Michael Hicks

A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump

“Ms. Easterly’s rise in elite policy circles over three decades and her sudden fall at the hands of Ms. Loomer, 32, tell the story of how Washington is changing during Mr. Trump’s second term and why it might never be the same.” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...

I am a labor economist who studies education policy

Today in my tiny world:

Commissioner of labor statistics fired bc president did not like jobs data

Staff at education science agency terminated

🤣😂🤣😂😂

Gotta say, the MAGA folks on the other site are quieter today than I've them in years.

Guy who was convicted on 34 counts of first‑degree falsification of business records says the numbers were rigged.

Dr. Erika McEntarfer has devoted her career to public service. She has conducted herself as BLS Commissioner with great integrity. There is no evidence whatsoever that BLS data are politically biased.

#econsky

The rank stupidity of this firing, even if it is reversed, is that there'll be an asymmetric mistrust of the data for a long, long time.

Good news (which we will eventually have) will be heavily discounted, while bad news is likely to generate excessive alarm.

More self owns . . .

Okay, *now you can start to worry about data being manipulated.

The job market is showing signs of weakness as Trump's tariffs take effect U.S. employers added just 73,000 jobs in July, according to a report from the Labor Department Friday, as the unemployment rate inched up to 4.2%. Job gains for May and June were also revised sharply ...

Today's jobs report shows 24,000 factory jobs lost in the past three months.

Trump’s first term brought a manufacturing recession. Now his reckless tariffs are making Americans worse off, again.

Impeccable timing . . .

Page One. 🤡

@wsj.com $F

Who could have anticipated that stochastic (hormal?) deployment of known job killing policies would kill jobs? A real mystery #MAGA.

Note: Anticipate more downward revisions.

The number “accounts for workers at dozens of agencies who took offers from the government as of June to get paid through Sept. 30 — the end of the fiscal year — or the end of 2025 and then voluntarily leave government ..”

@washingtonpost.com
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

“.. Durable goods have risen in price by 1.7% so far year to date. Other than the depths of the pandemic, that's the strongest 6-month rise in #PCE durables prices since 1987.”

@ernietedeschi.bsky.social

Tomorrow, focus on final sales to private domestic purchasers (not GDP)... and see if it's decelerated again #econsky
econbrowser.com/archives/202...

Federal place-based policy and the geography of inequality in the United States, 1990–2019 Abstract. This paper assesses the growth and spatial distribution of federal place-based policies in the United States. Using a novel dataset of federal pl

📣 Hot off the press 📣
We document tremendous growth in U.S. federal place-based funding, show it has disproportionately gone to areas with more nonprofits & stronger housing markets, and find a pattern of cumulative advantage in funding among high-poverty neighborhoods.

doi.org/10.1093/sf/s...

These two sentences, by themselves, literally ought to suffice to establish a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

This gives me hope! Thank you Scotland, you are our brethren across the pond & we love you!!!

How on earth could Stellantis lose $1.7 billion from tariffs? I was certain the Chinese/Mexican/Canadian firms were paying for them . . .

I guess MAGA just wants to go back to the time when US auto makers were unprofitable.

🍎 In FY2023, the National School Lunch Program provided 4.6B lunches. Now, Hilary Hoynes & coauthors find that school lunch reduces children's caloric intake by reducing soda/fat consumption. In the wake of #USDA cuts, this evidence should be top of mind: static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd7...

A Massive Health Care Shock Is Coming And there is little time—and maybe not enough will from Republicans—to avert it.

Trump’s own pollster has warned that insurance sticker shock could be a significant political liability. Republicans *might* want to fix this problem, but even then, they may not have the time. @citizencohn.bsky.social on another looming healthcare crisis:

The same guy telling you he’s not in the Epstein files, told you Mexico was going to pay for the wall, and people were eating dogs in Ohio.

So, as I suspected, the police response to the shootings of Democratic elected officials in Minnesota was actually a complete disaster www.startribune.com/new-details-...

Looks like there might have been a bumpy start to that multi-ethnic working class majority party I've heard so much about.

I know there's a type of person who desperately wants to believe students aren't assigned books anymore, but here's a list of the most frequently taught books by 6-12 grade teachers (n=~4,000).

Sure looks like a lot of books. Wild how many are the same ones I read in HS 3 decades ago.

I gave a campus talk last night on Trump's first 100 days for the WUD Society & Politics group. A student asked me if I thought that, at some point, we might start to describe the US as a competitive authoritarian regime. I said that we were already there, it's just that most folks haven't noticed:

It would appear axiomatic that we won't get a more classically liberal set of institutions through more illiberal demands.

The fact that the President of the United States posts a fake video of a kneeling Barack Obama being handcuffed and we’re supposed to pretend it’s perfectly normal, everyday stuff shows exactly what is terribly wrong with today’s political mainstream media.

West Virginia. Their PBS stations are everywhere and there is not much radio otherwise. Certainly no news.