America is in a serious jobs slump

It's even worse than "what will this look like in a year?". If it takes 4-6 months from when you pay the money to build a product to when you have that product available to sell to a customer, and you don't know how much your parts are going to cost OR how much you're going to have to pay to the federal government when those products finally clear customs (or what legal hoops you're going to need to jump through to get that product clear), how can you operate?

> How can a company invest without any idea if the tariffs will be around in a year?

They can invest in methods that will lower costs in a way that will outlast tariffs, like replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation (for manufacturing work) and more AI-enhanced workflows (for white-collar work).

In the short term, it could help offset the cost of the tariffs. In the long term, it lowers the need for human labor.

> it's the uncertainty

Worse, it's not even "honest" uncertainty, the people in charge of the policies are profiting from keeping everyone else uncertain.

Not only in the crass sense of insider-trading or market-manipulation, but also in terms of the landscape it creates.

For example, look at Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. While he goes on TV as the administration's tariff-mouthpiece, in the background, his family company [0] is going to US companies and saying: "Wow, those tariff-taxes suck, right? How about we give you a little money to keep you afloat today if you agree to give us any money the government might end up owing you back for illegal tariffs?"

It's hard to see how this will change until Republican federal legislators decide they no longer want to be accomplices [1] to the Executive branch's high crimes and misdemeanors.

[0] Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick owned ~50% and was CEO for decades before giving it to his sons.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-tariff...

> it's the uncertainty

Anecdotal reports from Europe (one insurance company, two banks, one systems integrator, one consulting firm; all multinational): All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.

A chancellor in Germany once proclaimed a ‘policy of steady hands’ when the opposition accused him of unsettling the economy with his many reforms.

Or even if legal or not means anything. Lower court ruling so far is a lot of the tariffs are illegal. But the supreme court as so far ruled overwhelmingly in favor of the administration, so that is very likely to get overturned anyways. So many layers of uncertainty.

The handwringing is so amazing here, as is the denial of what needs to be done to stabilize the US economy, which is to bring more manufacturing home, create jobs organically, and stop relying on China, who is not our friend.

We have create a massive cult at the national level. There is no reasoning with them. There is nothing that this administration can do to offend them or shake their confidence.

> Huge swathes of the American public are so utterly underwater in propaganda that they've lost the ability to reason entirely.

They're right here on HN as well.

And they're accusing the rest that they are the ones that are drinking the kool aid. It's a pretty weird time, tbh, I never ever thought it would get this bad. But I've seen some glimpses of it, a Dutch guy I know emigrated to the USA, got married to a woman in one of the heartland states and within a short few months he was completely on the Trump bandwagon and saying and writing stuff that his previous incarnation would be horrified at.

I am fractionally responsible for the government of the country that I live in, even if I did not vote for the parties that ended up in government.

> the greed of the few

Tens of millions of people voted for this rather exuberantly.

Maybe I am missing something but ~1/3 of voting age Americans voted for this. Trump was very clear that tariffs were coming, and even warned that Americans should be prepared for some tough times.

And another ~1/3 were comfortable enough with this to not bother voting.

I think people deserve what they vote for.

What if we didn't stop them because we were also benefitting from their greed?

Donald Trump did not have a "few" votes. You deserve what you get.

How about just a few Americans then.

Most of the Real Estate capex over the last few years has been in manufacturing real estate such as factories, or infra spending such as data centers.

Both those have value at a macro-level, and are largely a result of IIJA, IRA, and CHIPS act era subsidies, though CHIPS act adjacent spend was "AI-washed" which helped extend adjacent industries capex.

I've previously called out this kind of AI-washing as well [0] - it reminds me of the Telecom Bubble during the 1990s-2000s.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069086

Statistics done by a statistics bureau was "revised to look bad"? There are thousands of people collecting billions of data-points all accumulated layer by layer into a summary, compared over different sources. But this year they just decided to make up the numbers instead?

US labor and economics statistics is famously most reliable in the world, going further back in time than any other statistics source. Its not only used by the government but by banks, companies, and international organisations to predict and analyze economic trends.

But surely this year when the numbers looked a bit bad, they made the numbers to intentionally look that way? Simply no. The administration firing the people collection statistics is the real concern. (and its not the first time the administration has removed historical statistics either)

(manual revisions are made in statistics to compensate for anomalies. Companies stocking up on product to escape tariffs created a false peak in GDP that does not correspond to real consumption for example. But that's how statistics work, and the US is the gold standard in proper statitics)

Revisions which were regular standard practice. About ~50% of the revisions made the previous administration look good, and about 50% made them look bad.

This makes no sense. The initial jobs numbers usually get much more attention than the revised ones, so posted inflated numbers that eventually get revised down helps whoever the current administration is. The recent revisions have gotten unusual attention because of how bad the overall situation is, and from Trump drawing extra attention to them by firing the BLS head and essentially calling for the numbers to be cooked.

What does the last administration even have to do with this? Job growth plummeted under the current administration. I get that Trump blames Biden for everything because he always needs a scapegoat, but am shocked that anyone still gives that any weight given that Trump has very publicly and deliberately created the current economic trouble.

I mean, that's what's being complained about.

Trump fired a statistician because the numbers reported were politically inconvenient, not because they were incorrect.

Not baseless--when you're so bad at your job that those huge revisions come in year after year, someone's head should roll.

What you said is how the USA worked for my entire life until the H1B saturation finally reached a critical point! Young men and women would find jobs after college, it was NORMAL to have that be the case. What's going on right now is NOT normal. I got a job right out of college in 1995 with a CS degree--in fact, I had two offers, and I was nothing special. People with actual connections did really, really well back then. It was an optimistic time, and yes, Clinton was President, but he lucked out with the dot com era boom. It obviously imploded by 2001 or so.

Big-spending subsidies like CHIPS definitely stimulate growth in the targeted industry, with film being a classic example of how impactful the subsidies can be. The issue is that the subsidies are paid for by taxes on everything else. Realistically, the regulatory burdens on small & medium businesses are probably a bigger deterrent to long-term growth than high business tax rates though (and progressive policies have been responsible for much of the regulatory burden).

Yes, I am sure. Progressive policies such as raising the minimum wage, mandating benefits such as paid leave, and making it easier for workers to sue for various infractions, some of an extremely technical nature, has the effect of making it more expensive and legally risky to hire workers. There's an enormous laundry list of such policies and progressives never seem to get tired of inventing new ones. The result will be that less workers are hired than otherwise.