No. 49 of 108
1 August 2025
Hawai’i saw a 1.8% drop in June visitor arrivals. There is a drop in international travel to the U.S., especially from Canada, Asia, and Europe. Some of the decrease is due to disagreements between home countries and the U.S., in which citizens are making individual choices to not travel to the country they believe is treating their country badly. The leisure and tourism industry added only 5,000 jobs throughout the nation in July. After revisions, the U.S. jobs picture is the “weakest in decades”. “This is absolutely the worst major economic report since the end of the pandemic era”. Tariff wars have weakened and destabilized economies throughout the world, including the U.S. Prices are rising, businesses and producers are cutting back, and consumer confidence and therefore buying is down. Another factor is immigration policy. While new jobs are down, existing jobs have emptied out or gone unfilled in labor-intensive occupations, once filled by folx who are being or are fearful of being deported. Labor shortages generally do not create new jobs. Labor shortages also mean fewer throughputs in food production, food manufacturing, and construction. In economic downturns, government jobs and government funding have frequently slowed declines and mitigated impacts. In this case, the federal government is both slashing funding (except in defense and immigration enforcement) and terminating jobs. In response to the jobs report, Trump fired the senior official responsible for the report.
Everything is related to everything, whether we choose to believe it or not. Fewer things are more related to each other than the components of policy intersecting the economic well-being of individuals and communities and countries. Not believing that is the case doesn’t change the reality of what happens when wishful or willful thinking and policies are implemented, and even more so if at cross-purposes. The systems called economies are not only related internally and to each other, they are also massive. So, upheavals ripple out into the universe and reverberate back. Individual and community hacking of these systems, in some ways returning to simpler economic models that are nonetheless interrelated, will be the most fruitful inching forward as the seismic forces slog, mire, upheave.