Financial FAQs

“Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 130,000 in January, and the unemployment rate changed little at 4.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care, social assistance, and construction, while federal government and financial activities lost jobs.” BLS

FREDpayrolls

The Whitehouse is touting the January jump in nonfarm payrolls, which it claims is evidence Trump’s economic policies are beginning to work. But that ain’t so by a long shot.

It is not a sign of successful policies when this was the first jump from close to zero new hires in a year per the FRED graph of new payroll jobs.

Annual revisions to last year’s payrolls showed just 181,000 new jobs were created in 2025, down from an earlier estimate of 584,000. That means the monthly average job growth in 2025 was only 15,000.

Whereas the Biden economy added 237,000 jobs in December 2024 alone and 1.495 million in all of 2024. So whose economic policies worked better?

The Biden administration had passed almost $5 trillion in new bipartisan legislation that was modernizing the American economy for the first time in 70 years, passing the Infrastructure, Inflation Reduction and CHIPS Acts as well as increasing electric vehicle puirchase incentives,.

And they had even brought down inflation from the 9 percent high incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic to 3 percent where it has been ever since. But it seems enough Americans believed Trump’s lie that he could bring down inflation on “Day one” when it had already happened.

From Trump’s return to power, however, rather than continue to carry out the bipartisan agreements that would prepare our economy for the next century, his obsession to concentrate as much power unto himself and his Billionaire supporters has led him to destroy as much of those bipartisan agreements as possible that would grow the American economy into the next century.

The result is his return to policies of the last century’s Gilded Age of Robber Barons and corruption has been the opposite of what was promised—rising prices, falling employment and increased pollution.

The higher tariffs are the main reason there was such a loss of jobs last year. Employers couldn’t predict the cost of their imported goods because of Trump’s petty spites and mostly illegal executive actions, so they didn’t expand their businesses and hire additional employees.

And health care is now the main sector hiring new workers, not only because of America’s aging population but because Trump’s policies are making Americans sicker. There have been so many cuts to our healthcare grants and loss of medical experts in the CDC and elsewhere that even measles outbreaks are becoming a problem.

As has been the case for more than a year, health care accounted for more than half of job gains in January, adding 82,000 positions. Construction gained 33,000 jobs, but most other sectors were flat, and the federal government shed another 35,000 positions.

But lastly will be the toll that Trump’s indiscriminate roundup of undocumented immigrants will do to our food supply. I mentioned recently that according to a Michigan State study cited by The Idaho Capital Sun, more than half of surveyed farmers said in 2021 that they were experiencing some sort of worker shortage, It found that when domestic farm employment declines by 10%, food prices of labor-intensive crops increase by around 3%

The number of private payroll jobs will continue to shrink and who really believes that AI, or Chat GDP, or robots can replace real workers anytime in the near future?

Harlan Green © 2026

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