Important Statistics

Posted on by
Reply

The employment data published last week had some important statistics.

Net job gains totaled 165,000 in October, according to the Labor Department, far more than economists had expected. The August and September data were revised upward by a total of 84,000, reinforcing the story of 3.4% GDP growth in the third quarter that ended September 30.
Labor-force participation rose while the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1% from 4.2%.

These statistics can be useful, but they’d be much more useful were important context-providing statistics, along with their meanings, also published in the jobs reports. [F]ar more than economists had expected illustrates how useless “economists'” expectations are on immediate data. No “expectations” can be counted reliable when they’re based on badly incomplete data, and the data informing jobs reports are badly incomplete on the initial collection—see the two-month lag in getting complete enough data to comment on—form an expectation about—jobs data.

Beyond that, there are two important statistics, Critical Items for me, that clarify the meaning of the unemployment rate number. One of them is the labor-force participation rate blithely glossed over in this house editorial. This rate came in at 61.9% for October, meaning that of all the folks of working age, 61.9% of them were actually interested in getting a job or have one. That’s the snapshot. The better datum is the trend. Since June 2026, seasonally adjusted (which smooths out a lot of noise), this rate has risen slowly but steadily from June’s 61.5%. More folks who could work are actively seeking or are finding jobs. An even longer trend—reaching back 10 years—is available here. The current short-term trend, while encouraging, remains below that long-term trend. We may be recovering, finally, but it’s a bit early to draw that conclusion. Or expectation. Data reaching back to 1950 are available here.

The other statistic is the employment-population ratio. This statistic compares the number of folks who actually have jobs—that subset of the labor-force participation ratio—came in at 59.3% for October. This, too, is a snapshot; the trend since June 2026 has been growth from June’s 59.0%, with a brief downward excursion in July that was more than recovered from in August. Graphs showing the employment-population ratio reaching back to 1950 indicate that the current ratio is consistent with the historical trend; although it’s considerably below the period 1983-2008

These context statistics indicate that the employment component in our economy is sound and improving, or recovering well, depending on perspective.

Of course, a horsefly in this ointment, also mentioned by the editors, is wage growth not keeping up with, much less exceeding, the inflation rate. Americans’ real wages have been falling, meaning our ability to buy stuff like food and fuel or to pay our rent/mortgages and utility bills has been shrinking. Don’t look for government tax and spending increases to correct this.

Go Big?

Posted on by
Reply

Wyoming’s Republican Senator-elect (there were a few) Harriet Hageman wants Republicans to use their waning days of majority-ness in both houses of Congress to go big: pass multi-year budgets to protect agencies that Democrats want to defund and to codify President Donald Trump cuts to foreign aid that the left wants to restore.

I think we ought to do another reconciliation package and fund some of these programs and agencies that we know that the Democrats are going to target.
We did it with reconciliation for the Department of Homeland Security just this summer. So yes, we have the ability to do that. We need to target those agencies that we know that the Democrats are going to target from the standpoint of trying to either destroy them, undermine them or fundamentally change where they go.

She has other big moves, too.

Hageman said there are other major actions the House and Senate could achieve…including five Congressional Review Act resolutions that would reverse what she called “horrific policies” encoded in California state regulations that affect the whole country.

All of that forms one route. A major problem with it, though, is that laws enacted by one Congress do not bind subsequent Congresses. The Progressive-Democrats are fully capable of using their enormous majorities in each incoming house to rescind those lame duck budgets and foreign aid cuts.

Still doing that would be a big move.

The biggest big, though, would be for the current Senate Republican majority to pass a rule that would require two-thirds of the Senate (not of Senators) to change a Senate rule. This would necessarily include changing the Senate filibuster rule. Preserving the Senate filibuster would continue the requirement for a measure of bipartisanship to pass a bill and thereby preserve the Senate.

Notice that the question here isn’t so much bipartisanship per se, as it is to preserve some power of the minority and, with that, prevent the devolution of the Senate and the Congress as a whole into a tyranny of the majority, a tyranny flowing that majority’s ability simply to ignore the minority and pass whatever measure suits its fancy.

A Senate Judiciary Committee Report on Court Packing

Posted on by
1

With the Progressive-Democratic Party having gained a strong majority in the Senate, it’s useful to recall many of that Party’s politicians’ promises to stack the Supreme Court by adding as many as six Justices to it. That recollection makes it imperative to further recollect an earlier move to stack the Court and a Senate Judicial Committee’s near-unanimous rejection of the move.

This bill  is an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country.
…
It is essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive and legislative brunches of the Government, and we assert that independent courts are the last safeguard of the citizen, where his rights, reserved to him by the express and implied provisions of the Constitution, come in conflict with the power of governmental agencies. We assert that the language of John Marshall, then in his 76th year, in the Virginia Convention (1829-31), was and is prophetic:

[Spelling and punctuation in the original] Advert, sir, to the duties of a judge. He has to pass between the Government and the man whom the Government is prosecuting,; between the most powerful individual in the community and the poorest and most unpopular. It is of the last Importance that in the exercise of these duties he should observe the utmost fairness. Need I express the necessity of this? Does not every man feel that his own personal security and the security of his property depends on that fairness? The judicial department comes home in Its effect to every man’s fireside; it passes on his property, his reputation, his life, his all. Is it not, to the last degree, important. that he should be rendered perfectly and completely independent, with nothing to influence or control him but God and his conscience?

…
It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.

That’s from a report by the Senate Judiciary Committee, with its strong-majority membership of Democrats—its 7 June 1937 REORGANIZATION OF THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY report, an ADVERSE REPORT, regarding President Franklin Roosevelt’s (D) court packing bill.

Unfortunately, those were among the last of the Democratic Party politicians who aspired to a measure of integrity and of country before party. Today’s Progressive-Democrats, demonstrated by their drive to pack the Court with activist justices who will view our Constitution only as a collection of suggestions, are interested only in Party power and their personal power within it.

The Committee’s report can be read here.

 

h/t Senator Ted Cruz (R) via his Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas

Referenda Weren’t Part of the Blue Tsunami

Posted on by
Reply

In all of the voting that produced the collapse of the Republican Party in the last week, there were some bright spots where the people spoke directly for themselves rather than indirectly by electing politicians to speak for them. The people passed a number of conservative-oriented referenda.

  • Iowa…voters approved a constitutional amendment to require a two-thirds legislative majority for raising income taxes on residents or businesses.
  • Ohio…voted to shore up the state’s voter ID requirement by putting it in the constitution.
  • North Carolina…approved a constitutional amendment to cut the maximum income-tax rate to 3.5%, from 7%.
  • North Carolina also approved an amendment on voter ID.
  • Washington state approved a measure.
  • Colorado is on a path to Colorado’s barring biological males from competing in girls’ sports and a separate measure banning gender surgeries on minors also is ahead.
  • Arizona is on a similar path to protecting female athletes.
  • Kentucky voters amended their constitution to prevent lame-duck pardons.

However, even that silver lining is deeply buried in dark clouds; there’s still this:

  • Colorado voters repealed the state’s groundbreaking Taxpayer Bill of Rights and may saddle themselves with a progressive income tax.
  • Washington looks to have rubber-stamped a millionaire’s tax.
  • Arizona and California said no to voter ID.
  • Montanans and Michiganders voted for new restrictions on free speech under the guise of “campaign-finance reform.”

And Again, a Reason

Posted on by
Reply

This time, it’s the People’s Republic of China’s decision to block Softbank‘s acquisition of the robotics unit of ABB. As the news writers correctly noted,

By barring the SoftBank deal, Beijing is sending a message that it doesn’t want the expertise and technology ABB has developed in China to help its rivals—especially one based in US ally Japan, which has been in a diplomatic war of words with China over Taiwan.

The PRC has no trouble stealing non-PRC business’ intellectual property, but it objects to intellectual know-how developed by a non-PRC business while it was operating inside that nation being repatriated and used or licensed elsewhere. This is, at best, cynically disingenuous. This is the nation pushing anti-trust excuses for blocking deals moving hard to maintain its own monopoly, here over robotics.

Just as I suggested in a nearby post about another example of PRC disingenuous obstructionism, Softbank and ABB should do the deal, regardless of the PRC’s position, and simply stop doing business with any business domiciled in the PRC and stop doing any other business within the PRC. That would render the PRC’s intransigence wholly irrelevant, it would strongly benefit the two companies’ shareholders and customers, and their example would encourage others to take similar steps.