New Bloomberg News poll shows increasing anxiety over job availability

More Americans are growing concerned of being victim of a mass layoff, subsequently losing their jobs, according to a new poll by Bloomberg News/Harris, as economic uncertainty looms and AI infrastructure grows more threatening.

Photo of woman posing next to "NEED WORK" sign, www.ere.net.

The poll for Bloomberg conducted by Harris showed that a whopping 55% of respondents agree that they're concerned of losing their jobs. This comes after numerous polls showing that unaffordability is becoming a worse issue even for people with full-time employment, with a 62% base of respondents in Bloomberg's October 23-25th poll saying that the cost of necessities rose in October and almost 50% agreeing that those price increases have made life difficult to afford in the United States.

The concern in the October Harris/Bloomberg poll was primarily among Democrats and individuals making less than $50k annually, with those with higher incomes and Republicans making up the largest concentrations of those not concerned with losing their jobs. Many Republicans have continued to have high hopes that as tariff income surges, companies would gradually spend more on production methods in the United States, but recent employment data, like weekly jobless claims and the unemployment rate, showed an otherwise dangerous trend than in part from tariffs but also other factors, jobs are leaving the country or disappearing from the economy all together.

In regard to affordability, expert Tobin Marcus of the Wolfe Research center argued that "They are seeing misplaced priorities... No one’s making an argument that the tariffs will bring prices down, which is the thing that voters first and foremost elected him to do." Evidently, he argues that voters were misinformed about how the Trump administration would conduct economic policy.

Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody's Analytics who has voiced concern over fiscal conservative policy, believed that, "If businesses start laying [people] off, then I think this will not just be a jobs recession, [it] will be an overall economic downturn. Everything is clinging tightly to the lip of the cliff."

But, if tariffs were supposed to bring jobs back to the United States, then why are jobs diminishing in record pace? A key contributor to this trend has been the integration of artificial intelligence across the economy, fueled by profound investments into AI by top firms like Nvidia, AMD, and Google. While these systems may benefit company profits and the stock market, they innately endanger the vitality of millions of jobs that may become automated within the coming years.

Also, tariffs have caused companies to pursue layoffs to maintain profit margin. In fact, the first company layoffs of 2025, such as the one by Target, were caused by tariff pressures, not AI. Worse, the ongoing government shutdown and cost-cutting efforts of the Trump administration has caused thousands of federal workers to be furloughed or laid off.