Save a Dollar
Tuesday, February 12, 2026
I’ve been writing a bit and then forgetting to post, or not completing the post.
But here goes with another one.
Bad Bunny – seems the MAGA folks don’t know Puerto Rico is populated by Americans. They know they speak Spanish (Bad) and not English (Good). I wonder what they’d say if they discovered the last time it was suggested to have another language as part of the official U.S. language and it was German?
The Jobs Report – It came out and the explanations and the figures are fascinating. The jobs number for the month is 130,000 for the month, which is strong, but noisy. What does that mean? It means the actual number is somewhere between 7,700 and 152,000 and the 130,000 is splitting the difference or so they say. If I do (152,000-7,700) / 2 I get 72,150. Whatever.
That jobs number of 130,000 is considered strong. However, remember it is “noisy” and will get adjusted as more data comes in, provided of course there is someone competent left to handle the data.
However, if one looks at the number of jobs added since January 2025 it is 359,000. this number is a lot less subject to fluctuation (ie noise) and covers the first year of Trump. How’s he doing? Well, that number under Biden for his last year in office was 900,000 jobs added. You don’t have to be an economist to realize things are slowing down.
What explains this? Ah well you see according to the economic dynamos that Trump has ie Peter Navarro and Kevin Hassett the problem is that millions of workers have been deported.
Now if this makes you stop and wonder WTF? you’d be right to wonder. ICE has arrested 393,000 people, not millions. And weren’t they arresting and deporting criminals not workers? Is someone lying? I’ll be kind here. You are lying if you know the truth. If you are totally friggin’ clueless and pulling stuff out of your rear end that’s well – on snap – lying. Nevermind.
The picture gets worse. Manufacturing jobs, the manly jobs Trump wanted to bring back, they’ve declined too.
There is one thing that supports the Trumper analysis. Native born jobs taken rose last year. It was a temporary spike for a year and then fell.
This could be used to say that illegals were taking jobs from native born. But is that true? Probably not. In fact, taking away the immigrants’ jobs has hurt native born jobs. What? How? And it has set us on a path of decline in population just like Japan and China are experiencing.
It turns out immigrants, illegal or otherwise, take jobs in specific pockets of the economy. Notably construction, agriculture, food processing especially meat packing. So it is better to say immigrants complement what native born do, not take away from those opportunities.
And, as has been pointed out many times, immigrants commit far fewer crimes than native born or for that matter ICE agents.
Then there’s the population problem. It’s declining. So where are the new workers going to come from? Who’s going to pay for Medicare and Social Security or the enormous debt Trump has racked up? (Imagine if he hadn’t been elected? $7.8 Trillion in his first term and $2.25 trillion in this term so far.) Or as Jerry Reed sang in When You’re Hot You’re Hot (and when you’re not, you’re not) “Who’s going to pay for my Cadillac?”
