession. This is especially striking since the unemployment rate for white workers has barely risen, hitting 3.9 percent in November, up from 3.8 percent last November.
It would take some work to determine the causes of this sharp jump in unemployment, but the Trump administration ending pretty much all efforts to protect Black workers against discrimination likely played a role. In any case, the economic situation for Blacks has deteriorated with remarkable speed in the second Trump administration.
Low Quits and Fake Jobs
There are two other items worth noting in the November jobs report. The percentage of unemployment due to people who quit a job before they had a new own lined up dropped to 11.0 percent. By comparison, it averaged 13.2 percent in the strong 2018-19 labor market. This suggests that workers are pessimistic about their labor market prospects.
There is one last point. Picking up on a comment by Fed Chair Jerome Powell at his press conference following the Fed meeting; it is likely that we are overstating job growth. In September, BLS announced its preliminary annual benchmark revision, which showed 911,000 fewer jobs as of March 2025 than had originally been reported.
These revisions are based on unemployment insurance filings, which are a near census of payroll employment nationwide. The final revision, which will be put in place with the January report, will likely be somewhat smaller, but it nonetheless is likely to still mean the economy was creating substantially fewer jobs than the monthly data had shown.
The same factors that led the monthly reports to overstate job growth in 2024 and up to March of 2025 are likely still in place. This means that we are probably still overstating job growth, with the first estimate to come next summer.
Powell put the number at 60,000 a month. That figure is likely in the ballpark. That would mean that we have seen close to zero job growth in 2025 and have likely been losing jobs since April.
More Data to Come, but the Economy Does Not Look Strong
We still have lots of catch up to do with data reports, notably we will see the November CPI on Thursday, and we should get the October and November data on personal income and spending before the end of the month. But what we have to date is not pretty.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment