It’s the Stupid Economy

A soaring increase in wholesale prices on Thursday, combined with a plan to handle falling jobs numbers by hiding the jobs numbers, shows that America is close to answering one of history's greatest questions: What if you just handed the economy over to an absolute idiot?

The producer price index, which often signals coming increases in consumer prices, jumped 0.9% in July. That's the biggest increase since the pandemic. Behind that number are some genuinely shocking signs of things to come, like a record-breaking 39% bump in the wholesale price of fresh vegetables.

Why were vegetables up so much in such a short time?

• ICE persecution of agricultural workers has left food rotting in the fields.
• Steep and shifting tariffs have disrupted global markets for food and grain
• Climate change has driven droughts and floods in key food-producing regions

In other words, food prices are soaring because of everything that Trump has done.

This news of rising wholesale prices followed a sharp jump in the core inflation rate when that information was released on Tuesday, and it brings expectations that next month's inflation numbers are going to be chilling. The combination was enough to send the unrationally exuberant stock market skidding on Thursday morning as traders woke up to the fact that Trump's asininity is not going to pass without impact.

Also on Tuesday, Trump's choice to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced to Fox News that the jobs report—which the government has been providing on a monthly basis since 1948—was now just an optional thing. Without giving any evidence, Project 2025 contributor EJ Antoni called the unemployment numbers "phony baloney" and declared that they should be halted until they could be fixed. Maybe they would do it quarterly. Maybe they would just let Trump scrawl something on a chart using a fat black marker.

In response, fellow conservative economist Jessica Riedl said that Antoni's work was "probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now." However, as Meteor Blades noted, "a key aspect of disinformation campaigns is killing real information."

Oh, and it turns out Antoni was a "bystander" at the Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt. Bystander means he was filmed leaving the grounds as the violent rioting came to a close, but no one has turned up images of Trump's would-be BLS chief punching a cop or breaking a window. Yet.

Following a hugely disappointing jobs report in June, Trump demanded again that the Federal Reserve Board cut interest rates when it meets again in September. The stumbling labor market might have been enough to finally give Trump the cut he wanted, though few experts agreed that it was a good move.

Now the Fed is facing a double-dose of concerns over sharply rising inflation. Even if Trump were to backtrack and release another frightening jobs report for July, those red alerts on the inflation front will remain the Fed's biggest worry. No matter how many names Trump calls Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, there is a good chance that interest rates aren't going anywhere.

Trump was handed an economy in which unemployment was at record lows, inflation had been wrestled back into control without a widely predicted recession, and economic growth was at a level economists consider ideal. In less than six months, his dedication to wrecking the economy has shoved all of that to the edge of a cliff. And it looks like we're already in the process of falling.

It helps that Trump's entire economic philosophy is centered on the idea that every Nobel-winning economist who spent decades analysing the causes of the Great Depression was dead wrong. And that he—proud founder of Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Steaks, and Trump Air—is smarter than all of them combined. Trump either doesn't understand what a tariff is, what it does, or how it's paid ... or he's deliberately out to sabotage the nation.

It's honestly impossible to tell whether this is an instance of active malice or staggering ignorance. Either way, the rest of us will pick up the check.