Lies, Damn Lies, and Labor Statistics

Welcome to Unwashed and Unruly, where we take a hard look at society even though the world is too absurd to take seriously.

Today we're talking about unemployment statistics and jobs, or more specifically, the illusion of jobs and what the working class is actually facing.

I'm Lola Michaels, joined by the professor from the streets, Ezra Saeed.

Hi, Lola.

Hi, everybody.

And our derelict Debutante Cam cruise.

What's up guys?

Follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google, or wherever you find us, and make sure to rate and review.

Every month we get unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and headlines either celebrate how strong the labor market is or they sound alarms about the next recession.

But here's the problem.

Those numbers are always flawed and misleading.

Not because there's someone fudging the math, but because the way that we define employment, unemployment, and the labor force is broken.

If you're working 5 hours a week on poverty wages, you're counted as employed.

But if you've given up looking because you've been rejected too many times, you're not counted at all.

Today, we'll be unpacking why this data is so weaponized to sell the myth of a healthy economy.

And we'll talk about how working people are overworked, underpaid, and increasingly left out of the story altogether.

Because when nearly one in four adults can't secure steady, livable work, the question isn't just who's being left behind.

It's why we keep pretending the system is working at all.

So let's begin with what happened earlier this month.

In the spirit of If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.

Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the latest job numbers were released.

He said, quote, the job numbers were rigged in order to make the Republicans and me look bad.

The media and the Democrats denounced this patently political firing and jumped to the defense of BLS Representative Robert C Scott, a ranking Democrat from Virginia, stated the Bureau of Labor Statistics has always served as a nonpartisan, data-driven federal agency that provides key information vital to the United States economy.

President Trump's action politicizes economic data and undermines the independence of yet another federal agency.

So let's delve into this.

Are the numbers rigged?

Is this a case of a Biden appointee trying to make Trump look bad?

Or are BLS numbers just objective, truthful, unfiltered data?

Yeah, I I've been thinking a lot about this issue.

I think that jobs report data is definitely rigged, but not the way that Trump made it out to be.

So the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS is responsible for these official statistics like unemployment and hiring and inflation, which is called CPI.

But the numbers are backward looking and especially for job related figures, the BLS will often revise the numbers.

And that's basically what pissed Trump off.

So the BLS went in, revised the numbers for a couple months.

It made it clear that the economy and the job market was much weaker because of course, the economy is a mess and that's what led to controversy and political fallout.

So it's not like someone is cooking the numbers, but it's just about the way that that data is collected and determined.

It's super flawed.

You mentioned that he didn't like what the numbers were, but how do they even measure unemployment?

The main problem with unemployment, which right now is registered at 4.2%, is that a huge number of people are left out and not counted.

The official definition of being unemployed is that you don't have a job.

You're available to work, and you've actively looked for a job in the past four weeks.

But is it just four weeks?

Because I know lots of people who are looking for work for months sometimes.

Yeah, and that's one of the problems.

So it's a percentage of people in the labor force without jobs.

If you've been looking for work in the last four weeks, that means you're applying for jobs.

So what that means automatically is if you've given up looking for work, like you've been unemployed for a number of months, you're discouraged because you can't find a job that accommodates your needs or requirements.

You are not considered unemployed.

You're considered having withdrawn from the labor force entirely.

So if you've stopped looking for a job because of other reasons, like not just discourage but you have to care for a sick parent or child or something like that, you will just be not considered part of the labor force.

So a whole bunch of people who are unemployed or don't have jobs are not counted.

As.

OK, so you've covered who is unemployed and who they count and don't count as unemployed.

So about the employed, what do they consider to be employed?

So I think the big problem is actually who is considered employed.

So you're considered employed regardless if you're a part time worker or a full time worker.

You're considered employed if you have a part time or a temporary job.

This means that there's no calculation in terms of the quality of life or the quality of your job or your income.

If you work 2 hours a week, you're considered employed even if your wages are $30.00 for that week.

If you don't have job security because your hours fluctuate or you're under a temporary contract, you're also considered employed.

And then part of that is you're considered employed.

If you have a low paying full time job that's low skills.

Like maybe you had to take a job just to put food on the table.

I would call that underemployed.

A lot of people you know aren't happy with their jobs.

They're in jobs that don't really match their qualifications.

Think about like a white collar technical professional who ends up in retail just because they need work.

So who's receiving unemployment benefits is not the number that determines the unemployment rate by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Unemployment benefits and the amount of people accepting or applying or receiving unemployment benefits doesn't have to do with the unemployment rate.

There is another figure that measures how many people have applied for benefits, but that's not the official unemployment measure at all.

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It's just like really alarming that there is this huge group of people who want to work more, need to work more, and they're being considered employed when they probably don't have living wages.

And it just kind of makes me think about what this number actually represents and how it is missing out on all this information that says more about the standard of living that people are experiencing.

Yeah, I think if you have a job, which a lot of us do, the question is, are you making a livable wage, right.

Like if you have a job and you spend over half your income on rent or like a big chunk on health insurance and groceries.

This is the the the way that we measured how the economy is doing.

We should measure it based on how the vast majority of people, working class people and the oppressed, how they're actually faring.

Yeah, there's just something so weird about having this finite number that's supposed to represent so much, but it it seems to be missing a lot about what people are experiencing day-to-day.

So why do you think they do it this way?

If the data that comes out of it doesn't really measure conditions of the population and the working population, what is the point of this 4.2% figure or whatever the figure comes out to be that they release every month?

Yeah.

I mean, I think the first thing to remember is that statistics are not facts.

Facts are very stubborn, but statistics are pliable.

The statistics are just numbers.

They're not magical, they're not religious.

They're always debated because there's always different ways to collect those numbers and different ways to interpret those numbers.

So in that sense, it is political.

But I don't think it's political in a partisan sense.

Like the way that the Democrats are presenting it right now, like, oh, Trump is, you know, so upset with these numbers.

I think there's not actually a divide on this question in terms of Democrats and Republicans.

Both of these parties have been in power over the last several decades.

They've been responsible for overseeing the dismantling of social programs, the decimation of the unions, rich getting richer, the question of of wages being stagnated.

None of these statistics actually measure inequality or the wealth gap.

They don't calculate the real standard of living.

It's of course important for people to have jobs, but so is healthcare, so is a social safety net.

It's of course important to measure the rate of change of prices because people are dealing with an economy where they can't afford anything.

People just don't have the money.

That's why people feel like we're in a recession.

So when they measure it the way they do, what are they measuring?

What good does this number do for government officials and bureaucrats?

I think that it's not a very effective measure at all, but the the main reason why it matters at all, it matters to employers and business owners and it matters to the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve will use those numbers basically to determine if we're in a recession, if they should adjust interest rates up or down.

An interest rate hike or an interest rate reduction is going to either increase or lower the cost of borrowing.

So that's the cost of mortgages, your credit cards, your auto loans, things like that.

And what the BLS says about the economy.

Then the Federal Reserve says, oh, this is how we're interpreting where the economy is going to go.

And whatever they say then moves the markets.

So basically, it's just a useful tool for companies trying to project customer demand, plan future hiring or speculate about where they should put their investment, but it doesn't actually mean that they're going to give people any more benefits or protections for what they're dealing with in their life.

Yeah.

So the the number has a lot more meaning to business owners and people who are involved in the markets and the government than it actually means to people.

And I think you mentioned wealth inequality before.

And it's really frustrating for working class people like me to hear that the economy is doing great and that the numbers are up in the stock market.

And I don't feel like any of those numbers reflect my life.

So is there any other institutions who are measuring this in a different way and kind of taking into account more variables and looking at it in a different broader way?

There's there is one measure that the BLS uses that's a different figure.

It's not talked about very much.

It's usually about twice as much as the unemployment figure, but I still think it's pretty inadequate.

The main figure that I look at is what's called functional unemployment.

So basically, functional unemployment means that you have no job, or you work fewer than 35 hours a week, but you want full time employment.

So it's trying to include some of those people who are underemployed, like you were saying.

Exactly.

Or it's also including people who make less than $25,000 a year.

Which is, which is.

Extremely.

Low.

Does that kind of align with the federal minimum wage?

Because I know that's, I think around 7 something right now.

Yeah.

And I think that's the point is that no one can survive off of that.

And so functional unemployment, this is a measure that's actually by an organization that's run by Jean Ludwig.

It's called the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.

Their calculation, and they do a lot of statistical analysis called the true rate of unemployment.

And when they calculate this, it's like 6 times higher.

Wow.

Then the the official BLS numbers, So right now and it's been this way for a couple months actually right now it's A at around almost 25%.

And you said earlier the government says 4.2%.

Yes, so. 25 versus 4.2, yes.

And of course it that and then it is really different for, you know, Black people and Latino people because it's always higher.

The bottom line with that measure and why I think it's more of a useful metric is because it incorporates people who don't have steady work and they don't earn living wages.

Because why does it matter if you're considered employed if you can't pay for housing or food?

Yeah, exactly 1 of.

The points that you made earlier is that statistics are just numbers.

They're pliable.

They can prove anything.

Or is that Great American cultural icon Homer Simpson once put it?

People can come up with statistics to prove anything. 40% of all people know that, so I think I have.

Another funny one.

Statistics are like bikinis.

What they reveal is suggestive.

What they conceal is also pretty important.

That's.

Pretty good.

But you know, it's very hard to go against a philosopher like Homer Simpson.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So.

OK, so let's move away from statistics for a minute.

We'll come back to them, but I just want to move away from them for a minute.

And I think it might be useful to talk a little bit about what are the actual conditions of working people in this country.

Because from everything I know from personal experience, you know, every time I go to the grocery store, I feel like going on a riot because I, I see the prices of the things that I buy week in and week out.

Just keep going up and up and up to, to everything you see in the data.

It tells you the lives of working people in what is supposed to be the richest country on earth are increasingly getting worse and worse.

What are the conditions that working people face in this country?

Let's begin with wages.

What have wages been like over the last 40-50 years?

Have they have they grown with inflation?

Have they remained steady?

Have they declined?

Yeah.

And that's The thing is that real wages, you have to look at real wages because they measure the amount of money you make adjusted for the amount that you pay for things.

Those have not changed in decades.

They haven't gone up since the 1970s.

When people are talking about, oh, you can't make ends meet, what is the solution that they usually give you?

Go get.

A job.

Get a second job.

Go get a second job.

Go get a second job.

Yeah.

So get a.

Go find a hustle.

So get multiple streams of income because one income doesn't cut it anymore, which is why you have teachers driving Ubers or get a higher paid job, which is like with what army, right?

So I think that's really important to look at.

Also look at the job market right now.

If you get laid off from a job, you're looking at a extremely competitive job market where you can't really find work for years.

How long do unemployment benefits last on average?

Usually up to 26 weeks.

So what do you do in that time period when you're looking for work and you can't collect unemployment benefits?

How do you how do you survive?

So I think that's.

One of the reasons people do turn towards the gig economy because it's just easy work to get, but can you talk a little bit more about what it's like to work for DoorDash or Uber or one of those other companies and how it's less adequate than working for a traditional employer?

I won't go into all the details, but there's a really good episode by John Oliver on the gig economy and their conditions.

But basically, when you're a gig worker, you're considered an independent contractor, right?

You work for an online app, you're employed on a task or project basis.

And it's not just Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, delivery people.

It's also Task Rabbit and editorial and design folks.

You have to pay for all your own materials.

You have to pay for your gas, for your car, for your computer, for your supplies.

Also, if you don't have work and you're a gig worker, you can't collect unemployment benefits.

You're not eligible.

So if you work for Uber for five months or a year, whatever, and you stop working for Uber, you can't qualify for unemployment.

You don't.

Qualify for unemployment because you're classified as an independent contractor.

It's a it's a misnomer right, but it's presented as you're self-employed.

You also during that time when you're a gig worker, you also don't get benefits.

You don't get health insurance or paid time off or retirement plans.

Gig work has exploded over the last 10 years.

Obviously people think about it in terms of exponential growth since COVID, but even before that.

And it's this trend of these temporary kind of on demand jobs.

It's the same thing with contractor or freelancer positions.

Freelancers are going to take over the the job market.

And when you're a freelancer, yeah, you get your own clients, you got flexibility, etcetera, etcetera.

But you have to pay for all your benefits out of pocket.

And we know how expensive that is.

Basically, if you don't get work, you don't get work.

If you're a contractor, it's temporary, it's only for a specific period of time.

So there's no stability or security.

One of the.

Examples that I remember from a few years ago that I think is still a very much a living example that ties into these contract workers are supposedly self-employed workers is port truckers in the Bay Area and other ports where they have to pay to buy their own trucks or finance their own trucks.

And the cost of insurance, the cost of the gas, everything.

They're they're considered independent contractors.

They are workers on the docks.

They bring in goods and then they take away goods.

But they're not treated as such.

And it's clearly a money saving scheme by the bosses to lower labor costs.

Yeah.

I I do think that the Port Trekkers are a good example.

I think basically what you're just looking at is it the trajectory of decline in unionization, the wage stagnation that we talked about before, prices going up.

People are a lot more dependent on credit.

Yeah, I.

Speaking of debt, I know so many people with student debt who just kind of gave up on paying.

They just had to choose between being able to live and pay off their student debt and now they've destroyed their credit score.

And that has all sorts of implications when it comes to getting a house or a car or borrowing money.

So, yeah, this is all just very depressing to me.

Yes.

Student debt is a perfect example because you're actually paying for education.

You you become an indentured servant to this debt where you have to pay exorbitant interest for taking out money to get an education that doesn't really get you anywhere.

So before maybe you would get a degree hoping that that degree would land you a high paying job.

That's not the case anymore, yeah.

Well, most people I know who have degrees have jobs that are considered above average.

But even with their above average salary, it's not like they're living lives of luxury.

They kind of have to choose between taking an annual vacation or being able to have any savings.

And yeah, I just feel like it's very The situation for the middle class in America right now is very desperate.

Yeah.

Part of it is the capitalist boom bust cycle.

You're always going to have wage exploitation under capitalism.

But things have just gotten so much worse.

I think a perfect example is the amount of debt that people are facing for basic things like education, but also relying on debt for groceries.

Yeah, just to.

Live people who have children.

It's kind of impossible, yeah.

And you have these predatory banks and Finserv companies, right?

Financial services companies trying to capitalize on people's despair and economic scarcity by offering buy now, pay later plans for for for take out.

Yeah.

Well, one of the things with the job market on the mid low end of it and the question of college degrees that I think is really interesting is you have a lot of jobs that in the past did not require a college degree.

A lot of these are office jobs, did not require a college degree to get, and in the present require at least a bachelor's degree.

But that bachelor's degree may land you at such a massive student debt.

And the job that you now use your bachelor's degree to get isn't going to cover that kind of student debt.

So you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't.

If you don't get the degree and don't acquire the student debt, you can't get the job that a couple of decades ago you might have been able to get.

And if you do get the degree and then our burden with that debt, that kind of job isn't going to be able to pay off that debt and you're stuck with it for decades or the rest of your life.

It's.

So vicious.

I always think about how stark it is in terms of generational differences.

Like you have this younger generation that's dealing with this 10s of thousands of dollars in student debt.

And so they're bound to that.

They can't afford anything else.

How are they going to afford to take out a mortgage on a home?

How are they going to afford ever in their lives home ownership?

It seems completely a utopic pipe dream to be able to do that.

And what is the next generation going to look like?

I have to talk about AI, of course, because we're talking about the job market because right now things feel very dire.

There's a reason why people are terrified of AI and that's because by 2030, so that's in five years, 30% of U.S. jobs could be automated.

That's the the prediction and 60% significantly altered by AI tools.

So that's just five years, that's how quickly it's advancing in 20 years by twenty, 4550% of jobs that exist right now could be potentially fully automated.

We're all.

Going to be homeless and out of a job guys I don't know where the.

AI statistics are going to go in the future.

Exactly.

And I don't know that anybody knows for sure.

I mean, they're making these projections and possibilities, and it's very possible.

But one thing I do know is with the history of capitalism, with every technological leap, on the one hand you get these amazing technological advances.

On the other hand, they come at the expense of working people.

You know, there's a thought experiment you could do.

If you have 500 workers doing a job and you have a machine that does the work of these 500 or 450 of those workers, you would think in a rational world those 450 workers could maybe enjoy life a bit more because they don't have to suffer as much and do as much work, or the work could be spread around.

But under capitalism, what it means is they become pauperized, they become poor, they become basically beggars for everyday necessities.

And I think when you mentioned the next generation and what they're going to face, I think what you're talking about is a declining American empire unable to sustain conditions of life like it was able to sustain in the past.

And it's just going to keep getting worse.

I don't know how else to look at it.

Yeah, I think that.

Declining empire is a key part of this, that this very small percent of people at the top have offloaded the cost of this declining empire onto people.

And so the working class has to absorb all of it.

That's why the very small percentage of people at the top, the capitalist owners and the investors, are making a killing.

They're managing very well.

And it's also why talking about generational questions, how are you actually going to be able if you're not in that tiny, tiny minuscule top percent that like owns the stocks and bonds or whatever, how are you actually going to have enough savings to retire?

And especially since like.

I'm like personally so worried about that.

I know that Social Security is pretty meager from my own knowledge and experience, if it's even there by the.

Time, yeah.

And I know that I'm not the only person living paycheck to paycheck in the millennial generation.

And I just don't see how this is not going to be a massive crisis when you know the latter end of Gen.

X Millennials and Gen.

Z start retiring and just don't have any savings at all to live off of, I'm of the opinion.

That the ruling class in this country thinks the population is living too long.

Kill them off early.

Oh my.

God are you?

Are you?

Suggesting we're going to they're going to start murdering us.

No.

Well.

Yes, in a way.

In a way it's a you wait till you die.

It's a slow death.

Yeah, it's the slow.

Death of working until you die.

My current job right now, there's somebody that we were dealing with that was having a hard time understanding what we were trying to ask them to do.

And so then I finally reached out to someone else in the in that office and I said, why?

What am I doing wrong?

How am I, how can I explain this better to this person?

Now this person is a contracted out worker.

They're not part of the company where I work.

That contracted out worker is a 94 year old woman, 94.

I swear.

Is a 94 year old woman?

What the hell is a 94 year old woman doing working that's so depressing.

That's yeah, they will kill us.

Early.

And they will kill us early by working us to death.

I mean, I'll give you a very simple expression of what we all mean by that.

Here's a New York Times headline from from April of this year.

To escape the grind, young people turn to mini retirements.

And I remember seeing that headline and going, what the Hell's a mini retirement?

You know what I mean?

A retirement is it's a vacation.

That's what they're calling somebody going on vacation, a mini retirement.

How do you even have What is to go on?

A vacation?

Well, let's say.

We'll never afford a real.

Let's say that.

Yeah.

Let's say you.

Can't afford to go on vacation, But you're not supposed to do that.

You're supposed to work and work and work and work and then drop dead.

That's why you have a 94 year old woman still working.

And that's why you you walk into a Walmart, you see the so-called greeters who are really old people shouldn't be working.

You should be enjoying the twilight of their years.

This country is obscene.

And yeah, I do think the American ruling class thinks the American populace as a whole is living too long and would rather us die early so then they don't have to worry about things like retirement.

So something I've been.

Seeing online is a trend of young people moving out of the United States because the standard of living is better at other places.

I've been seeing a lot of videos on TikTok of people moving to China and it's just wildly different.

The cities are more modern, they're cleaner, and the way the government works is very different.

So one of the things I saw is that some companies actually subsidized people's housing.

So you pay maybe 500 U.S. dollars for a three bedroom apartment in a modern city and your company pays half of it.

And of course the salaries are lower there.

But a lot of people are digital nomads and they're kind of taking their U.S. dollars with them other places.

And yeah, I feel like the desperation has people kind of looking elsewhere, especially also retirees trying to make their dollars go farther in places like Vietnam and the Philippines.

And we mentioned wage stagnation earlier.

One of my favorite things to do to quell my anger is to mess around with the USA vax.org inflation calculator.

And $15,000 now is equal to $109,000 in 1972.

So when your parents shame you for all of your bad financial choices, think about how their minimum wage job is probably equal to $80,000.

Yeah, and I I want.

To talk about that too, because it ties in with how statistics are so misleading.

So besides the unemployment rate, which is completely messed up, the inflation rate is also totally misunderstood and deceiving.

So when you hear people talk about how inflation is going down, right?

You've heard that.

So it was like after COVID, that was really, really high inflation.

They say inflation is going down, but it's at the rate of inflation that is going down South.

That's year over year.

It's an annual rate.

So if inflation.

Goes down and milk is $5.

It's not like milk is going to be 450 exactly.

Exactly.

That's the point is that prices are not going down at all.

There's there's so much wrong with this besides the fact that what you're saying is correct.

The the cat is out of the bag, right?

Those prices are there, they're there to stay, and they're just going to keep getting higher, just maybe at a lower rate.

But also the way that inflation is measured, it's this quote UN quote, basket of goods, which is all clumped together.

And so certain things are going to be more expensive than others.

And then depending on who you are in your economic situation and your family situation and where you live, your personal inflation rate could be very different.

So if you have a family of four and you live in a urban city and you have a car, so you're paying for gas and you have a home, so you're paying for electricity and groceries, your inflation, your personal inflation rate is going to be a lot higher than if you're a single person living in the mountains.

So the inflation rate for everyone is fundamentally different, but also prices are just not going down.

Also, corporations are always juicing their profit margins.

The cost of business is going down and they don't hide that.

Like CE OS are always boasting about their profits and at the same time they boast about their ability to raise prices on consumers.

So there's a ton of price gouging going on where we can be told anything like, oh, well, it's just inflation.

Or right now we're being told, well, it's tariffs that are raising the cost of things, but it could be anything.

We just have to eat it.

We don't have a choice.

Well, I remember around.

COVID it was being blamed on the fact that a lot of Americans supply chain.

No.

No, no.

Well, yeah, the supply chain, but also that a lot of Americans got, what was it a measly 1600 dollars or two grand total checks.

Oh, the stimulus, the stimulus, right.

And that somehow that is the reason, because you Americans got a little bit of money.

Meanwhile, that's what Israel gets in an hour.

A minute, actually.

Yeah, because we.

Deigned to send you something.

It has now driven inflation to such a rate that that money is worthless now.

That's totally true, because they did.

Talk about that as one of the quote, UN quote, reasons for the high inflation rate was that there was too much money being circulated in the economy when they've actually done studies that show that people took those measly stimulus checks and they used it, they put it into savings or that they paid off debt.

Exactly, Exactly.

Yeah.

They weren't they weren't going around living off the hog on No, they were like they got I'm.

Drowning a little bit less, yeah.

Scene.

OK, we've been talking about the conditions and what people in this country as a generality face.

But I think one of the things we should touch on is that as you move into particular sectors of the population, conditions become more acute.

I'm thinking of farm workers, the mostly immigrant and undocumented farm workers who work in California's Central Valley and other farm lands.

I'm also thinking of the perennial last hired, first fired populace of America, the black population and in in all of these metrics and even if you just take the statistics that do get released, populations like these go far below what is the average.

And the conditions that we are all suffering, including white workers are expressed so much more starkly for, for example, the black populace in America.

Yeah, I would say that the.

Situation is definitely more acute for black people in this country.

The unemployment rate has always been roughly double that of whites for several decades.

And then there's also all the stuff that's wrapped up into the job market, employment discrimination, the criminalization of black youth.

Ezra, you mentioned the last hired, first fired in terms of where they stand in the job market and the deep seated oppression within the job market.

Also, I think in terms of women, women are facing a lot more responsibility in terms of being the primary caregivers and families.

Even though they have entered the workforce a lot more, they've actually left the labor force.

I think the figures are in the first half of 2025 / 200,000 women ages 20 or over have left the labor force entirely.

Well, I mean when childcare.

Is as expensive as it is.

That totally makes sense, yeah.

How do you balance?

Work and family and how do you do it financially right, but that raises.

A whole other thing which is a single income household let's say that these women are living with somebody who's working the ability of a single income household in this country to sustain a family is incredibly difficult a lot of the people I know who who.

Have kids, actually have a lot of debt?

Yeah.

And also if you're a stay at.

Home caregiver, you are not considered part of the labor force, so you're kind of like opted out of the.

Labor force technically, regardless of whether.

It's your choice or not, but the point is, is for those statistics, going back to those statistics, the unemployment numbers, that unemployment figure of you're out of a job, you're able to work and you've been looking for the last four weeks.

That only applies to people who are considered part of the labor force.

The labor force is not the entire population.

The labor force is like 60% of the population, you know, hearing.

How this number is kind of bullshit is helpful for me because the number 4.2 does not represent the reality that I see in the job market.

Yeah.

And I think that's the.

Problem if you have millions of people missing from the workforce and the unemployment rate is being artificially depressed and it gets used.

By the rulers for their particular purposes, which are usually to attack the bigger benefits that the population gets.

Totally.

One of the things I you notice as a pattern, as if the unemployment figures and similar such metrics come out with numbers that the political establishment consider to be favorable.

What they will do is say, well, things are going so well, we need to cut entitlements.

What they call entitlements.

The meager benefits that people get if the numbers come out and they're not very good, then they will say, well, we need to cut entitlements because we can't afford to keep spending like that.

The country's going into debt either way they they come at it.

It's being used as a cudgel to go after the small amount of benefits that this country gives out to the population, which are historically the result of massive struggles by working people in this country.

What you said about entitlements is.

Totally true, because even just that word that's used, entitlements, which is used to demonize and villainize people who are struggling, and it's totally tied to this idea that poor people are completely undeserving.

Rich people like Elon Musk are totally deserving.

They can get as many bailouts as they want.

They get all their entitlements.

They're never demonized.

Yeah, the fact that Elon Musk get.

Tax breaks.

It makes me insane.

This country really believes that.

If you are wealthy and have quote UN quote made it, it means you're good.

And if you are poor and impoverished, it means you're bad.

Yeah, you are to blame for your own lot.

Yeah, this country.

Criminalizes poverty.

Yeah.

And what you were saying before.

About how companies use what's happening in the economy as an excuse.

I can't even tell you how often I hear the term economic headwinds.

What does that even mean?

Economic to to a normal human being it means that.

The business is not it's, it doesn't mean anything because corporate profits are still breaking records.

So I can't even say that it means anything.

It literally means we might not get as many profits as we projected, so we're going to have to cut.

Your wages in advance benefits.

Or job.

In advance exactly and.

What's really messed up, of course, is that then it becomes this race to the bottom.

You have unionization rights that have plummeted.

You have fewer protections, fewer pensions, like who gets a pension anymore.

So that's interesting.

And I'm like to use it to pivot a little bit to statistics, but ones that I think might actually be indicative.

Sorry, Sir, Lies.

Damn lies and statistics.

As Mark Twain said, let's see the lies.

And the damn lies and the statistics here.

One of the things that's interesting when you talk about previous generations, what people harken back to when America was supposedly great in the 1950s and 60s, is you had a much higher unionization rate that resulted in higher wages and benefits for working people.

But the anchor of that unionization, and indeed the anchor of the whole economy, was manufacturing.

That was where the American economy was strong.

And partly it had to do with the fact, which we're not going to get into here, but it had to do the fact that after the Second World War, the US was basically the only economy left standing among the big advanced capitalist countries.

But so this is interesting.

In 1960, if you look at the approximate share of the gross domestic product or gross national products, they called it the time.

The number one part of the share was manufacturing.

That doesn't include service or anything.

And it accounted for 28%.

If you go down to what was then #4 they had a category called finance, insurance and real estate.

But sometimes it's, it's abbreviated as FIRE and it's what you can call trading in fictitious capital, stocks, bonds, investments, those kinds of things that accounted in nineteen, 6413%, so 28%.

And then #4 at 13%, what I'll call rentier capitalism.

Fast forward to this year, 2025 GDP breakdown number one at 21 percent is rentier.

Capitalism is fire, finance, insurance and real estate, and #5 is manufacturing at 11 percent.

The pain that working people are feeling isn't just because a job is paying less money, it's because the jobs that are available are shit jobs.

What used to be good, decent paying manufacturing jobs are disappearing and have disappeared and have long been disappearing.

And what it you instead get is a bunch of capitalist making a ridiculous amount of money trading in investments and the like, and basically these service industry jobs that are, you know, as an old friend of of ours like to call Mick jobs and workers are feeling the pain of that.

And it's also translated into the destruction of these massive manufacturing unions.

So first of all.

Manufacturing jobs are not coming back.

No.

Second of all, they left because the capitalist class found cheaper sources of Labor abroad.

Yep.

Not that we have to get into all the insurance and outs of it, but you have this sort of circus show happening in this country since Trump took office of tariffs, tariffs on this country.

Then the tariffs get suspended and they come back and they get suspended.

And there's supposed reason for that is you're going to put those tariffs on because they're going to somehow bring jobs back to America, and manufacturing jobs specifically, they're not.

But the way it gets talked about, whether it's by Trump or by others, including Democrats, is that the loss of manufacturing jobs is something that happened to America.

Oh, poor America had suffered this.

No, it was done to America by American capitalist for the reason that you laid out, because they saw that manufacturing was cheaper abroad and went for that.

But for another reason as well.

When you started getting in the 1960s, W European and Japanese capitalist, having recovered from the Second World War, competing with the US, American capitalist made a decision that it is far cheaper to not engage in that direct competition and instead engage in speculation as a way to bring in massive profits.

As opposed to having to, for example, reinvest in all your factories and bring them up to speed so they can compete with Japanese capitals.

Just let them go ship off the manufacturing somewhere else and we're going to make our money in speculation.

And you know what?

They were right for them.

The rest of the country went to hell, but they've made massive profits and they're going to continue to do it.

That's why it's never coming back.

So the guillotines come up.

Guillotine.

Guillotine.

Do we pronounce it guillotine or?

Guillotine.

We pronounce it the American.

Way guillotine.

You know, and we're talking a lot about.

Manufacturing and obviously that was a really huge portion of the American workforce.

And then I think after that, one of our biggest industries was tech.

And now with AI coming, we're already seeing huge layoffs in that industry.

So the future seems very, very uncertain.

And like you said, manufacturing is certainly not coming back.

We just don't have the infrastructure or even the will, as you guys say also.

That's very relevant.

This is drifting a little bit, but into the AI point is that all these companies invested A tremendous amount in AII, think it was like 30 or 40 billion into Gen.

AI and they have gotten 0 returns. 95% of.

Organizations that invested heavily in AI have gotten no returns for their investment whatsoever, which is why I'm a little.

Bit dubious about whether really 30 or 50%, yeah, that's when that 20. 40 number or whatever it is you're by 20-30 are going.

To be taken by AII mean it's possible.

This technology is young, it's growing, but it hasn't really reached that level of maturity yet.

Yet, but it is growing fast.

And also, regardless of where it goes or what the numbers are, the people on the bottom are going to pay the price absolutely.

And the people at the.

TOP are going to do everything in their power to make sure that happens.

It's just a further further.

Concentration of wealth, Yeah, I was just thinking.

You know, having used Homer Simpson earlier as a paragon of of American culture and philosophy, I always think it's interesting that when The Simpsons first aired, it was I think 1989.

The character was Homer Simpson at a dead end job.

Marge Simpson as a stay at home mom.

Literally it's the standard American family from the 1950s.

Two and a half kids, Bart, Lisa and the half kid being Maggie.

They had a cat and a dog and they lived in a house, 2 cars, everything.

I mean, the dog was pretty skinny.

The dog was pretty skinny.

You're right, the dog was pretty skinny and it was always about how they were having a hard time making ends meet.

But you have to always remember it was a one income household.

And when it came out in 1989, I would say it was still kind of believable, but, but on the cusp of it not being believable, you know, I, I, I don't know if I would.

Classify it as a dead end job, though.

He worked at a nuclear power plant and he was an idiot.

But that I think was a part of it.

Is that like anybody, no college degree could have this job.

So I had epitomized that, I think exactly, exactly and at one point.

There was one one episode where, Oh my God, Homer's gone, how are we going to replace him?

And it was just a, a stick hanging on a, a brick hanging on a stick.

And that basically did Homer's job for a week while he was gone.

But it was believable.

I think in 1989 was at that very cusp where you could have a one income household like that and it didn't strain credulity too much.

I think if that show were to launch today and you have that setting, it would no one would even believe.

It would just be impossible to even conceive A to have that setting today.

Well, none of us are.

Doing as good as Homer, that's for sure.

That's for sure.

So what's the?

Retirement plan.

Guys, I don't know the.

Apocalypse is my.

Retirement plan, I think that's all of our retirement.

Plan at this point, but.

We don't love anybody who doesn't love us.

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