Millions of food insecure Americans are being treated like bargaining chips in a political showdown. They have no political power, no lobbyists, and no way to influence whether the government reopens. Using them as leverage is cruel.

People aren't happy with the state of the economy and the real weakness for the GOP is that independents are less happy about it than they were a year ago. You can't just lie to people about energy prices, they will open their heating bill and see the difference pretty clearly.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you that intelligence shows anything “without a doubt,” but even if the intelligence was water-tight, this strike was still murder. No law permits the deliberate, premeditated killing of civilians.

Cities with violent crime rates higher than DC: Memphis, Tennessee Houston, Texas Nashville, Tennessee Evansville, Indiana Peoria, Illinois Toleda, Ohio Cleveland, Ohio St Louis, Missouri Kansas City, Missouri Springfield, Missouri Little Rock, Arkansas for more: usafacts.org/articles/how...

I understand why Trump wants a command and control economy with him at the center. What is confusing to me is why the entire Republican party is so willing to walk so far from a competitive, market-based economy.

If the concern was really around accuracy why did the Trump administration dismiss the **uncompensated** Technical Advisory Committee and the Data Users Advisory Committee, which gave guidance on statistical methodology and specialized economic expertise?

There were 159,539,000 jobs in July. The fears about accuracy refer to the possibility that it was actually 159,439,000 or 159,639,000. Don't get me wrong, I like accurate numbers more than most people, but still: the data is pretty darn good and suspending the data is corrupt.

One easy way to hide rising unemployment, slowing job growth, and rising prices would be to pause the data release for a few months in the name of "accuracy" and then release it with new definitions a few months later that make it incomparable to the past.

The Fed can't be dovish or hawkish right now, they have to be doggish--data doggish that is. nytimes.com/2025/07/02/b...

Tariffs are not going to mean that we have more goods-producing jobs in the US. What they will do is change the relative price of goods versus services, pushing Americans to buy fewer goods relative to services. If you are worried about American overconsumption of stuff, then hooray! 🧵

The United States GDP per capita is 20 times great than it was at the start of the Guilded Age. And yet so many in power remain just as insensitive, greedy, and detached from the realities of poverty and suffering. Imagine getting that much richer and not using any of it on empathy.

This fun, creative contest seriously highlights how hard the entire Planet Money team works to communicate economics in a way that both educates and entertains.

The public needs to hear this over and over again: work requirements are not about getting Medicaid recipients to work. It’s about increasing the administrative burdens and costs in the system to push both recipients and the program itself to the breaking point.

You might be getting bored of tariff talk but the rubber is going to hit the road in the coming months as price increases hit. Walmart tells investors that it's raising prices later this month. And inflation expectations have shot up a shocking amount in the Michigan consumer survey released today.

If they really wanted to incentivize work, they would require married stay-at-home moms to work. The second earner effect is their best chance for a work requirement to influence work at all. There is no first earner impact.

Walmart might not raise every price by the amount of the tariff, but they aren't going to let their profitability suffer. Their shareholders demand profit maximization and that means passing along tariffs to the fullest extent possible without losing too many sales.

On @allinwithchris.bsky.social @chrislhayes.bsky.social asked me why tariffs will raise prices if a higher minimum wage doesn't always lead to higher prices. The answer: People are not things. They respond to a change in their compensation, a sippy cup doesn't.

It's true. President Trump is forcing economists to rewrite their textbooks. #TeachEcon @betseystevenson.bsky.social

And now Walmart is telling us definitely higher prices in June. Just because there aren’t problems in the hard data yet, doesn’t mean that they aren’t forecastably coming.

My concern is that we'll see a weaker employment report in June and July, of course the labor market was strong in April. That report measured the weak after liberation day and despite the shock of Trump's tariffs, employers aren't going to shed workers that quickly.

I didn't post my NBC Fed preview before the press conference. Luckily my preview was exactly what they did and said.

Reporters seem to think that the only direction for rates to go is down, but Powell shuts that assumption down by saying "once you have a clear direction" Rates could go either way people!!! It depends on what happens with inflation.

The Fed can wait because they can't change a decline in supply due to the distruption in imports. They can try to decrease demand for that reduction in supply to help reduce inflationary pressure, but they can't create jobs to make up for those lost due to the reduction in imported goods.

Powell made a pretty strong case for why the Fed has to ensure that the one time price increase caused by tariffs doesn't cause inflation expectations to become unanchored.

Nothing Powell said is surprising, this is the sensible decision making of a balanced and reasonable group of monetary policy makers who are walking a tight rope.

Powell: data is not clear what they should do. Bottom line is that wages are good, job creation is fine, layoffs are normal, and consumer demand shows no sign of slowing. The problem: the crash to businesses from tariffs is coming and there is nothing the Fed can do about it.

Powell once again refuses to comment on Trump or Trump's ability or desire to fire him. So smart. You won't get any headlines beyond monetary policy out of Powell. His comms team is 🔥🔥

"They don't need our advice on fiscal policy any more than we need their advice on monetary policy."😂😂🔥🔥

Yesterday I said that a slowing job market doesn't start with a monthly jobs report that shows a dramatic drop in jobs added, it starts with a slowdown in openings being posted (which we are seeing). This jobs report shows an economy that is still strong, but that doesn't mean that it is stable.

“I don’t worry about fertility as in, ‘We have got to fix fertility.’ I worry that American families are not thriving, and one symptom of that is we can see them having fewer children.” -- @betseystevenson.bsky.social www.thebulwark.com/p/can-donald...

Large tariffs on China will cause some American small business owners market to collapse, taking the jobs of the workers who support them. Their problem is that they don't have Tim Cook's political clout to get "helped" by President Trump.

There is definitely something ironic about Trump tanking the economy with tariffs and then tanking it further by threatening the monetary system out of frustration that Powell won't give him a 25 basis point rate cut (ostensibly to prevent the economy from tanking).

I have a lot of dumb kitchen gadgets, made in China, but designed by & employing lots of Americans. We aren't going to make these things in the US, we are just going to have less of them and Americans will have fewer jobs.

Trump says Powell faces a lot of political pressure. Yes, and that's why we have central bank independence.

It will reduce quality of life and shrink the economy. Why? If you can’t trust baby food to not kill your kid, you make your own. If you can’t trust toys to not kill your kid you buy fewer toys, focusing on a few trustworthy brands. If you can’t trust planes not to crash you fly less.

The “economist” they are all turning to can’t get through a basic intro Econ course. He has no knowledge about basic concepts like supply and demand. It’s why he is so comfortable ignoring them in his analysis of the tariffs. It’s easy to not see the harm if you don’t know how markets work.

What a time to be a lobbyist. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04...

Political appointees have a responsibility to learn the details of the programs they are trying to change. The ignorance here is shocking.

Fiscal policy is supposed to help reduce volatility, not amplify it.

It's not just a tariff shock, it's also a competence shock, and that might even be the bigger problem.

I’m sure the tariffs aren’t helping but in this specific case it might be more because we’re locking tourists up in detention centers

Here's the problem: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I just got a notice that an academic conference for 2026 was being moved from the US to Canada because of concerns people have with entering the US. The cell phone searches and random detentions at the border are going to have long-term negative effects on the US.

People arguing that the Trump 1 tariffs didn't cause inflation so these ones won't either don't understand magnitudes. They are the same people who say "If you think a $15 minimum wage won't reduce employment, how come you don't support a $50 minimum wage?"

Milton Friedman isn't my hero and didn't even come up with I, Pencil, but I really think the entire administration needs to watch this video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tH...

The US is trashing our National Parks by firing tons of park rangers, leaving the remaining crew ill prepared to receive paying or non-paying guests. Meanwhile in Canada….

My favorite part is Justin quoting our kid who complained that tariffs caused Nintendo Switch 2 production delays. It's not just that the prices will be higher but tariffs will change what's available for us to buy. When Q decreases it is bad for variety and bad for competition and bad for profits.

I am getting fed up with the nonsense. They are not reciprocal tariffs: they are punitive, illogical, self-destructive tariffs. They can't even help reignite the golden age of manufacturing because they can't give us 1950s technology and almost everything is made with something that is imported.

My heart goes out to every international student in the United States. Foreign students have helped make American universities the best in the world. Without them America will suffer.

I get the impression that Trump is no longer using the stock market as a measure of the success of his administration.