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On Friday, the jobs data hit—and it wasn’t good. Non-farm payrolls came in at just 22,000, far below the already low expectation of 75,000, and well short of the 53,000 that would have at least met consensus. By any measure, that’s a weak print.

It raises a big question: are we looking at the beginning of a major slowdown, or is something else going on beneath the surface?

In this post, I want to break down how to interpret this report, why it might not mean what the “perma-bears” think it does, and how it fits into the broader macroeconomic picture.

Framing the Question: Major Slowdown or Temporary Pause?

Whenever I see a headline-grabbing data point like this, I try to step back and ask a few simple questions:

1. What are the main drivers of the economy right now?
2. What should we expect to see if the bearish case is real?
3. What doesn’t line up with that story?

With jobs data, the natural concern is that weak hiring means the cycle is rolling over. But to confirm that, we need to see reinforcing signals in credit, fiscal policy, inflation, and layoffs. Without those, a bad number might just be noise—or the result of something temporary.

Later this month, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk will issue a report calling for massive reparations from the West for the alleged harms wrought by colonialism. It will be the culmination of a long-gestating effort within the U.N. and by Third World nations to squeeze money and demand other goodies from former colonial powers in the name of “reparatory justice.”

In addition to being historically ill-informed, the effort is racist. What began as a simple extortion effort has since been supercharged into an all-out assault on European cultures. Since being appointed in 2022, Türk has transformed his office. It now issues daily muezzin calls for uncontrolled mass migration to the West and the erasure of white cultures. His report should cause Western nations to abandon every U.N. agency that pursues this sick agenda.

Following our 2025 Community Tax Summit, the federal government announced an Economic Reform Roundtable.

Per Capita and the organisations who partnered together for the Community Tax Summit each added their submissions to the Economic Reform Roundtable in the lead up to the event to help push for meaningful and effective tax reform.

The overwhelming consensus from the summit was that reform was needed. And while our opinions of how this could be achieved align in some places while differing in others, a robust discussion around this matter needs to be had.

We thank our partners for sharing their submissions with us.

Per Capita’s Submission to the Economic Reform Roundtable 

The Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability’s Submissions

The Brotherhood of St. Laurence’s Submission

The Superpower Institute’s Submission

Prosper Australia’s Submission

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and an associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, analyzes how the weaponization and distortion of the Holocaust, in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, has been used to serve the narrative of Zionists and the Israeli government. He tells host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report:

“We know that Holocaust education eventually was more focused on transmitting this feeling of exceptionality than actually teaching about Holocaust as history, as real history, as normal history, as a part, indeed, of the making of the modern and late modern world.”

Segal recounts his personal experience learning about the Holocaust in Israel, revealing a Zionist perspective that is both skewed and contradictory.

Recent events regarding Lisa Cook’s attempted firing by Donald Trump have convinced me to do a premium series on the history of racial segregation and the Federal Reserve. This is for a few reasons. First, I think it's difficult to understand the import of this moment without understanding the history of racial segregation in the Federal Government and in the Federal Reserve System, specifically.  Indeed this history hasn’t really ever gotten a serious treatment. This is for a variety of reasons which are beyond the scope of this piece to examine.

The analysis finds that the costs of climate change to local councils – such as repairing roads, drainage, parks and community facilities after floods, storms, and fires – are increasing far faster than local government revenue.

The insured costs of climate change are now 12 times higher than 20 years ago, while local government revenue is only three times higher.

The findings support calls for the release of the National Climate Risk Assessment, which contains important data for councils to prepare for the impact of climate change.

When I served as an Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadet at Fordham University in New York City, the Department of War paid for my degree in American Studies. During my coursework, I read books like The New Jim Crow and was bombarded with the claim that the country I had signed up to defend was irredeemably racist and broken. My civilian classmates and professors were overwhelmingly liberal, and the university was in the capital of liberalism. I spent most of my time in that milieu as opposed to dedicated environments conducive to military formation.

ROTC should be nowhere near Fordham University. In fact, the Trump Administration should end ROTC programs in blue states, leftist cities, and anti-American universities, focusing instead on institutions that actually love America. Training military officers in environments that serve the national interest is a critical step toward restoring the U.S. military as a whole.

No longer should ROTC programs be benefactors of the woke and weaponized higher education system. The colleges and universities that ROTC cadets attend—and that the federal government pays for—shouldn’t feature Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas, the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other divisive ideologies, and the promotion of gay and lesbian lifestyles.

Australia’s national tax system is 110 years old. What has shaped it in the last century, and why is tax reform needed today?

The Federal Government has announced a Productivity Roundtable and indicated that broad tax reform will be part of the discussion to tackle the economic pressures our country faces today, to boost national prosperity, reduce growing inequality and improve living standards for future generations.

Following the popularity of her keynote speech at the Community Tax Summit in February 2025, Professor Miranda Stewart provides a follow-up address outlining how Australia’s tax system came to be how it is today, the reasons it needs reform and what that reform should look like, in light of the recently announced Productivity Roundtable.

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Miranda Stewart is a Professor specialising in taxation law and policy at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne and an Honorary Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. In 2024, Miranda was a visiting fellow at the Australian Treasury. Her most recent book is Tax and Government in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press).

On this episode of After America, Maskym Dotsenko and Illya Kletskovskyy, the Director General and Deputy Director General of the Ukrainian Red Cross, join Allan Behm to discuss the impact of the Russian invasion on Ukrainians, the role of Red Cross in armed conflict, and the importance of international humanitarian law in saving lives and reducing suffering.

This episode was recorded on Thursday 4 September.

After America: Australia and the new world order by Emma Shortis and Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss are available now via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Maskym Dotsenko, Director General, Ukrainian Red Cross Society // @MaksymDotsenko

Guest: Illya Kletskovskyy, Deputy Director General, Ukrainian Red Cross Society

Host: Allan Behm, Special Advisor, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute

Host: Angus Blackman, Producer, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB

Show notes:

Recent buzz about the possibility of Trump selecting Budapest to host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine has brought Hungary back into the public consciousness. During the Biden years, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary was relegated to something of a footnote and regarded with distaste by the reigning administration. Now, Hungary has moved from adversary to ally in record time—a welcome reset that offers a window into Trump’s recalibrated foreign policy.

As early as the 2020 campaign, then-candidate Biden branded Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a “thug” and lumped Poland and Hungary together as “totalitarian regimes”—incendiary language that prior U.S. presidents avoided, even when the two countries were under actual totalitarian control of the Communist Party.

It was hardly surprising, then, that in 2021 President Biden chose a gay, married LGBTQ activist with two adopted children as ambassador to Hungary—a country whose constitution defines marriage strictly as a union between a man and a woman, bans adoption by same-sex couples, and enforces some of Europe’s toughest child-protection laws. U.S. Ambassador David Pressman ignited tensions by denouncing Hungary’s conservative stance on marriage and its 2021 Child Protection Act, which forbids gender propaganda in K-12 schools.

Ross Gittins wins 2025 E.J. Craigie Writing Award for the best article reflecting the ideas of Henry George. Prosper Australia is pleased to announce Economics Editor for The Age/Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Gittins, as the recipient of the E.J. Craigie Writing Award for 2025 for his article: Productivity Commission wants our big mining companies to […]

Not surprisingly given those extraordinary numbers, U.S. immigration officers have prioritized immigration enforcement in the Los Angeles area. The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United
States, they promptly let the individual go. If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate the process for removal.

-- Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, September 8, 2025

Join me for a live Q&A on my YouTube channel and X account, Monday September 8, at 7:00 - 8:00pm ET. Questions will be taken from the comment section of this Substack post, as well as during the live on YouTube/X.

Please attempt to keep your questions direct and relatively brief, as I cannot read entire paragraphs during the show.

Volunteers Use Red Chalk to Protect Pedestrians and Drivers Under California’s New Law

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Friday 5th September 2025

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The End Times of Academia

 — Author: Sarah Kendzior — Friday 5th September 2025

The year is 2013. The Great Recession has turned into the False Recovery, Trump is but a Twitter pest, and I was a new PhD with two small children who had ditched academia for journalism — a move akin to leaving the Titanic for the iceberg.

I did not regret it and still don’t. I was freelancing for a pittance while staying home with my kids, but my mind was free to wander. My articles attracted interesting people — one of whom, anthropologist Ryan Anderson, interviewed me that May. I am reprinting that interview with Ryan’s permission. Our 2013 conversation covers issues relevant to 2025 — including careerist conformity, economic exploitation, and threats to intellectual freedom.

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Trump’s Flag-Burning Executive Order Is Constitutional

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Friday 5th September 2025

In 1989, Justice Antonin Scalia cast the deciding vote to overturn the conviction of Gregory Lee Johnson, who was arrested and found guilty of violating a Texas statute after he burned the American flag outside the Republican National Convention. The author of the Court’s 5-4 opinion was Justice William Brennan, the leading liberal and advocate for the “living Constitution” on the Supreme Court. For conservatives, it was one of the two most widely criticized votes of Justice Scalia’s illustrious career (the other being his vote refusing to recognize that parents have a natural, constitutionally protected right to direct the upbringing of their children).

But the opinion by Justice Brennan, which Justice Scalia joined, is not as absolute as it has subsequently been portrayed.

It specifically held that Texas violated the First Amendment by prosecuting Johnson “in these circumstances”—that is, expressive conduct or symbolic speech as part of a political protest that was not designed to incite a crowd (nor did it have that effect). It also held that the “government generally has a freer hand in restricting expressive conduct than it has in restricting the written or spoken word.” Only laws directed at restricting the communicative nature of expressive conduct implicate the First Amendment, and even then they can be upheld for a valid governmental interest.

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America First Realism

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Friday 5th September 2025

In this country we stand at a crossroads—as a movement, as a party, and as a nation. The world is not what it was a generation ago, nor is America’s place in the world. The unipolar moment is over. And yet many in the GOP seek to claim the mantle of America First while continuing the same failed adventurism of the past. National Conservatism as a movement agrees that these people and ideas must be stopped. But we have failed to check their influence in the party in large part because we have not offered an alternative that meets the real threats to American security and balances national interest, the deterrent effect, industrial capability, and political will.

In a piece that was recently published in the National Interest, I sketched out a framework for what a real America First foreign policy looks like. I called for developing a doctrine that I called “Prioritized Deterrence.” That essay was the first step toward spelling out a set of foreign policy principles that can unite National Conservatives and set the agenda for the Republican Party for the next generation.

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New Resource Helps Portland Communities Take Action on Road Safety

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Friday 5th September 2025

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The Lost Art of Crafting Great Urban Places

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Thursday 4th September 2025

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Walking Small: Buford Pusser’s Family Gets Answers. Will Nashville?

 — Author: Betsy Phillips — Tuesday 2nd September 2025

Authorities recently determined that the famed McNairy County sheriff likely killed his wife. Here's how that relates to Nashville's civil rights era bombings.

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Multiculturalism in Australia: A Deliberate Success, Not an Accident

 — Organisation: Per Capita — Friday 5th September 2025

When Pauline Hanson declared in her infamous maiden speech in the 1990s, “I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate,” it was a statement driven by fear and division. I remember the impact it had—not just on public discourse, but on the lived experience of Asian communities.

The response was not defiance, but caution. People stuck together for safety, retreating into familiar cultural spaces. Ironically, this reaction reinforced the very stereotype she invoked: communities appearing insular, not out of unwillingness to integrate, but out of a need for protection.

This past weekend offered a powerful contrast between two visions of Australia. On one hand, the Premier’s Multicultural Gala Dinner was a vibrant celebration of diversity. Hundreds of people from across ethnic communities came together to share meals, dance, and connect. The evening began with a moving Welcome to Country from Uncle Shane Charles, grounding the event in respect for First Nations people.

It was a reminder that the success of multiculturalism in Australia is not by accident—it is the result of decades of deliberate effort, relationship-building, and trust. It is a project built by communities, advocates, and policymakers who believed in a more inclusive society.

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Never Say Never: A Case for “For-Awhile” Urbanism

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Thursday 4th September 2025

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Are Businesses Scaling Back Hiring Due to AI?

 — Organisation: Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Publication: Liberty Street Economics — Thursday 4th September 2025

Jaison R. Abel, Richard Deitz, Natalia Emanuel, Ben Hyman, and Nick Montalbano

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Productivity crisis? Australia’s “lazy” oligopolies could step up

 — Organisation: The Australia Institute — Thursday 4th September 2025

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Matt and Elinor discuss the Australia’s latest economic growth data, Trump’s threat to hit countries with digital taxes with extra tariffs, and this week’s political fight over aged care.

Early bird tickets for our Revenue Summit at Parliament House in Canberra – Hon. Steven Miles MP, Senator David Pocock, Kate Chaney MP, Greg Jericho and more – are available now.  You can buy tickets for the early bird price of $99 – available for a limited time only.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available to pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 4 September 2025.

Host: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @mattgrudnoff

Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek

Show notes:

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The Family: The Foundation of America’s Next 250 Years

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Thursday 4th September 2025

At this moment in history, we face a choice: Will America’s second 250 years be greater than its first 250 years?

If we have the courage, the discipline, and the vision, I believe this generation can lay a foundation of renewal so deep that our descendants will look back on us with gratitude, just as we look back on the Founders. And the most important choice we can make together to ensure that the next 250 years of America are greater is to focus—through our laws, our labors, our loves—on making the family the centerpiece of everything we do.

No nation in human history has entrusted so much of its future to the virtue and vitality of its families as America. The great empires of Europe—France, Spain, and England—placed their hopes in armies and palaces. The stability of their regimes rested on the health of a king’s bloodline and the strength of his throne.

But America bet her future on something humbler, yet infinitely stronger: not the pomp of royalty, not the machinery of a permanent bureaucracy, not the shifting will of mobs. We staked it all on what G.K. Chesterton called “the most extraordinary thing in the world”: an ordinary man and an ordinary woman, bound in covenant love, passing on their faith and virtue to their ordinary children.

We staked it all on the American family.

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Two Porch Crashes, One Block: Why Park Avenue Needs Quick-Build Safety Now

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Thursday 4th September 2025

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A New Democratic Approach for the NDP

 — Publication: Perspectives Journal — Thursday 4th September 2025

There can be a new era of democratic innovation for the federal NDP as it rebuilds from the ruin of the 2025 general election. Its upcoming federal leadership race, moreover, presents this chance to model the democratic transformation that the party ostensibly values. Nearly a decade ago, the combined federal and provincial NDP riding association that I was once a part of put forward my policy resolution to support “participatory budgeting;” a democratic process whereby citizens decide how to spend portions of a budget on capital and operational projects. These organizing efforts never became a policy priority for the party. Today, the federal NDP has an opportunity to use the leadership race to support in-person regional participatory assemblies and open-source digital platforms, such as pol.is or decidim, to amplify the voices of citizens. Democratic renewal of institutions like political parties, therefore, involves democratizing election platform development and internal party decision making structures. 

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The Decline and Fall of Gabe Schoenfeld

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Thursday 4th September 2025

I see Gabe Schoenfeld has attacked me again. I usually try to let these things go, but sometimes a little context is demanded.

The piece is, as usual, filled with bile and unrelieved nastiness. What Gabe leaves out is that we used to be friends, or at least friendly acquaintances. We met through Manhattan conservative circles, where we had many friends in common, including the late, great Fred Siegel (whom I am confident would be distressed at what Gabe has become).

Gabe snidely writes that one should not pity me. On this we agree. I do not need or deserve any pity. My life has gone and is going quite well.

Not so for Gabe. His first disappointment (that I know of) came when he finished a PhD in Soviet studies…just as the Berlin Wall fell. Like many disappointed academics, he bounced around the nonprofit sector until landing as an editor at Commentary. This was the Neil Kozodoy Commentary, when the magazine was good. I wrote for them back in the day. Gabe did not edit me; Gary Rosen did. But even then, Gabe and I were friendly enough.

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Creed and Culture Both Matter

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Wednesday 3rd September 2025

My colleague and friend Andrew Beck has written a useful and provocative essay about a subject that has been simmering in American politics for decades. The dual accelerants of events and ideology brought that simmer to a boil in 2020. The disputed question remains open: What is an American? It’s impossible to answer that question without its predicate: What is America? If we answer those questions, we are led to the primordial question of politics, which concerns justice: Are America and her institutions good?

These are the fundamental queries at the heart of the assimilation debate. What are we assimilating new Americans to—and why? The Right remains divided on these issues, as it has in different and shifting ways in the postwar era. Until the Left moderates on the topics of citizenship, assimilation, and civilizational stability, it will be up to the American Right (and its fellow travelers across the Atlantic) to have a rational argument about the preservation of American and Western civilization.

Creedal Mutations

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How Mortgage Fraud Makes the Housing Market More Expensive

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Wednesday 3rd September 2025

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Technology and the Future of Central Banking at the RBA

 — Organisation: Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) — Wednesday 3rd September 2025

Speech by Michele Bullock, Governor, to the 60th Shann Memorial Lecture. This speech is being broadcast live.

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The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 283

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Wednesday 3rd September 2025

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

A Grade of AI | The Roundtable Ep. 283

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