Weak retail sales for Holidays and lower wage growth as 2025 ended

We're still a bit delayed on some economic data, which means we had to wait until today to find out that consumer spending at stores slowed as 2025 ended.

U.S. retail sales were unexpectedly unchanged in December, putting consumer spending and the overall economy on a ​slower growth path heading into the new year.

The flat reading in ‌retail sales last month followed an unrevised 0.6% increase in November, the Commerce Department's Census ‌Bureau on Tuesday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast retail sales, which are mostly goods and are not adjusted for inflation, would rise by 0.4%.....

Retail sales excluding automobiles, gasoline, building materials and food services fell 0.1% in December after a downwardly revised 0.2% gain in November. These so-called core retail sales correspond most closely with the consumer spending component of ⁠gross domestic product. They were previously reported ​to have advanced 0.4% in November.

December's drop ​and the downward revision to November's data could prompt economists to trim their fourth-quarter estimates for consumer spending and GDP.

And yet the DOW Jones Industrial Average hit its third straight record high on Tuesday. Because with Wall Streeters, bad news for the real economy is good news for them, since it’ll be cheaper to take on even more debt.

The weak number appeared to lead to an increase in bets on interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve. While most traders still expect the Fed to hold steady next month and April, those majorities are shrinking. Meanwhile, over 75% of traders now expect rates to be lower by June.

The consumer data lays the ground for Wednesday's all-important January jobs report, in high focus following last week's signs of softening in the labor market. The latest Consumer Price Index reading is then due on Friday to give a look at inflation pressures, as the Fed continues to balance both sides of its dual mandate.

And based on the flop sweat and excuses from Trump’s Treasury Secretary and other Administration hacks this week, those jobs numbers will likely suck.

Peter Navarro: "The jobs report comes out tomorrow. We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like ... Wall Street has to adjust for the fact that we're deporting millions of illegals out of the job market."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 10, 2026 at 8:19 AM

Or, maybe having immigration allows for higher job growth, higher demand and higher economic growth, which tends to help almost everybody. Funny how that concept eludes TrumpWorld.

We also found out on Tuesday that employers have been reducing their raises for employees, with the increase in the Employment Cost Index declining to 0.7% for the 4th Quarter of 2025. Which means the higher wage growth of the post-COVID era has now receded back to pre-COVID levels.

It’s not like the crackdowns in immigration are translating into a boost in wages for those who are left in this country, so throw Navarro's BS to the side. But it does help lead to record profits when prices keep going up by the same amount, so Trump/GOP donors like that part.

But don’t worry, all of those Trump-donating corporations will be using their multi-billion dollars in new tax cuts to hire and pay employees. You know, as soon they get done laying off thousands of the ones they have today.

CBO budget stuff shows deficit was dropping before Tax Scam 2.0 shows up on books

As tax filing season starts, the Congressional Budget Office got their monthly update on how the federal budget is doing. So 4 months in, what do the numbers look like?

That's quite an increase in revenues. What's behind that?

Individual income and payroll (social insurance) taxes together increased by $124 billion (or 9 percent).
• Nonwithheld payments of income and payroll taxes increased by $77 billion (or 33 percent) relative to payments in the same period in fiscal year 2025. Amounts collected so far this year consist of estimated payments of 2025 taxes and final payments of 2024 taxes that were made after the end of the 2024 filing season.
• Amounts withheld from workers’ paychecks rose by $42 billion (or 4 percent), a reflection of rising wages and salaries.
• Individual income tax refunds were $7 billion (or 15 percent) less than during the same period in 2025, boosting net receipts. Most refunds typically are paid during the period from February through May.

Before you say "the newest tax cuts are working!", I'll remind you that we haven’t seen the effect of GOP Tax Scam 2.0 show up much in income tax revenues. That won’t happen until the refunds come in for the next few months, because the Feds are still withholding taxes at pre-Tax Scam 2.0 levels. It's the jump in non-withheld payments that has led to an overall increase in money coming in, and it reflects the continued growth in the stock market that we saw in 2025 (Uncle Sam is not caring if it makes sense for the market to go up).

But we are seeing the difference from Trump 2.0 when it comes to the other main sources of government revenues.

■ Customs duties, including tariff revenues, collected this year were more than four times the amount recorded in the first four months of last year, an increase of $90 billion.

■ Receipts from corporate income taxes decreased by $22 billion (or 16 percent). The enactment of the 2025 reconciliation act allowed corporations to take larger deductions for certain investments in 2025, thereby reducing some estimated payments and offsetting the underlying growth in such receipts.

That increase in tariffs would be around $270 billion at a yearlong, which would keep a lid on an otherwise-rising deficit IF it’s not given away on some Trump/GOP “stimulus check” stunt. Also, keep an eye on the declining tax bill from corporations, and the distortions that may cause for the overall economy (both positive and negative).

On the spending side, the "Big Three" of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are all up 8-9% from last year, as is interest on the US debt. But many other parts of the federal government lowered their spending in the first four months of this fiscal year.

The Homeland Security stat is interesting, given all of the deployments by ICE in recent months. But the report indicates that's because FEMA is spending much less on reimbursements for natural disasters than they were in the last four months of the Biden Administration. Read into that what you will...

So before tax filings and refunds began en masse , the US budget deficit was in line to go down in Fiscal Year 2026. But let's check back in four more months, after those refunds have been processed, and see if Trump/GOP Tax Scam 2.0 is starting to have this country bleed even more red ink, and if there's an indication as to who is getting the big refunds, and who's stuck paying the bills.

More layoffs coming and less jobs available. But hey, DOW 50,000!

Late last week, we got a couple of indications that the US jobs market was in rough shape. The first sign came when we found out there was a huge increase in layoff plans by companies.

Layoff announcements ballooned in January, hitting the highest level for the month since 2009, according to a Thursday report from the global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

That should come as no surprise, given tens of thousands of job-cut announcements in recent weeks from the likes of Amazon, UPS, and Pinterest, as companies claim the need to make room for investments in artificial intelligence, reorient business plans in uncertain times, reduce bureaucracy, or compensate for the rash of pandemic-era hiring….

Indeed, companies' hiring plans, at 5,306 in January, were the lowest for the month since Challenger began logging hiring plans in 2009.

Meanwhile, Challenger tracked 108,435 layoff announcements from US firms in January, more than double the 49,795 cuts announced the same month last year. It was the highest January total since 2009, when 241,749 layoff plans were reported.

Along with the layoffs, later on Thursday we found out that companies haven’t been looking to fill or add positions either.

Job openings dropped in December, widely missing economists' expectations and tumbling to the lowest level since 2020, according to government data released Thursday.

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — originally scheduled to be published on Tuesday but delayed by the partial government shutdown — showed there were 6.5 million jobs open at the end of December. Economists polled by Bloomberg had projected 7.25 million openings for the month.

Layoffs and discharges, at 1.8 million, increased slightly from 1.7 million a month earlier. The data was collected before recent announcements of sweeping job cuts from firms including Amazon (AMZN) and UPS (UPS).

Not only was December a significant dropoff in openings, but November’s amount of openings was revised down by 218,000 in this report. In addition, the number of openings declined by more than 1.1 million in the last 3 months of 2025.

That’s the lowest non-pandemic amount of job openings since the end of 2017, and down more than 4,300 openings since the end of 2022. Well, I guess there were some people that wanted to bring back the economy of Trump’s first term, and here we are.

And yet, what happened a day after all of this bad jobs news hit?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) led the way higher, surging by about 2.5%, or more than 1,200 points, to climb ahead of the 50,000 level for the first time.

The S&P 500 (^GSPC) rose 2% in its best session since May of last year. The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) added about 2.1%, as the indexes bounced back from Thursday's sharp closing losses and a week's worth of selling pressure.

Wall Street is ending the week with a bounce back, as Big Tech CEOs and analysts brushed aside concerns about the impact of new AI tools on legacy tech. The Dow ended the week with a gain of 2.5%, but the benchmark S&P 500 and the Nasdaq closed the week in the red.

Some of tech's biggest names led the charge. Nvidia (NVDA) surged over 8%, while Broadcom (AVGO) and Tesla (TSLA) posted sizable gains. Some tech gloom persisted as Amazon's (AMZN) shares tumbled 7%. In its earnings, the major cloud provider outlined plans for a massive 2026 jump in spending to at least $200 billion, even as its forecast for operating income fell short.

Friday also had the release of the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment survey for February, which had another small increase for the month, hitting the highest levels in 6 months. But even that positive economic news comes with a major caveat.

Hmm, it's almost like the stock market and the jobs market aren't connected to each other. Or worse, the stock market is growing at the expense of the jobs market. Which might be nice for the 0.1%ers that make most of their income off of assets, but isn't so good for the bottom 80%ers who rely on actual work for 93% of their incomes.

WisGOPs decide to that they don't want to lower property taxes OR fund schools!

Legislative Republicans in Wisconsin have never forgiven Governor Evers for his maneuver to guarantee that our state's public schools would be able to use more money every year, and they are trying to find ways to stop it from happening. Let’s start by recalling how this happened.

As passed by the Legislature, 2023 Enrolled Senate Bill 70 (the 2023-25 biennial budget bill) would have set the per pupil adjustment under revenue limits at $325 in 2023-24 and 2024-25, and there would have been no per pupil adjustment in 2025-26 and each year thereafter. The Governor's partial veto modified the language of the per pupil adjustment so that the $325 adjustment would apply from 2023 through 2425. In April of 2025, the State Supreme Court opined that the Governor's 400-year partial veto was consistent with the Wisconsin Constitution.

So right now, we have $325 per student increases to the total revenue limit set to happen each year as long as any of us are around.

The first way that the WisGOPs are trying to keep this from happening is by putting a Constitutional Amendment onto this November's ballot. This measure passed the Senate on an 18-15 party-line vote, and is likely to be taken up by the GOP-controlled Assembly next week, and reads as follows.

In approving an appropriation bill in part, the governor may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters in the words of the enrolled bill, and may not create a new sentence by combining parts of 2 or more sentences of the enrolled bill, and may not create or increase or authorize the creation or increase of any tax or fee.

Seems benign on the surface, and I'd probably vote for it at face value (if you're going to raise/create a tax, a law should say so). But if the WisGOPs think this would have stopped what Evers did, they are WRONG. Because all Evers did is raise the allowable revenue that local K-12 school districts could raise. It didn't do anything to raise or create taxes or fees at the state level.

In addition to the attempted Constitutional amendment, there’s a bill going through where the WisGOP Legislature wants to use more conventional means to stop that $325-per-student increase after the next school year. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau calculated the effect that would have on resources for both public schools and payments for vouchers and charter schools.

Using the 2025-26 revenue limit enrollment of 781,400 pupils for public schools, the bill would reduce statewide revenue limit authority by approximately $254 million annually beginning in 2027-28 compared to current law. The actual effect of the bills in future biennia would depend on actual enrollments and offsets to other revenue limit adjustments related to declining enrollment. If base level funding for general school aids and the school levy tax credit were maintained, this would result in an equivalent reduction in the statewide school levy compared to current law. Changes to general school aid and school levy tax credit funding, as well as changes to other revenue limit adjustments, would also affect school levies in future years.

Providing no per pupil revenue limit adjustment under the bills would also reduce payments and appropriations for the choice and charter programs compared to current law beginning in 2027- 28. The following table shows estimated annual change to the general fund appropriations, offsetting general school aid reductions, and net general fund expenditures for each of the programs under the bills, based on estimated 2026-27 enrollments in the programs.

This feels like a more legitimate way for the Legislature to act, and it allows for the revenue limits to be re-debated with whoever our Governor will be and whoever runs the Legislature.

A $0 increase per student is not good policy, mind you, as costs keep going up in the real world and many schools are already going to referendum because an increase in resources of $325 per student did not prove to be sufficient (even for the lowest revenue limits, the increase is not even 3%). But it at least would be a way to put the solution in writing in a way that sets revenue limits through the normal lawmaking process.

As the Joint Finance Committee debated the bill this week, Dems gave a reminder as to which party decided to let property taxes go up this year.

Rep. Tip McGuire, D-Kenosha, said Republicans had a choice last summer in the budget to put additional state aid into schools to prevent the property tax hikes while ensuring public schools succeed. He accused Republicans of forcing districts to go to referendum to fund basic needs because of their refusal to fund needed costs.

“We have a way to get everyone everything they want, and you keep saying no,” McGuire said.

And the GOP response to that complaint was odd.

Sen. Romaine Quinn, R-Birchwood, said the 400-year veto is bad policy that gives every district the same increase every year, regardless of factors such as enrollment and what they spend now. With some districts spending about $11,000 per child between state aid and property taxes and others spending $18,000, Quinn said a flat increase for each child exacerbates existing inequities.

I’ve read this paragraph a few times, and I don’t know what this means (and I’m not sure Sen. Quinn does either). All districts have the same $325 per pupil increase in revenue limit, and the lower-revenue limit districts get a higher % increase than the higher-limit ones.

Sen. Quinn followed with the mystifying GOP line that having all these referenda are a good thing.

He said referendums are a compromise with education funding in allowing districts to ask taxpayers for additional funds if they believe they need more.

“What Democrats want is to never have to ask taxpayers again,” Quinn said.

That’s true, we shouldn't ask people to have to raise their property taxes to fund their schools. Because if we’d use more state tax dollars to fund K-12 education, WE WOULDN’T HAVE PROPERTY TAXES GOING UP.

Now do I think Governor Evers would actually sign this bill ending rev limit increases after next year? NO WAY. Tony’s not letting that happen while he’s in power.

But it’s good for the WisGOPs to show their hands that their “solution” to the $325 per student increases aren’t to stop property taxes from going up by increasing state aids to pay for that as well as other parts of school funding (which the “far left” portion of the Dem caucus wants to do).

Because WisGOPs really don’t care about the property tax part of K-12 public education, as much as they care about choking off community schools in general, and making them underfunded and ineffective.

I think the average Wisconsinite would prefer to have lower property taxes, fewer referendums, and adequately-funded public schools. But if GOPs want to go ahead and run on “we’re happy with how schools are funded in Wisconsin….and we want your community schools to be starved even more!”, please proceed, dipshits. It’ll likely go over as well as the Moms for Liberty candidate in Texas who just lost a Trump district in their State Senate by double digits last weekend.

ADP report shows another month with few jobs gained

With the short government shutdown of this week pushing back the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs report until next Wednesday, the ADP payrolls survey got some extra attention (today). And for the first month of 2026, the ADP report served up a familiar story – anemic job growth.

US private employers added fewer positions than anticipated last month, according to the private payroll processor ADP, starting 2026 off on a downbeat note.

Private payrolls grew by just 22,000 in January, ADP said Wednesday, below economists' expectations of 45,000 positions….

"Job creation took a step back in 2025, with private employers adding 398,000 jobs, down from 771,000 in 2024," ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said in a statement. "While we've seen a continuous and dramatic slowdown in job creation for the past three years, wage growth has remained stable."

Manufacturing helped lead the slowdown with a drop of 8,000 jobs in January, according to ADP, less than one year out from President Trump's sweeping tariffs and promises to restore positions to the sector. Professional and business services also continued to decline, while construction added roles. Losses across the economy would’ve appeared even more stark if not for the healthcare and education sectors posting positive growth, with 74,000 new positions gained in January.

In addition, UW-Madison’s Menzie Chinn notes that ADP’s listing of 398,000 private sector jobs in 2025 was a significant downward revision from what had been previously reported, and those revisions say private sector jobs declined for 4 straight months between February and June before having a slight recovery in the 7 months since then.

And one sector that was a significant job-loser in 2025 was in manufacturing, which has been shedding jobs in numerous surveys since the start of 2023, and continued to slide last year.

One reason the BLS’s job report was set to get extra attention this week was that it would also include their annual benchmark revisions for jobs numbers. Based on information from the “gold standard” Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), it looks like the “official” jobs numbers are going to end up quite a bit lower than what was originally reported – and those numbers are already the worst in a non-COVID year since (2010?).

Now we have to wait until next week for that report to hit, which will seem to extend the bad jobs news beyond Friday. Everyday people already think this is a rough jobs market with wages barely keeping up with costs, which helps explain why US consumer confidence plummeted to its lowest level in 12 years last month.

But bits of data are always welcome for me to show whether this gloominess is just bad vibes about the repressive dimwits running our country, or if there’s something in the real economy that is driving those feelings. And if the strong “economic growth” numbers that may be reported end up being concentrated in a few industries with the benefits only going to a privileged few.

Wis losing a seat in Congress? That's what we're on track for as of now

Following up on the recently-released Census estimates of state and US population for 2025, that also means we are halfway between the 2020 Census and 2030’s Census. So why not project forward to what this may mean for the membership of Congress and the Electoral College after that 2030 Census, and the maps get redrawn. The American Redistricting Project went with the 2022-2025 post-COVID population trends to see what states were on track to add or lose members of the House of Representatives as well as Electoral College votes.

As you can see, Wisconsin is among the states that would lose members of the House.

Yes, I find it ironic that the GOP-led states of Florida and Texas would grab more seats in Congress in no small part because of high levels of immigration in their states, no matter how much their GOP overlords pose against it (but funny, ICE isn't overrunning their states, are they?). I also note that this projection shows that Dems can’t win the White House in 2032 merely by getting back the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and having everything else be the same.

I want to center on the Wisconsin situation in particular, as we are pretty close to the threshold where we could hold onto our 8th seat in the House.

So if we gain people at a faster rate than Michigan or don’t lose as much ground to Texas or Georgia in the next 2 years, maybe we stay at 8 seats. But if we don’t, then it would add even more importance to redistricting here for 2031, because some member of Congress is losing his/her seat regardless of the result of elections.

I took a crack at what that might look like, if we were trying to make a relatively even 7-member map in Wisconsin. Here’s what it looks like.

And I’m going to use two races to see what the partisanship of these districts might be. I’ll use the 2022 Governor’s race (Dems win by 3.5%) and 2024 Presidential race (GOP wins by 0.9%) as baselines to see who would be favored in these districts, and by how much.

2022 Governor race

2024 Presidential race

I can probably do some more manipulations to make it even closer to level (either moving District 1 more into Milwaukee or moving District 3 into Dane County), but this is a good start. 2 Dem districts, 2 GOP districts, and 3 districts that lean GOP in various amounts, but are definitely flippable for Dems.

January's release from the Census Bureau only had state population. We will find out later this year how population has changed inside of Wisconsin, and which counties and communities of our state are growing faster than others, along with the ones that are losing people. That's also a key factor in what happens for districts at both the Congressional and statehouse level, and we can see if the COVID-era trends that encouraged more people to move up North in this state are still happening, or if people are heading back to metro areas, and where in metro areas are they going to.

Also remember that Wisconsin Republicans have 6 seats in the House today as a result of their 2012 and 2022 gerrymanders. So in any 7-district scenario, they are likely to have 1 fewer GOP seat than today, and possibly 2 or 3. So maybe our GOP members of Congress should be going out of their way to encourage more migration to our state (both from inside and outside the country), and making sure that every Wisconsin resident gets counted in 2030. Because the job they save could well be their own.

Wis population grows again in 2025, but both state and US growth is slowing down

After some delay due to this Fall's government shutdown, we finally got new Census estimates for 2025 in this week, both for the nation and for individual states.

Overall, US population growth was nearly cut in half last year, largely due to the Trump/Stephen Miller Administration’s racism action against immigrants and immigration.

· Between July 1, 2024, and July 1, 2025, the U.S. population grew by 1.8 million (or 0.5%) to reach 341.8 million.

· The U.S. population grew at a much slower rate between July 2024 and July 2025 than from 2023 to 2024 (when it increased by 1.0%, or 3.2 million people). The slowdown is largely due to lower levels of net international migration.

· Between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025, net international migration was 1.3 million, a notable drop from 2.7 million the year before (a decline of 53.8%). If current trends continue, net international migration is projected to be approximately 321,000 by July 2026, representing another decline of nearly 1 million since July 1, 2025.

Fun fact - you know which states had the highest growth from international migration in late ‘24-early ‘25? Florida (+178,674) and Texas (+167,475)! And immigrants accounted for over 90% of Florida’s population growth in the last year! So why isn’t TrumpWorld sending ICE all over those places…..?

While a lot of the trends of more Americans moving south continued in late 2024 and early 2025, I’ll note that our part of the country is also growing and attracting people from other parts of America. And we didn’t have our population growth drop off as much as other regions last year.

The Midwest was the only region where all states gained population from July 2024 to July 2025. In addition, after experiencing population decline in 2021 and small growth in 2022, the Midwest’s population grew solidly in 2023 (259,938), 2024 (386,231), and 2025 (244,385). Slight gains in natural change (births minus deaths) for some of the states in the Midwest contributed to their population growth.

“From July 2024 through June 2025, the Midwest also saw positive net domestic migration for the first time this decade,” said Marc Perry, senior demographer at the Census Bureau. “And while the net domestic migration was a relatively modest 16,000, this is still a notable turnaround from the substantial domestic migration losses in 2021 and 2022 of -175,000 or greater.”

Wisconsin was a part of this trend of positive domestic migration for 2025 (+6,984), and continued with to have its population go up overall (+15,619). However, we also had a slowdown in population growth, as that's lower than the 27,000+ we added in 2023 and 2024.

It places us in the bottom half of our Midwestern neighbors for growth, although we were not a huge laggard for the region as a whole. (I define the “Midwest” as the 7 states of the pre-1993 Big Ten. The Census Bureau may define it a bit differently and widely).

Since the last Census in 2020, Wisconsin has added 78,464 to our population (+1.33%), a number that places us smack dab in the middle for the Midwest, both in terms of amount and rate.

Change in population 2020-2025
Ind. +186,728
Minn +123,742
Ohio +101,065
Wis. +78,464
Mich +48,522
Iowa +47,805
Ill. -102,600

% Change in population 2020-2025
Ind. +2.75%
Minn +2.17%
Iowa +1.50%
Wis. +1.33%
Ohio +0.86%
Mich +0.48%
Ill. -0.80%

I'll take the positive net migration and overall population growth as good signs for this state, especially as we go through a week where the temperature has been below zero every night and the high temps haven't gotten above 15. And if we keep on adding 15,000-27,000 people a year, as we have in the last 4 years, we will break 6 million for total population by 2027.

Nationally, we can see where the Trumpian limitations on immigration was already having an effect on the country's population growth by mid-2025, and that's going to limit the amount of job and consumer spending growth that we can get (conversely, it also explains why our tiny job growth might not spike unemployment as much as it would have before 2025). So one of the big engines of our surprisingly large post-COVID job and GDP growth is going away, and once the Bubbles pop, it doesn't seem like there will be much on the demographic side to make up for it.