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Economy
Jobs Report Seen as 'Calm Before the Storm' as Trump Chaos Rattles US Economy
"Donald Trump is on track to be the first president to deliberately engineer a severe depression," warned one observer.
Mar 07, 2025
Labor Department figures released Friday show that U.S. job growth was weaker than expected last month as President Donald Trump worked to eviscerate the federal government—the nation's largest employer—and whiplashed financial markets with his erratic tariff announcements and reversals.
The U.S. added 151,000 jobs in February, fewer than the projected 170,000. But economists stressed that the numbers don't yet show the full extent of the damage Trump has done in the opening weeks of his second White House term.
"Unfortunately, this is the calm before the storm as trouble is clearly brewing and the pain will be felt across the economy in coming months," said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
While Gould stressed that "it's too soon" for jobs data to reflect the impact of the Trump administration's effort, in concert with billionaire Elon Musk, to gut the federal workforce—which has impacted some 100,000 government employees thus far—she said emerging numbers are still cause for concern.
"Nominal wage growth continues to hold steady, rising 4% over the year," Gould noted. "After falling steadily since its peak in June 2022, inflation has hovered around 3% for 20 months. As a result, average real wages have been rising. These gains could all be lost with the proposed tariffs and deportations."
The jobs data comes a day after Trump declared on his social media platform that "the Golden Age of America has just begun"—a message that appeared incongruous with economic trends and the perceptions of small business owners, investors, and working-class Americans facing a potentially massive tax hike and looming cuts to food assistance, Medicaid, and other benefits.
"Just one month on the job, warning signs are flashing across the Trump economy," Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement Friday. "Inflation is rising, consumer confidence is plummeting, business investment is pulling back, and now, the labor market is stalling."
"Instead of focusing on tax breaks for billionaires and giant corporations," Jacquez added, "Trump should find a way to get the economy back on track for working families before it spirals into recession."
"Trump has the power to issue commands in the domains that he controls, but he can't command the stock market to levitate, or prices to moderate, or consumers to feel confident, or people who have just been laid off to go out and shop."
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a billionaire, conceded Friday that the U.S. economy is showing signs of wavering but insisted it's a "natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending."
"We've become addicted to this government spending, and there's going to be a detox period," Bessent told CNBC.
But economists have warned that Trump's instability and constantly changing whims could result in a prolonged reduction in private investment. The president's tariff policy has been so chaotic that it has some wondering whether he's trying to wreck the economy on purpose.
"If we don't get clarity by the back half of this year, economic uncertainty can be like a deer in the headlights," Nancy Lazar, chief global economist at the investment bank Piper Sandler, toldThe New York Times on Friday. "Things just stop. Business confidence is muted, employment is muted, and capital spending is put on hold."
Richard Trent, executive director of the Main Street Alliance, said in a statement Friday that "small business owners don't need more chaos."
"In the past month alone, market turmoil has frozen hiring, disrupted key programs, and rattled confidence," said Trent. "There's still time to correct this, but that requires President Trump and Elon Musk to work with Congress, follow the law, and restore stability. Main Street needs steady leadership, not chaos and cutbacks."
In a column earlier this week,The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner wrote that less than two months into his second term, "Donald Trump is on track to be the first president to deliberately engineer a severe depression."
"Trump has the power to issue commands in the domains that he controls, but he can't command the stock market to levitate, or prices to moderate, or consumers to feel confident, or people who have just been laid off to go out and shop," Kuttner wrote. "In a couple of weeks, the budget talks will reach the point of an increasingly likely government shutdown. Closing the government will be even more of a hit to total demand and consumer and investor confidence."
"In agreeing to reopen the government, Democrats are in a good position to demand that Trump reopen the whole government, starting with the parts that Musk has illegally shut down," he added. "In the meantime, this engineered crisis is entirely Trump's."
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Trump Delays Some Mexican, Canadian Tariffs After Talk With Sheinbaum
"Everything Trump does on trade maximizes chaos and uncertainty," said one lawmaker.
Mar 06, 2025
In a move that one Democratic lawmaker said would further harm the United States' "credibility and our economy," U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday postponed tariffs on certain Canadian and Mexican imports after a discussion with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Trump had imposed 25% tariffs on the countries' imports on Tuesday, saying the levies were aimed at pressuring Canada and Mexico to take more action to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States.
Sheinbaum, who had threatened to impose tariffs in retaliation, said in a press conference that she convinced Trump to delay the tariffs on products traded under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) until April 2.
The Mexican leader said she had sent Trump U.S. Customs and Border Protection data showing that fentanyl trafficking has already dropped significantly in recent months, with seizures of the drug decreasing by 40% over the past month.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum: “It’s a very definitive moment for Mexico, depending on what happens these days until Sunday. There will be no submission. Mexicans are brave, resistant, and full of strength.”
Sheinbaum’s statement comes as Mexico prepares to respond to U.S.… https://t.co/IgdSEzqdL7 pic.twitter.com/LvxdvOVfq3
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) March 6, 2025
Sheinbaum said she asked Trump, "How can we continue cooperating, collaborating when this hurts the people of Mexico?"
"It was simply: 'Understand me. The most important thing is my people,'" she said Thursday. "'And I need to continue collaborating and cooperating with you, but in a situation of equality.'"
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, noted that only a very small amount of fentanyl enters the U.S. from Canada.
Trump did not make a public statement about delaying the Canadian tariffs on Thursday, but included them in an executive order he signed postponing them.
The president also delayed 25% tariffs on auto industry imports on Wednesday after car manufacturers said the levies would hit them hard financially.
U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said businesses across the U.S. "are delaying decisions, investments, and hiring, because they don't know what Trump will do."
"Everything Trump does on trade maximizes chaos and uncertainty," said Beyer. "Keeping his tariffs in place will cost families up to $2,000, but imposing and lifting them over and over again also has a cost."
With Trump's delay only applying to goods traded under USMCA, the White House said 62% of imports from Canada and 50% of those Mexico will still face the tariffs that were imposed this week. Experts have stressed that these costs will be passed on to consumers.
Outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday that the country expects "to be in a trade war that was launched by the United States for the foreseeable future."
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Warren Demands Big Tech CEOs Come Clean on Cozying Up to Trump for Corporate Tax Giveaways
Given that "American taxpayers will shoulder the burden of tax cuts" for major tech companies, she argued, "they deserve answers."
Mar 06, 2025
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren this week sent letters to five Big Tech executives—including the world's three richest individuals—to sound the alarm about their "personal and financial ties to the Trump administration" and how they "may be exploiting" those relationships for billions of dollars in corporate tax breaks.
The Massachusetts Democrat's targets include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the wealthiest person on Earth and head of President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, which is leading the administration's effort to dismantle the federal bureaucracy.
She also wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta—which owns Facebook and Instagram—as well as Amazon.com founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos. As of Thursday, they are respectively the second- and third-wealthiest people on the planet. Warren's final two letters went to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
"This $75 billion windfall is only one slice of the billions of dollars that you stand to gain from Republican efforts to lower your taxes while raising costs for working families."
Warren and other Democrats on Capitol Hill are intensely critical of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which congressional Republicans passed and Trump signed in 2017. The law was largely crafted to serve rich individuals and businesses, including by slashing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.
Now that the GOP has regained control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, its members are aiming to extend expiring provisions of the TCJA—funded by gutting programs for the working class.
As Warren's office noted in a Thursday statement, the TCJA ended "a corporate tax break known as research and development (R&D) expensing to help pay for their tax cuts for the ultrawealthy. This tax break allowed companies to deduct the total cost of their R&D expenses immediately, instead of deducting them over time, as is the standard practice in the tax code."
"This change was one of the few parts of the 2017 bill that forced companies to pay higher taxes," her office explained. "Now, corporations want to revert back to the pre-2017 rules—and not only do corporations want to apply immediate R&D expensing to future tax years, but they are also pushing to retroactively apply these deductions to 2022, 2023, and 2024."
Warren's letters cite a recent independent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which found that retroactive application of R&D expensing alone would slash each company's tax bill by billions of dollars—specifically, Tesla: $2.5 billion; Meta: $15 billion; Amazon: $22 billion; Apple: $10 billion; and Alphabet: $24 billion.
In other words, Warren wrote, "collectively, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Tesla are projected to win $75 billion if Congress awards them retroactive R&D tax expensing—nearly double what the federal government spends on child nutrition programs each year and a fantastic return on investment for the millions you have spent lobbying on the tax fight."
"And this $75 billion windfall is only one slice of the billions of dollars that you stand to gain from Republican efforts to lower your taxes while raising costs for working families," she continued, pointing out that GOP lawmakers may "succeed in lowering the corporate tax rate even further, as President Trump has sought, or in handing out other tax giveaways to massive corporations."
Given that "American taxpayers will shoulder the burden of tax cuts" for major tech companies, "they deserve answers," argued Warren, a member of the Senate Finance Committee. She demanded responses to a list of questions by March 19.
Warren's inquiries include how much the companies are spending on lobbying for Republicans' tax legislation, and the R&D provision specifically; which trade associations, lobbying coalitions, or similar entities that they are a part of; and how much they have given, directly or indirectly, to federal elected officials who are advocating for corporate tax giveaways.
The senator also asked "exactly how much" of the retroactive tax breaks that the tech giants would put toward R&D investment and how they expect it will impact the companies' outlook for stock buybacks and executive compensation.
The potential tax law change is just one way Republican control of the federal government could benefit Big Tech. As the watchdog Public Citizen highlighted Tuesday, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Tesla are among dozens of companies with ties to the Trump administration that could benefit from its efforts to end corporate probes and enforcement actions.
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Critics Ask If Trump and Musk Are 'Intentionally Crashing the Economy'
"If you think back at the last economic crashes... the rich were able to buy up assets on the cheap and emerged even wealthier and more powerful than before," noted one progressive commentator.
Mar 05, 2025
Are U.S. President Donald Trump, top adviser Elon Musk, and allied oligarchs deliberately trying to tank the economy in order to line their own gilded pockets?
More and more observers from both sides of the political aisle are asking the question this week as the U.S. president implemented steep tariffs on some of the country's biggest trade partners, threatened a global trade war, and is taking chainsaw to government spending and programs—policies that, while inflicting economic pain upon nearly everyone else, could dramatically boost their already stratospheric wealth.
Numerous observers have likened it to the " disaster capitalism" examined in Naomi Klein's seminal 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism—politicians and plutocrats exploit the chaos of natural or human-caused crises to push through unpopular policies like privatization and deregulation that harm the masses while boosting the wealth and power of the ruling class.
Economic alarm bells were already ringing before Trump's 25% tariffs on most products from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on China—for a total of 20%—took effect on Tuesday, prompting retaliatory measures and threats of more to come.
Then, during his rambling joint address to Congress on Tuesday night, Trump threatened to impose reciprocal tariffs on every nation on Earth starting April 2 (because he "didn't want to be accused of April Fools' Day") if those countries did not lower barriers to trade with the United States.
@jamellebouie Replying to @C. Stetzer ♬ original sound - b-boy bouiebaisse
New York Times economic policy reporters Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson called Trump's sweeping tariffs "one of the biggest gambles of his presidency," and a move "that risks undermining the United States economy."
But what if that's the whole point?
"I've been entertaining this theory a little bit more lately, because [Trump's] economic moves seem so stupid and terrible and counterproductive without thinking that he is intentionally trying to cause harm," progressive political commentator Krystal Ball—who also has a degree in economics and is a certified public accountant— said Tuesday on the social media site X.
Ball cited an X
post by Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive Democrat running for Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) House seat who worked on Wall Street for six years and helped found the online payment processing company Stripe, in which he accused Trump of "manufacturing a recession."
"But it makes sense when you realize his goal is to create something like Russia where the economy is run by a few oligarchs loyal to him," Chakrabarti added. "Creating that state is hard in a large, dynamic, powerful economy with too many actors who can oppose him. So he's accelerating concentrating money and power into the hands of his loyalists while he crashes the rest out."
Responding to this, Ball asserted that "at this point, until proven otherwise, the primary actor in the government and the economy is actually Elon, so I think it makes sense to think of Elon's incentives here and what he may actually want to accomplish."
"If you think back at the last economic crashes—both in Covid and in the 2008 financial crash—while initially everyone suffered, including the rich, out of both, the rich were able to buy up assets on the cheap and emerged even wealthier and more powerful than before," she noted.
"So in 2008, not only did they get their own custom bailout, but they were able to buy housing stock at absurdly low prices," Ball recalled. "The rich got richer than ever, inequality skyrocketed, and the big banks got bigger than ever."
"Same deal with the Covid-era recession," she continued. "So, while again, everyone suffered initially, there was a huge bailout package which, yes, did benefit ordinary people, but if you look at who came out really on top... you could see people like Elon Musk, people like Jeff Bezos, people like Mark Zuckerberg getting far wealthier. Their net worths, which were already very high, skyrocketed beyond anyone's wildest dreams."
Indeed, as Common Dreamsreported, 700 billionaires got $1.7 trillion richer during two years of pandemic. Between March 2020 and April 2022, Musk got 10 times richer, while Zuckerberg's net worth more than tripled and Bezos' grew by nearly $80 billion, according to Forbes.
"Here's the other piece that's worth thinking about as well," Ball added. "Crash and crisis leads to governments and authoritarian leaders claiming more power for themselves. They can use the crisis and the emergency as a justification for taking on extraordinary powers and for taking extraordinary measures... measures that can be custom fit to primarily benefit oligarchs like Elon Musk."
"So I don't know guys, while we're running around here going... 'can't they understand how this is going to be devastating for the economy,' maybe they do understand," she concluded, "and maybe that's kind of the point."
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