December 16, 2025
Oof – not great. The jobs market in this country is not great at all and that’s according to some numbers from the trump administration.
How ugly is it? The newest jobs report for the month of November from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released this morning shows the number of people who are unemployed in this country just hit a high we haven’t seen in four years. We’ve lost jobs three of the last six months which means we are on track for the worst year of jobs growth since the pandemic. And as for affordability, there’s a reason why most people say they’re making more money than they have before but they still can’t afford to live. And I’m going to show you all the actual numbers that back all that up.
Before I get into it – you need to know – these numbers are a little skewed. That’s because the trump administration failed to put out a jobs report in October, because of the government shutdown…and because of that – this report they released today–includes information for some of October and all of November. But the numbers are the numbers so here’s what they show.
Let’s start with unemployment. As of November 2025 — 4.6% of Americans are unemployed. 4.6% is the highest number we’ve seen in more than four years. But it’s even worse when you look at specific groups. When you look at teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19 – they are unemployed at a rate of 16.3% and when you look at Black Americans – they are unemployed at a rate of 8.3%. In the category of Hispanic or Latino – those folks are unemployed at a rate of 5%. Those are big and troubling numbers. And even if you don’t think that’s high the bottom line is – those numbers are continuing to go up. Which is the wrong direction.
Now – let’s talk about the number of jobs employers created because that’s where you can really see how the jobs market is absolutely slowing down. According to today’s report – US employers added a total of 64,000 jobs to their payrolls in the month of November – which is definitely much lower than what we saw in the first four months of 2025.
Here’s the November number and see how it’s much lower than the steady growth we were seeing at the beginning of 2025? What this chart doesn’t show is we’ve seen constant job growth since 2021. But then – here’s the where the problem begins. According to today’s report – in October the US economy lost 162,000 jobs. Now – a lot of those job losses in October were the result of all those federal employees Trump fired at the beginning of the year. Remember they were given a deal to voluntarily resign and basically be paid out through the end of September? Well – by October 1 they were all done and no longer employed by the federal government. That’s why you see that dramatic drop off. But the result is we are now looking at three of the last six months of job losses. We haven’t seen one month of job loss in years – and in 2025 – we have three out of six.
Lastly – I want to talk about the affordability piece of this. To do that you need to look at average hourly earnings – which is the blue line and compare it to inflation rate—that’s the red line. See here in November see how close these two lines are… this is showing that inflation is currently sitting at 3% year over year, and hourly wages are only increasing 3.5%… that means wage gains are only barely covering higher costs. What you don’t want to see is these two lines cross. That would be bad.
Read the new jobs report here.
