Maybe those Wall Street traders shouldn’t have shared their TACO joke with the press. The President is now showing that Trump doesn’t Always Chicken Out by moving forward with the acceleration of his economy-busting tariffs. That’s bad news for working people whose wages and employment opportunities grew significantly in recent years as a direct result of high gross domestic product (GDP) and job growth. That seems to be ending.
Sage Economics Week in Review said, “Employers simply aren’t hiring. The only other time the hiring rate has been this low was during and immediately after the 2008 financial crash…It’s a good time to have a job and a bad time to need one.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics August 1 jobs report was the primary source of the Sage commentary. It was a shock after four years with an average 395,000 new jobs per month to see that numbers for May and June were 19,000 and 14,000. The initial estimate for July is 73,000, but it’s the hard data that comes in later that tells the true story, and if trends continue, it will be lower.
Nobody should be surprised that employers aren’t hiring like they did in recent years. Businesses invest when they are confident in their business plans, when there is an educated and healthy workforce, financially stable customers, a consistent regulatory environment, and consistent tax policies. They don’t invest when their workforce is being deported and the imported products they rely on come with new 15%-50% import taxes that change every week.
In Anne Arundel County, we’ve not yet seen our unemployment numbers rise, but we have seen a surge in applicants for what has been a steady number of open county jobs. For non-public safety positions, the applicant pool grew from 15,289 to 22,703 over the last year. Even in the harder-to-fill public safety positions, the growth was from 5,153 to 6,799. Across all county job categories, 1,031 of the recent applicants were people seeking to move on from federal government employment.
Employers get some benefit from higher unemployment rates. It’s a lot easier to deny a raise to workers when there’s a line of others eager to replace them. But as someone responsible for the overall well-being of our county’s economy and people, I don’t like high unemployment.
I’ve written in this letter before about the alignment of interests in recent years between employers and community when demand for workers exceeds supply. I have loved hearing business owners advocating for better public education, more affordable housing, improved public health, and re-entry programs to grow the pool of qualified workers. Many will maintain these public policy priorities even as the supply of unemployed workers grows because they are caring people, but the economic pressure to expand our workforce through education and health will recede. That’s unfortunate.
Economic cycles and the trauma that the downturns cause to families at the low end of the income scale are nothing new. The difference this time is that the fundamentals of the economy are strong, and according to mainstream economists, the downturn is a direct result of deliberate policy decisions being made by one man, with mass deportation and tariffs being the primary drivers. The secondary impact will come from more than one man. That’s the Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, when implemented, will slash the social safety net and thereby push middle class consumers into poverty, which shrinks the consumer base that the economy relies on. All of it is deliberate. They know the economic impact of what they are doing, but they are doing it with glee. They are celebrating the harm and destruction.
Between elections, when we the people are powerless to fix what politicians are breaking, we can at least monitor and document what’s happening, understand the causes, speak up about the impacts, and be prepared to build back better when new leaders replace the old. Your county government is doing those things, and I hope you are as well.
Until next week…