Between Trump's No-Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence: Dismal Economic Outlook

Planned and announced layoffs reached their highest level for January since the Great Recession.

There were more job-cut announcements last month than in any January since 2009.

“Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January.” Andy Challenger said, adding, “It means most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less-than-optimistic about the outlook for 2026.”

The transport sector has 31,243 planned cuts, essentially all due to UPS’s plan to remove 30,000 people from its payroll. 

Amazon plans to axe 16,000 roles, after cutting 14,000 jobs in October last year.

Citi said in January it plans to cut around 10% of its workforce, or 20,000 employees. 

Hiring is also in the doldrums, with just 5,306 new hires announced in January.

While AI is projected to cost jobs in the coming years, this drop appears to have little to do with the new technology. Experts attribute the job losses to "contract loss," "market and economic conditions," and "restructuring", all driven by Trump's chaotic management of the economy, with AI responsible for around 7% of the cuts. 

Healthcare was the third biggest loser, with 17,107 job cuts announced. It is the largest monthly cut in the industry since April 2020.

The White House, meanwhile, continues in its fake "positive wishful thinking" typical of Trump's standard operating procedure of never admitting failure or blaming ancient admministrations for bad news. One spokesperson for Trump said, "As trillions of investments continue pouring in to make and hire in America, and as GDP growth continues to accelerate, Americans can rest assured that the best is yet to come.” In other  words, as they struggle every day with every aspect of the economy, Americans are being sold hot air and future hypothetical prosperity destined only to prop up his and his MAGA gangsters' chances next November. The question is, have the fools and morons who believed his lies in 2024 learned their lesson not to do it again in 2026 and 2028? 

Trump's deceitful exuberance about a booming economy under his stewardship - in January he said that it had been the “greatest first year in history.” But the vast majority of Americans are tired and exhausted of empty promises  that seem only leveraged to keep Trump in power and enable billionaires and the elite class to enrich themselves even more, while the middle class and the poor are drowning. 

MAGA republicans are worried. They ought to be. They created and enabled the monster and are unable to tame it. The GOP-MAGA priest Karl Rove went so far as attacking Trump and accusing him of “making the same mistake” as Joe Biden by telling people that they were doing better financially than they really felt they were. In short, Trump believes - and has publicly declared - that his MAGA base is stupid and will believe any horse manure he hurls at them, even when they are hurting real bad. Watching him treat them like a herd of cattle, and watching them "keep the faith" with him, verges on the a sado-masochistic relationship: He's the sadist who tortures them, and they are the masochists who enjoy it. 

For his part, doomsday predictions seem to be Elon Musk's favorite pasttime. He is bluntly telling Americans that saving for retirement is futile because AI and robotics will dismantle today’s labor market. According to Musk, white-collar workers such as lawyers, accountants, analysts, marketers, coders, and other jobs long considered “safe” because they were cognitive rather than physical are the most immediately vulnerable to AI systems that can reason, write, analyze, and iterate at superhuman speed.

Blue-collar work is next, Musk says. Humanoid robots, paired with highly capable AI models, will replace much of physical labor. Manufacturing, logistics, construction, and even service work would eventually follow. His estimate for this transition is strikingly aggressive: three to seven years. 

Musk puts a positive spin on all of this, while ignoring the suspicious stench wafting all over the economic future: he says that if AI and robots can produce goods and services at near-zero marginal cost, then food, housing, transportation, energy, and manufactured goods all become dramatically cheaper. Productivity explodes, not because humans are working harder, but because machines are doing nearly all of the work. But Musk sidesteps the most obvious elephant on the room: If people have no jobs because robots replace them, where are they going to find the money to buy all this cheap junk?

His answer is disguised Communism, without naming it: Musk suggests that the government provides “universal income” to people regardless if they work or not so that they never stop consuming and driving the economy. He says that the cost of living will drop so sharply that most people will be able to afford a high standard of living regardless of whether they hold a job. But isn't putting people on what sounds like glorified welfare a "leftist", "socialist", "Marxist", etc... platform? 

Musk then takes another fantasmogorical leap - like his twilight zone fictions of living on Mars - and tells Americans not to worry about saving money for retirement, “It won’t matter. You won’t need to save for retirement. If any of the things we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.” If work disappears, he’s arguing, then the entire concept of retirement disappears with it. There’s nothing to “retire” from, and no need to stockpile capital to survive old age.

When crowds are out of work because machines replace them, idleness leads them to become demanding of other intangibles besides the work-money formula. Social "luxury" issues then take precedence, which is what Communism promised and failed to provide. Are we headed to a place where Communism makes a comeback - Let the machines do the work, and since humans are less  involved in production, there is less territoriality: No private property, no private enterprise, production by machines can be centralized by the state and hence equally distributed, since no one is producing more than his/her neighbor due to absence of competition.