Hiding Bad News
But the hand basket is still going to hell
Bryan Zepp Jamieson
August 14th, 2025
Karoline Leavitt, the stooge tasked with saying things that even El Presidente would be embarrassed to utter, said the other day that monthly job reports may be suspended “until they get the data and methodology in order.”
It’s a bit like suspending climatology reports from NOAA while they investigate to find out if thermometers can really measure temperature. It comes just a couple of weeks after the Trump clown show fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for issuing a weak jobs report. They want to replace him with a libertarian hack from the Heritage Foundation willing to praise the Glorious Capitalistic Five Year Plan of Noble Leader. Sure. Minus ten percent unemployment! Take that, Obama!
The administration may not notice this little economic tidbit that came out yesterday because it isn’t as easy to understand as the unemployment rate or the inflation index: sales of cardboard shipping boxes dropped last quarter to the lowest level seen since 2001. That, in turn, is a strong indicator of anticipated shipping activity, which in turn is a central indicator of overall economic activity. A drop that big suggests people in charge of shipping are anticipating a sharp downturn.
I suspect that this administration is going to be shutting down every economic metric they can lay their hands on in order to tell reassuring lies about the state of the economy. I expect us to be in a recession by the end of the year (actually sooner, but you need three consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth before you are officially in a recession) and quite possibly in a depression by mid 2026.
Trump and his stooges honestly believe that people who go grocery shopping every week won’t notice inflation, or that more of their friends and neighbors might be out of work. Even sillier is the belief that businesses and factories will play along with fake “sunshine and roses” economic reports even though it’s costing them billions.
In addition to the utterly foolhardy tariffs regime, the Trump administration is working to remove all the economic governors put in place during and after the FDR “New Deal” to stop the economic boom-and-bust cycle. At a time when a move is under way to completely revamp what is taught in America as ‘history,’ the country’s real economic history, already downplayed massively, will probably vanish altogether.
A lot of people these days think of the Great Depression as something of an outlier, something huge and horrible that has been solved by enlightened business practices.
In the days before economic reform produced “the mixed economy” (nowadays called “Democratic Socialism”) depressions occurred every 10-15 years. Each one threw thousands of banks and other businesses out of existence, impoverishing and ruining the lives of millions. While we don’t have the numbers, it’s safe to assume that in any given depression, unemployment reached anywhere from 10 to 25% of the work force. Thousands of mortgages were foreclosed, many farms and small businesses failed. Inflation wasn’t a factor then because the value of the dollar was tied to gold, but it meant recovery was much more gradual and painful. The static value of the dollar CAUSED some depressions!
The New Deal reforms worked. The US went into the era of greatest economic growth in its history between 1934 and 1980, and by the 60s economists were beginning to hope the boom-and-bust cycle, already far milder than it ever had been, might be gone forever. (The math behind that cycle is strikingly similar to the math that explains the caterpillar-like motion of traffic jams.)
Unfortunately, the wealthy became convinced of their own wisdom and infallibility because, after all, they’re rich, aren’t they? In their eyes, it stood to reason that if they got richer, that would prove the system worked, and so let’s lift all those boats, baby! The economic poison of “supply-side economics” (aka “trickle down”) was born. It indisputably lifted the yachts.
The economy still grew, but most of that growth went to the top 1%. This created an imbalance of wealth and power, similar to such imbalances in 1780s France or 1910s Russia.
Such times are referred to as “end-stage capitalism.” The ceaseless concentration of wealth eventually leads to massive melt-downs, economic, social, and political. Most involve government collapse and/or violent revolution.
Trump’s policies are greatly accelerating that process, and like many other vain and foolish plutocrats before him, he hopes he can make the warning signs of the looming catastrophes go away simply by removing the tools used to measure the economy.
It’s a bit like solving climate change by banning the use of thermometers. And Trump is the guy who wanted to ease the COVID crisis by stopping testing.
It won’t work. Government metrics didn’t exist in all the other times of major economic upheaval, but then, people didn’t need them to know food was expensive, jobs were scarce, and everything was going to hell in a hand basket.
Economic convulsions are coming. All Trump is managing is to avoid letting people get any warning when they do come. But he thinks that they won’t notice when it happens because he didn’t tell them.
That will be the death of his movement.
Unfortunately, it could also be the death of many of the rest of us.
