Since the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations.

https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...

It's even crazier when you look at the data since the end of the cold war in 1989. Then the ratio of jobs created is 50:1 for democrats.

How am I supposed to consolidate my power if the market doesn't crash so I can purchase residential and commercial real estate at bargain prices? Every third restaurant and business on Las Olas was shuttered in 2009, the buildings sold for next to nothing. Today there's one after another—Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, Maserati—parked on the street in front of those same buildings, all the while, Steve B. and I enjoy that coal fired pizza! /s

That Thatcher example was brutal. I have an interest in social housing (Austria, Singapore). The idea of selling it like that is insane to me, like if you said Taiwan sold TSMC for pennies on the dollar. And made it illegal to start another chipmaking company.

> Ultimately, the new homeowners were also borrowers and paid portions of their yearly income as interest on long-term mortgages

The United States does similar and we also have a nice twist on the concept. We have $38,000,000,000,000 in national debt which increased $2,500,000,000,000 in 2025. Which is like $111,764 per citizen with ~$3,000 in interest payments a year each, all going to a handful of families (and Japan) who hold most the debt as an investment.

The US government borrowed the money, gave the money back to people the government borrowed it from in form of kickback contracts, subsidies to oil companies and farmers who vote for the politicians who increased the debt by $2,500,000,000,000 in 2025, and every citizen is responsible for paying the interest on it.

As an American, all of this is insane to me.

I don't think presidents have all that much to do with the economy (vs. the legislature). Well... maybe the most recent example is to the contrary with certain actions that historically should have been the role of Congress.

That's true. Though in this case the administration is taking a much more active hand in the economy than any in almost a century.

For the most part the correlation between administrations and the economy is arbitrary. But in this case I would make a case that it is causative.

Sort of. I've done a lot of thinking about this one, and realize that it's really not just "one person" but a very large team of individuals, along with the "politics" of everything. If the President brings on a good staff, makes solid cabinet appointments, and they themself being a singular large part of the legislative process in modern years--given that it's usually fairly difficult to get 2/3rds of Congress to agree on anything--you can see the President actually has significantly more influence than you'd think.

In addition, it's the circles that person runs in and the circles that person's people run in. Do you think judge or cabinet appointments are decided on by one person? Sure, the President is a figurehead in this position and ultimately has to say yes or no, but there's a large pool of candidates out there and it's up to the staffers, maybe friends, maybe people in the know to propose those people to the President.

So while on paper the President doesn't, or shouldn't have that much power--in actuality with our current political process it's certainly much more.

Now, that said, just like the billionaires--they can only control so much. At least in the United States, there are competing interests even among the wealthy class, and sometimes shit just sort of happens--like a meteor killing the dinosaurs....or the release of decades of e-mails, videos, documents, and communications surrounding their pedophile behavior on a secret island in the Caribbean.

I disagree, but my personal belief is the economy and the government stewardship thereof work much the same way as WH40K ork technology

If that were true then why would there be such a glaringly clear example that presidential party influences economic performance?

I'll see if I can dig it up, but I remember reading that on average, under democratic presidencies going back to FDR, the economy in general performs better than it does under a republican presidency. If I'm remembering right, it's not as simple as mere ideological differences because there has been changes within the parties in those intervening ~75 years but the trend still holds.

Found your article for you, as I was looking it up the other day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...

Is it possible that can be attributed to lagging effects of their predecessors’ policies?

The consecutive GOP events don't seem to point to that.

I looked this up. "10 of the 11 recessions between 1953 and 2020 began under Republican administrations”. It seems Republican = Recession.

It seems silly to blame these on the president though, consider just the past two recessions and how little they had to do with the actions of POTUS...

They are still responsible for making the recession easier or harder or longer

The Tarifs and the way trump acts, for example, massively disrupts markets.

Ok, but is it cause or effect? Maybe Republicans do well when there is fear about the economy and a recession is coming.

Depends. If it's a Republican president in office, we must look at many factors, it's a difficult thing, y'see, many variables and such, market fluctuations, etc. etc. etc.

If it's a Dem president in office? 100% the Dem's fault.

Isn't literally this, but unironically, what dem supporters are doing in the least voted comments here?

Why try to make it as if it was the "opposite side" doing it while I'm reading it?

There are many marginally employable swing voters who vote Republican when they have jobs and the Democrats in charge ask for taxes, then vote Democratic when they get put out of work and need a social safety net.

This is largely the crux of it.

GOP is the fun dad party and Dems are the mommy party.

Republicans run economy hot until it blows, then Dems get voted in to clean up. People get annoyed about taxes and regulation when economy is ok again, fun dad promises ice cream and pizza for dinner forever.. rinse & repeat.

Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy.

The fact that consecutive Republican administrations in this graph fared even worse suggests that is not the case.

I’d have called Reagan very conservative, am I missing something?

Are you misreading the word consecutive as conservative?

> Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy

Why? What if constantly launching foreign wars, leveraging up the financial system and running up deficits isn’t sound economic policy?

Wasn't trying to be political, just making an observation that 4 years is probably too short of a time to credit policy changes within a single administration.

Threatening all of our allies with war and tarrifs is a great way to tank confidence in the US and its businesses. Ask me how I know.

Oh, so every Republican administration dating back to FDR did the same?

Did you look at the graph?

Eisenhower had two terms = 8 years - did poorly.

Kennedy + Johnson two Democratic terms in a row = 8 years, did well.

Nixon + Ford, two Republican in row = 8 years, did poorly.

Carter 1 term, did well.

Reagan Bush - 3 terms Republicans 12 years, did poorly.

Clinton 2 terms 8 years did well.

Bush the second, 2 terms 8 years did poorly.

Obama 2 terms 8 years did well.

Trump, 1 term did extremely poorly

Biden 1 term did well.

So this 4 years thing you're talking about you mean that we can't be sure about Biden, Trump, or Carter. Fair enough, is the 8 years good enough or is that also too short to draw a conclusion?

Yet it tracks for decades with successive D/R presidents, suggesting that this 4 year excuse is not enough to dismiss the correlation

I suspect the administrations are as much a sign of the shifting tides than a cause.

Conservative approaches tend to be…. Conservative. Which is the opposite of growth.

WW2 really got the US economy going, so maybe the issue it a lack of scale in the warring?

Carter has good employment, but terrible inflation making everyone poor in miserable. His Fed appointee, Paul Volcker raises interest rates, kills inflation, puts the country in recession, and drives unemployment up during Reagan's first years in office. Carter's job numbers look better than they should, and Reagan's worse, unless you look at the bigger picture.

Carter gave up the presidency to save America then. Volcker did the right thing.

The bigger picture being that this is political nonsense. We all know Reganomics.

There has to be some lag, and it is more about who controls Congress.

For example, the housing crisis and bubble were largely driven by legislation passed years earlier, including the 1999 repeal of Glass Steagall under Clinton. That was passed by a Republican controlled Congress, and the crisis eventually exploded under Bush. So I do not think either Clinton or Bush can be directly blamed for the housing crash. It is the repeal of the glass steagall act.

More broadly, I would argue that presidents, and even legislators, have limited control over the actual health of the economy. Are we going to say Trump is responsible for the AI boom? And if this AI boom collapses into a massive bubble burst under the next administration, will that president be blamed instead?

Congress has a substantially greater impact on the business climate than the President.

And the president has enormous influence over what congress does (veto).

Of course everything is nuanced; the trend is merely interesting especially juxtaposed against people consistently voting for republicans for "economic" reasons.

That’s unless you have a Congress that lets the President usurp the pose of the purse that should be theirs and Supreme Court that rubber stamps everything he does

If you are referring to the current administration, SCOTUS has barely "rubber stamped" any of his actions, and has rejected several already (though we will see with tariffs... but Polymarket has it only 31% in favor of the president so at least the odds are in our favor).

I'm not so sure either have much impact. Economic policy doesn't change much between administrations and Congress has been ineffective for a long time. Politics is mostly culture war things these days.

The Fed seems to be the big driver of the economy. Other than that, the government is moving things at the margins. Even Trumps tariff shenanigans don't seem to have rocked the boat much.

Except they have abdicated most responsibility, especially when the president is of the same party, for decades.

Many now talk like they work for the president.

I've always heard market forces and policies dont take effect until the following presidency.

It's the ratcheting mechanism of bipartisanship.

One party develops, the other party cracks down on potential economic wins for the working class.

Both parties make sure the capitalist class stay in power.

CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.

JOLTS is where stress shows first. Openings fall,[1] hiring slows,[2] quits drop,[3] and layoffs rise later.[4] Biden in particular shows the weakness of your provided stats.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSHIL

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUL

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL

Thanks for providing actual data and contributing to the discussion instead of the knee-jerk responses in the rest of the replies here.

The charts paint a much more precise picture on what is happening, and I actually don't see anything that strongly support it being a partisan effect.

>CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.

Can you explain why? Given that it's presumably averaged over the president's entire term, doesn't that provide a good measure of how much jobs were added under a given administration?

Is there a line chart or a stacked area chart of this over time?

This seems to confirm that Joe Biden created the most jobs of any president in recent modern history.

Joe Biden "created" jobs the way covid "created" job vacancies. Maybe time periods with worldwide upheaval should be taken with a little salt.

Joe Biden also presided over the largest America that ever existed, and took power at a moment when a huge rebound in jobs was inevitable.

> I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term.

Thats not necessarily true. During Bill Clinton's presidency he cut the deficits and the debt and yet the economy saw very strong job growth.

https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-und...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presi...

And Clinton (mostly Gore as VP) cut the federal civilian workforce by about 20%, while following the both the letter and spirit of the law, and not causing chaos.

I’m not sure how true this is given that both Clinton and Obama cut the deficits and in Obama’s case he did it despite complaints from the left.

Democratic administrations see less spending growth, though. Definitely not more. Look it up.

You're confusing rhetoric with policy.

If you think republicans lowered spending I have a bridge to sell. See two Santas strategy.

Macro-economic policy is political. I'm sorry.

Are you serious arguing that managing the economy isn’t political?

Grow up. The world is political whether you like it or not. Elections and apathy both have real consequences.

Job loss is not political?

It apparently does when one major party is full of destructionists who have had much success in politicizing everything, including a lot of what used to just be basic core American values.

Someone is in a financial position to absorb the fallout, huh?

Good for you.

For now….

the idea that the US economy is apolitical is, itself, ideological. and that ideology is called neoliberalism

Which is really neither here nor there.

Anyone implicated by the Epstein files should go to jail. That can remain true while also not being relevant to a discussion of which party's economic policy has historically performed better.

It means they're both servants of Israel. Israel is very much 'there' and not the United States of America. America needs a Declaration of Independence from Israel.

9/11, 2008, and now AI job displacement is also bad luck

Many publications have made that claim about a Russian hack. Is it inaccurate?

Ok, but there were also 36+ months prior to covid in Trump's first presidency...

Correct. The unemployment rate was 4.7% in January 2017 and was 3.6% in January 2020. Or if we look at total private sector employment that went from 123,300,000 to 129,300,000 (its highest ever, at the time). That's an average of 125,000 jobs per month, or equivalent to Obama (although Obama's unemployment was significantly higher for both terms).

Tariffs are bad for the economy. Foreign countries are ditching US partnerships, contracts. Less travelers are coming to US. Wow I wonder when will we open our eye. In the middle of all these, US is ditching its allies and planning to invade sovereign countries (Greenland).

Tariffs, forcing capital into 7 very large companies instead of small startups, wage suppression through weird offshoring and immigration schemes so on and so forth. There are seemingly unending number of issues that all contribute to the same outcome we're seeing today.

We did this to ourselves. Let’s not make excuses.

Post WW2 was a time of labor scarcity the US benefited from - but eventually that went away with global competition. The tech boom years were another labor scarcity time, and that’s also going away.

Both these times were plausible ways of entering the middle class.

What does economic theory say should happen to labor when scarcity ends but capital is strong? Does the economy expand until there’s more labor demand? Or will structural and monopolistic problems cause capital to benefit while suppressing wages - making us all serfs?

Any system based on exponential growth will have almost all people become serfs as even if their capital grows it falls behind the growth of older capital

Labor supply and demand do not reliably reflect the productive or social value of labor.

Allowing individuals to hoard enough wealth to corrupt, at will, the system that gave them their wealth - maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all.

But who knew?

Important context is January is historically the month where most layoffs are enacted. Not saying the number is insignificant, just not entirely unexpected.

It’s a disaster when compared to other Januarys.

Yes. And this January's numbers are comparable to January numbers during the Great Recession.

Link to report PDF: https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CR...

So much winning

The country desperately needs antitrust action to vastly increase.

We need all these monopolies and cartels broken up so that there is a dynamic competitive environment in all sectors of the economy

You’re talking about something that happens in a country that wants free markets. It doesn’t really apply to countries that want oligopolies or monopolies.

For me, it seems like a logical consequence of overheating the economy by cutting interest rates to zero during the COVID period.

Combined with stimulus and PPP

I recall similar predictions from stimulus from the mortgage crisis. Things did not seem to play out predictably, I'm not sure all the old rules are as hard and fast anymore as people think.

You are off by several years on the interest rates, which have an 18-24 month impact. Also we have this idiotic and unlawful tariff war the US administration is currently perpetrating. But I'm certain AI is having a huge impact as well.

I'm unconvinced of the AI impact outside of the tech sector. But there's certainly a lot of uncertainty generally. Probably more senior people with reputations are in a better position but likely tougher for people with no records.

I agree generally as far as immediate losses. But I think longer term with AI soaking up a lot of investment dollars we see other places not seeing investment or hiring growth.

Graphic design and copywriting are possibly affected even worse than the tech sector, for one.

There's a lot of reason to think companies citing AI as the reason for their layoffs are just lying because it looks better to shareholders, and that AI kinda sucks and isn't used for much yet. https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-lab...

I don't have much involvement with graphic design but I agree that the impact on journalism and adjacent is pretty awful. Not sure how much is AI per se but certainly the economics have been pretty unfavorable. I'm not convinced it's just AI slop but but quantity can displace quality.

And yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH.

That makes no sense...unless the economy is an a sort of death spiral where companies layoff employees, then stock goes, then companies layoff more, then stock goes up, so on and so forth.

Ouroboros. The economy is eating its own tail.

> And yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH.

The price of stock is based in dollars. The value of the dollar goes down due to inflation, so the stock goes up, while not actually changing in value.

If you think of the DJIA as being denominated in dollars the ATH looks less impressive.

Yet housing costs keep increasing. The working class is being squeezed between employers who are suffering lost revenue and can't pay US wages, and landlords and mega-corp shareholders who won't budge on price. I foresee a slow protracted "collapse" (or really renegotiation) that will bankrupt stuck-in-the-mud billionaires (like Elon) as their means of recourse - law enforcement and the military - come under such powerful social coercion that no amount of money will stop them from siding with working-class-friendly new leadership like Mamdani, as the workers (who, despite what Elon tells himself in his robot fantasies, are still needed en masse), use their REAL voting power - moving their home to jurisdictions that are working-class-friendly.

I don't see any signs of that

can we also blame the DNC for not holding an election for who would run against trump?

Or the DNC for throwing Bernie under the bus in 2016 (he would have beaten trump)?

Maybe the two party system has grown rotten to the core

No, DNC picking a bad candidate should be responsible for a D electoral loss, it is not responsible for Trump's electoral win. A lot of people seem to think only the DNC has agency in elections, only they should be responsible for outcomes.

You can blame the DNC for all the badness of Harris (the minimum badness you were able to choose in the election). You can't blame the DNC for all the difference between Kamala and Trump. That was entirely up to you.

No. You had a choice. I voted for Harris (who I do not like as a progressive) instead of chaos and destruction, others had the same choice. To not vote out of protest was a vote for this.

Better luck next time. ~2M voters 55+ age out every year. Can we do better? Remains to be seen.

1/3 are D and voted Harris

1/3 are R and voted Trump

1/3 are I and voted their wallet

handwavy, but not inaccurate

I voted for Bernie in the primary, for Hilary; Biden; and Harris in the general elections. At no point did I think to myself "Now is the time to be an idealist about the DNC, right when we're combating fascism"

The DNC is an embarrassment, the two party system is a democratic disaster, but accelerationists? They're evil.

That's rather reductionist for such a complex set of circumstances and events that led to the eventual results

> That's rather reductionist for such a complex set of circumstances and events that led to the eventual results

I think this is usually true, but there hasn't really been a global shock of the sort we had in 2020 or 2008 or 2001.

What would you say are the salient circumstances now?

It's not a shock, it's a natural consequence of the rot continuing its course.

The USA is an empire founded in bloodshed and hatred, and it is only becoming more so as it decays. Until you rewrite what the USA means, this will only continue.

now is not 2024, when people felt the sting of inflation and the collective trauma of covid

now is still largely the the same, top 2-3 issues are related to money, cultural or societal issues are on the rise and shifting in polls, a welcomed sign

The scariest party is the uniparty.

Every post you make on this site is essentially the exact same H1B propaganda. It's tiresome to watch someone use this community like this.

Migrating to a place where people can contribute more to society is both a core tenet of individual liberty and one of the most positive-sum things any human being can do.

But given that you both feign concern over visa holders' working conditions [1], while at the same time advocating for policies that lead to worse working conditions [2], perhaps you just hate freedom and were never acting in good faith in the first place.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45656527

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323501

It's just the process of learning the hard way that not heeding the warnings everyone gave is painful.

Now that they're facing consequences which we warned about (and prepped for as a result) they want to ignore it thinking that the monsters under the bed will go away.

Brain drain somewhere is brain gain elsewhere.

Barely a couple weeks ago resorting to H1B bashing was the norm on HN. Now that the chickens have come home to roost you want to ignore it.

I don't want to ignore anything. The H1B fee changes were a half-measure that didn't go nearly far enough.

And my point is those "half measures" have already incentivized us to offshore even more than before. Going with "full measures" will only further incentivize us to go ExAmerica.

That assumes that policies can't be put in place to control the incentives such that they prioritize American companies hiring American employees.

So you truly do hate freedom then! At least you admit it openly.

What a childish argument.

I need you to understand that immigration controls are fundamentally and inherently antithetical to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and freedom of association. And this applies both to immigrants and to citizens.

Imagine if you needed government approval to live with the one you love! What a completely unreasonable intervention into the private lives of ordinary people. Oh wait, that's the actual reality immigrants live in.

What policies lol.

We lobbied where we needed to. Now we're bankrolling Trump's Venezuela [0] and "Drill Baby Drill" [1] policy and bankrolling Iowa [2] and Montana GOP's [3] agricultural exports. We also greenlit multiple Trump Towers projects [4][5][6][7].

This is how a trade war is fought.

Policymaking is always secondary to politics. That's why I left the policy space to climb the ladder in business.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-reliance-talk...

[1] - https://www.livemint.com/companies/ongc-exxonmobil-collabora...

[2] - https://governor.iowa.gov/press-release/2025-09-16/gov-reyno...

[3] - https://www.daines.senate.gov/2026/01/20/daines-travels-to-i...

[4] - https://www.trump.com/residential-real-estate-portfolio/trum...

[5] - https://www.trump.com/residential-real-estate-portfolio/trum...

[6] - https://www.trump.com/residential-real-estate-portfolio/trum...

[7] - https://www.trump.com/residential-real-estate-portfolio/trum...

It’s not irrelevant to this discussion considering 50% of our unicorns are immigrant founded.

The big question is “whose jobs”?

If it’s federal government employment that is dropping, or illegal alien jobs dropping, then some will view it positively (I’ve seen this perspective advanced on x.com).

Mostly Transportation, Technology, and Healthcare [0].

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/layoffs-unemployment-jobs-econo...

As it turns out, no one wants to invest in infrastructure when all the inputs are going to be tariffed to oblivion. All else equal why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper? Protectionism isn't enough to overcome losing access to world markets.

Eventually the protected industries will be totally disconnected from global markets causing them to lose global competitiveness, to the point they cannot even compete with the black market markups. And then you are maga, er mega, fucked.

> why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper?

What markets do you have in minds? Can retail investors invest there?

I foresee something closer to a proportional increase of investment in all the remaining accessible markets, as US relative attractiveness decreases, rather than it moving to a specific other place.

So basically, everywhere else, proportionally. Even markets that have worse import/export restrictions, will still have relative changes in their attraction.

For a rough approximation non-US world index ETFs, which are available to retail investors.

These perspectives bother me a lot, because I want to invest passively, but if people are out there thinking like that, maybe nothing is priced right...

Priced right if money is moving from the bottom 90% to the top 10%. Stock market growth is because theres excess money and people need to invest the money. Supply and demand. There's reason why you can buy any ultra luxury car right(look at ferrari's revenue growth) and private jet industry is booming.

> maybe nothing is priced right

What does "priced right" even mean? For whom? When a public company makes billions in profits by selling insanely overpriced hardware, then that's "priced right" for the shareholders.

When a supermarket gives out 25% discount stickers to use, then the price of the good is closer to being priced right for the consumer, as long as you apply the sticker. There is, of course, no reason to assume that the supermarket would operate at a loss or close to cost. These 25% are already priced in and anyone not using the stickers is paying extra.

Nothing has been priced right ever since they've (the collective of anyone willing to sell something) figured out that they can ask for however-much people are willing to pay, which is quite more than what MY FELLOW HUMANS would need to pay.

For everyone else, who aren't willing to pay deliberately inflated prices, there's usually always some form of discount for some product, somewhere to be found.

In the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present. There is one remaining parameter (the exchange rate between future payouts on different dates, the "discount rate"), but all the subjectivity reduces to that one number.

However if everyone is deluded about what the future payouts of different insturments will be, you can get $10 for $1 in one place and $0.001 for $1 in another (given that in both cases the influence weighted participants think they're selling you a dollar). That invalidates the picture of reducing the unknowns to the discount rate.

In your examples, you're talking about goods and services, which have different values to different people. They have an equilibrium price but as you say, that's not the "right price for everyone," like there is for say a bond.

> In the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present.

This doesn't make sense though. The only reason I would buy an investment is if I believe it will grow in value from the point that I bought it. That means I'm pricing it at its future ccost.obviously other people are doing the same, so the actual cost of the investment will always rise above current value if people believe its a good investment.

I didn't write out enough to fully explain the idea. Here is the wiki page where you can find the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_discount_factor

The reason the stock market is generally "priced right", which we see in the strong long term returns of index funds, is because the winners get more money and get more influence, and the losers get less.

So you have a self selecting system, that have (over time) proved itself. Whatever you might think of the effect of certain effects (such as immigrant labors) you can end up reflecting in your investments, as others do - and if you end up being correct, you'll have more power to influence the price in the future.

The Challenger report contains large companies' announced future cuts. Not government, not small and medium business, not actual job losses. So neither, really.

Well those are incredibly ignorant and mostly likely strongly biased beliefs. When I worked for NASA and the DoE, I was surrounded by the most competent, hard-working, productive people I've ever known. Silicon Valley engineers are a joke compared to government engineers. Silicon valley people have newer toys and more flexible funding and no oversight, but government employees have vastly more impact and actual measurable utility. Only morons born into enough safety and security that they can be completely ignorant of how the actual world works believe the government is unnecessary and as many government jobs as possible should be deleted. The owner of that twitter platform you linked to killed several hundred thousand people last year, and again this year, and again next year, through sheer narcissistic incompetence. Is that a good source for any information at all?

Also a good bs indicator: 'illegal alien jobs'. As if the demand vanishes with the poor souls to uganda. It just framing in hope of twisting a win out of it, because if you would have stated that sub-minimum wage jobs are in decline, this would be a terrible economic indicator for the US.

The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.

Looking at salaries, senior developers working for the government get paid about the same as entry level software engineers who get return offers at BigTech. Well actually senior developers in government only about 10%-20% more.

And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?

I know how much senior cloud consultants working at AWS make working in the WWPS. I was there as an l5. Amazon is a shitty place to work. But I doubt it’s any worse than the government right now. GCP and Microsoft (not just Azure) both also pay their consultants a lot more than government employees make.

I’m not saying the government isn’t needed. But the best and the brightest aren’t going to give up the amount of money they can make in the private sector - especially now that government jobs are far from a secure paycheck

You are arguing that everyone is as money driven as you are. Plenty of people who are more altruistic people take employment based on non money factors all the time.

Plenty of people will also earn their chunk of change as an l5 at Amazon or whatever, then transition to a lower paid job with more impact.

In fact, I know almost nobody who makes their employer decisions based on the pay factor alone.

I agree with your opposition to the comment above, but I feel like the condescension towards silicon valley, and non-government employees is not a way to start a healthy dialogue. Like you are not going to convince anybody by calling 80+% of people here (private sector employees) "a joke".

I agree that randos on twitter are a bad source of information.

The people looking to view this positively will find or imagine a reason to do so, regardless of which jobs it is.

You think illegal aliens working - by definition- illegally, show up on reports like this?

sigh If only the department of education was as well funded as the department of war.

It’s a non trivial question.

Estimates of criminal activity, for example, are frequently counted as GDP in places like the UK. And even if you’re working in violation of visa rules, the IRS will still expect and enforce taxes.

These people don’t have an SSN. You can’t pay taxes without one

They can and do pay taxes with ITIN instead of SSN, and some non-citizens are eligible for SSN anyway. Undocumented immigrants have paid billions in taxes annually. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/how-do-undocumented-imm...

The larger point that they may be omitted on reports like this may still stand, but it’s not because every single one is unable to be tabulated in the count by definition.

Mostly SWEs (especially the type who act pissy on HN).

> does that mean that my garbage company no longer needs to employ a staf on every truck to drive it and empty my trash recepticle into the truck?

Do… do you not want them to do this?

Is that an argument of some sort? I can't quite identify the point.

I feel the same way about the article