Flying Off the Cliff
and not a parachute in sight
The shutdown grinds on. Trump’s tariffs are starting to bite. And the scythe is swinging.
People are losing jobs just as the shutdown cuts off access to food aid, healthcare, and financial support. Layoffs are piling up: Paramount — fresh from its sweetheart merger, courtesy of a grateful president — is cutting about 2,000 workers. UPS is dropping 48,000. Amazon, 14,000.
Executives blame tariffs, higher costs, changing consumer habits, and of course, AI. There’s always a new scapegoat. Meanwhile, worker anxiety is the only thing booming.
Job listings still exist, but most companies are in a holding pattern. When hiring freezes, the dominoes start to fall. People out of work spend less. When they spend less, businesses earn less. Then more layoffs follow.
Capitalism trying to pass kidney stones.
Federal workers are getting hit the hardest. Thousands of jobs were already cut early in Trump 2.0, and now, thanks to the impasse, many of those who remain aren’t being paid.
No official data is being released — the only sound in the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a lonely wind — but payroll firm ADP estimates 32,000 private-sector jobs have vanished into thin air.
Here’s a partial roll call of the corporate bloodletting:
Microsoft: 8,000 jobs gone in May, now another 9,000 “organizational changes.”
General Motors: nearly 2,000 cuts.
Paramount: 10 percent of staff gone after an 8-billion-dollar merger.
Target: trimming 8 percent — about 1,800 jobs — or as they put it, “streamlining.”
Nestlé: 16,000 jobs worldwide over two years. Ripping off the bandaid as slowly as possible.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s approval on the economy has cratered. Sixty percent of Americans now disapprove, according to the latest Yahoo/YouGov poll. But he’s not slowing down. Between golf trips and global tours, he’s accepting lavish gifts from foreign leaders, pushing his new White House ballroom, and demanding a “triumphal arch” in Washington.
He said that aboard Air Force One, en route to meet China’s authoritarian leader Xi Jinping.
He’s still ordering the Navy to blow up boats of supposed drug smugglers — no arrests, no evidence, no intel. Just explosions. It might make more sense to stop the boats, arrest the crews, find the drugs, and gather intelligence. But “declassified” videos of boats asploding real good play better online.
ICE raids are ramping up. Protests are spreading. The economy’s cracking. And the longer the shutdown drags on, the more anger builds — the kind that doesn’t fade.
If we don’t pull out of the dive now, there won’t be anything left to land. We need off-ramps, stability, and a government that stops treating anxiety as the new national currency.