"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