Made In America Jobs 2.0 & The Aftermath of Liberation Day 2.0 – Top 3 Takeaways, August 4th, 2025
Takeaway #1: The Impact of Liberation Day 2.0 to you
On Friday, aka Liberation Day 2.0, we had a mini financial market freakout. The one-two punch of President Trump following through with his long-promised August 1st tariff increase for countries without new trade deals, and the jobs report gone wrong...except there are two caveats. One for each of those dynamics. First, on the tariff piece. If you ever took a look at the big Wall Street trading firms and thought that those theoretically elite financial minds were just so much superior to your understanding of money and markets...What you saw on Friday, with professional firms expressing surprise over the size of Trump’s tariffs once again shows that a) They’ve still not yet read the now 38-year-old book that explains everything...Art of the Deal and that b) They’ve somehow or another after four and a half years of Donald Trump having been president haven’t realized that he’s not your typical politician. You know the type that promises one thing but gets to D.C. and does another? How it could surprise any theoretically intelligent and thinking person is beyond me...but nevertheless. Anyway – here's the first piece of new information I have for you stemming from what took place on Friday. As I mentioned in my takeaways on Friday...after having cracked a bunch of numbers to bring you what the actual impact of the tariffs would mean to you – the number I came up with was 1ish percent. As in a 1ish% percent increase in the cost of imported goods to you. Now with the full results in, and accounted for, I can tell you this... The net average tariff increase effective August 1st, took the average U.S. tariff rate from approximately 13.3% to 15.2%. This reflects a net increase of about 1.9 percentage points. So, it was 1ish percent – albeit at the high end of my projection. So that’s that piece of the puzzle for now. Also, this almost certainly is the high-water mark for what tariff rates will be as any new trade deals from here would figure to reduce rates if anything.
Takeaway #2: June wasn’t a fluke
As a data wonk, each month’s jobs report is something that’s intriguing to me. There are always so many more storylines beyond the headlines than ever get told. But extremely rare are the reports where we see wholesale changes to the U.S. economy take place... However, it was in last month’s report that I first noticed one of those times. As I brought you last month... Jobs created in the United States of America are actually going to Americans...(again)! Here’s a crazy stat for you. What percentage of jobs added in this county during the Biden administration went natural born citizens? 59%. That’s it! 41% of the jobs added in the country during the four years of the Biden administration went to foreign-born persons. So, what’s happened through the first 5+ months of the Trump administration? 985,000 jobs added with a net decline of 735,000 foreign born workers. That dynamic was high on my radar heading into Friday’s report before we got even more than the eye-opening report from the month before. The headline numbers looked bad – only 73,000 jobs added – the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2%. The secondary numbers looked worse... negative jobs revisions from prior reports totaling 258,000 fewer jobs added than previously reported – making the net number of the July jobs report a loss of 185,000 jobs. But there’s so much more to the story and the reason why we’re seeing job losses is a potentially great thing for the average American employee. What is that thing...? There are now 1.2 million fewer ‘foreign born’ workers in the U.S. work force this year. That’s an increase of 465,000 stemming from July’s jobs report alone! It’s by far the biggest one-month decline ever recorded! There has been a total of 1.1 million jobs added in the U.S. this year, so what this means is that American employment has risen by 2.3 million jobs this year – including an increase of over 500,000 new American jobs over the past month! This is the real storyline that needs to be told. July’s job report wasn’t bad, it wasn’t iffy, it was...
Takeaway #3: Incredibly great news
...if you believe that Americans, rather than illegal immigrants, should be getting job opportunities. Not only has American employment exploded this year – unsurprisingly as illegal aliens are rapidly exiting the workforce – with Americans getting job opportunities, but wages are also rising meaningfully too. The average hourly wage reached a record $36.44 per hour last month and it is 3.9% higher than a year ago. With an inflation rate at 2.7% over the past year – the average American is finally getting ahead once again. And as I mentioned last month... What this data also suggests is that it’s likely self-deportation numbers could be huge. When it comes to deportations, we don’t know what we don’t know, which means that the only self-deportations we’re aware of are those that’ve taken place using the CBP One Home App – of which only several thousand have been reported thus far. While digging deeply into the jobs data, there was far more than meets the eye. Going forward you can expect to see labor force participation rates rise once again as Americans who’d been knocked out of the workforce, by those here illegally, see the opportunity to work once again. What this also is likely to mean is faster and higher wage increases as well. There’s a lot here. A LOT...stand by for news in future months. I’ll be watching this going forward. I was right, but by even more than I thought. We’ll certainly revisit this again next month.