Good growth, defined

From The West Wing, S1E17 (March 22, 2000) -- President Bartlet speaking:

Historically, 2 to 2.5% GDP expansion is classified as lackluster, even anemic economic growth. 4.5 to 5% is needed to be considered robust -- and not even spectacular.

"the fundamentals of our economy are sound"

Think so?

Open up Benjamin Friedman's 1986 paper "Increasing Indebtedness and Financial Stability in the United States" 

Search for the word recession and read some of the sentences that turn up.

The Emperor has no need for Senators

Impeach Trump before he dissolves the Senate.

All Employees, Federal

The May jobs report came out today. The graph shows the number of federal employees since December 2021 (not seasonally adjusted). I cut and pasted the dates for December 2024 and May 2025, essentially the change since Trump returned to  office:

FRED Source Data (since 1939): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CEU9091000001

The graph shows the number of federal employees falling from 3,020 in December 2024 to 2,950 in May 2025. But the units are "Thousands of Persons" so we are talking a change from 3,020,000 to 2,950,000 employees. That amounts to a decrease of 70,000 employees in five months, or 14,000 per month on average.

At that rate, all federal employees could be gone in about 210.7 months. That's 17 years, 6 months, and 21 days give or take, if they keep at it 7 days a week.

I object to this news

Slide the ScrollBar Right to See More, or just Click the Image

Gaio reminds me that "The Federal Reserve (the Fed) returns a portion of its earnings to the U.S. Treasury" every year.

Reuters (March 24, 2023) says the Fed payment to Treasury was $76 billion in 2022 and $109 billion in 2021. Amounts like that would cover a lot of data-gathering cost at the BLS, if they just kinda bypassed the Treasury. 

To do its job, the Fed needs economic data from BLS and other sources. How are they going to fight inflation if they don't get the data from BLS??? Seems to me if they need the data, they can justify spending those billions to get it, even if it takes most of the profits the Fed would otherwise have paid to the Treasury.

The Corporate Income Tax & After-Tax Profit

Federal Revenue from the Corporate Tax: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Ja1b

Corporate Profit: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JnwN

Trump's tariffs ARE "the competitive struggle for markets"

Stephen Miran, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has Trump crying Unfair!: 

The desire to reform the global trading system and put American industry on fairer ground vis-à-vis the rest of the world has been a consistent theme for President Trump for decades.

At best, crying "unfair" is zero-sum economics. And Trump's unfair is far from the best.

From Chapter 24 of The General Theory:

[U]nder the system of domestic laissez-faire and an international gold standard such as was orthodox in the latter half of the nineteenth century, there was no means open to a government whereby to mitigate economic distress at home except through the competitive struggle for markets.

Little has changed since Keynes wrote those words. Laissez-faire is now called "free markets", and the international gold standard has been replaced by floating exchange rates. Things are the same as they were, except our gold standard has no gold, and our laissez-faire has a different name. 

Keynes continues:

But if nations can learn to provide themselves with full employment by their domestic policy (and, we must add, if they can also attain equilibrium in the trend of their population), there need be no important economic forces calculated to set the interest of one country against that of its neighbours.

And then

there would no longer be a pressing motive why one country need force its wares on another or repulse the offerings of its neighbour ... so as to develop a balance of trade in its own favour.

Donald Trump is doing economics that Keynes rejected in 1936. Trump is setting the interests of our country against those of our neighbours, with the goal of developing a balance of trade in our own favour.

Trump's policies do seem specifically designed to set our interests against those of our neighbors. Unfortunately, we still have not learned how to provide ourselves with full employment by domestic policy. This, however, does not mean we must go with Trump's plan.

Now, on domestic policy let me start by saying that our problem is a cost problem...