It’s even better: a lot of essential or close to it things are pretty much monopolies or cartels (for example, Internet access in most of the US) so people have no actual choice but to pay a specific entity whatever they chose to charge.

It’s like tax but without the upside of taxes (which is that they’re money that’s supposed to entirely end up benefiting you, even if most of it indirectly) because when you buy a product or service from a monopoly or cartel only part of it goes to cover the cost of the actual product or service you’re getting and a large fraction or even most of it goes to shareholder dividends, which has zero benefit for you.

I’ve taken to call these things Taxes Paid Directly To Private Companies.

It’s pretty easy to pump up the official GDP Growth number by understating Inflation since the former is mathematically reduced by the latter.

You might have noticed frequent news (and people complaining) about the prices of things having gone up A LOT in the US and yet official Inflation figures are quite subdued.

Then on top of that, it’s an Election Year and the political pressure to massage then numbers to make them look good is likely higher than normal (plus they can always be corrected later, after the election).

The US might not practice China-level Economic-figures Massaging, but they’ve definitely been a lot more Fantastic and Fabulous (in that they have a lot more Fantasy and Fable to them) since the mad scramble to look good (or at least not as bad) after the 2008 Crash.

If I remember it correctly, in China Mao ordered sparrow to be killed en masse because they supposedly ate the grain: turns out that what they ate were the pests that attacked the plants.

Every whole in the ground is a Hamas Tunnel, every Palestinian is Hamas, every person critical of Israel is pro-Hamas.

You can see it everywhere, not just Israeli Propaganda (and even that from its unwavering supporters like Germany and the Biden Administration) but even here posts accusing somebody critical of Israel of being pro-Hamas are common.

Exactly.

My own experience in IT with companies which were even just starting to talk about layoffs is that the people who can much more easilly find new jobs - typically the better ones and the ones with hard to find or in more demand expertises - are the ones who leave first, often preemptivelly (though it does depend on their chances to get compensation for being dismissed and how much, so for example in certail legal jurisdictions were compensation depends on years employed there, you might seen the best of the newer employes just take off whilst the ones with many years there hold on for compensation because it’s worth it for them).

In fact if you’re going to do cuts you better have the list of positions which are going to be cut already planned because in that period of uncertaintly between knowing there will be layoffs and knowing who is going to be kicked out is when those people who can easilly find another job will leave, if only because that removes the uncertainy of if and when they’ll stop getting paid, reduces the risk of a gap between jobs and even lets you take your time when searching for a new job and thus get a better one (if you’re kicked out whilst still having bills to pay being selective about your new job is sometimes not possible).

Even were such effects only impact a small number of employees, it’s never the least useful ones that leave preemptivelly.

In this specific case with an ultimatum of the “do this thing that’s going to be worse fo you because I say so, or else” kind, that’s just going to give more reason for the ones who can leave more easilly to leave.