Arizona has hardly had an opportunity to recover from the aftershocks of Biden-omics. The trillions of dollars injected into the economy through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act continue to work their way through the system in the form of higher prices and eroded purchasing power. Open-border policies that expanded the labor supply at the lower and middle ends of the wage scale have depressed wages. And the Biden Administration’s unprecedented regulatory burden on industry, a nearly $2 trillion drag on the economy, will take far longer than a year to unwind and correct.
Unfortunately for Arizona, efforts to fix these problems at the federal level cannot be fully realized here at home because Katie Hobbs remains our Governor.
Hobbs has harmed Arizona’s recovery, overseeing a massive fall from 4th in the nation in job growth to 47th. She inherited a booming local economy after a Republican legislature and Governor ushered in a 2.5 percent income tax, incentivized entrepreneurs and small businesses, prioritized deregulation, and expanded choice and freedom in education. Yet Hobbs has managed to squander that opportunity. In fact, it takes a special skill set to be perfectly set up for success and then drive a working model into the ground.
And Hobbs knows she’s to blame. That’s why she’s now desperately trying to reinvent herself by pushing Trump-esque tax cut rhetoric while clinging to the same big-spending, high-tax policies that caused the damage in the first place. At her core, she remains a California-style Democrat who would rather govern Newsom-style than embrace the Republican solutions that actually work. That’s why, despite a Republican legislature that has delivered tax relief bills, more disciplined budgets, and common-sense deregulation, she has earned a reputation as the veto queen.
As a result, Arizonans are dealing with real affordability woes, and they best not hinge their hopes on Hobbs.
Despite responsible budgeting and repeated tax relief efforts by Republican lawmakers, affordability pressures continue to mount. Taxes are creeping higher at every level of government. Utility bills have surged. Housing costs are outpacing wage growth. And programs intended to help struggling families are losing billions to fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
That is why the 2026 legislative session must focus on Affordable Arizona…
As the end of 2025 nears, the question arises: What can Americans expect in the world of energy policy in 2026?
Predicting future events where energy is concerned is always a risky enterprise. After all, if anyone could accurately foresee where, say, the Brent price for crude oil would sit a week from today, that person would soon become fabulously wealthy and never have to work another day in his or her life. But no one can actually do that because too many widely disparate factors impact where prices will head on a daily basis. This overarching theme holds true in most areas of the widely diverse energy space.
Still, just as energy details like exact future oil prices or rig count levels are impossible to know with certainty, some overarching trends are entirely foreseeable. As an example, it was entirely predictable a year ago that 2025 would become a year in which an energy policy revolution would take place. Donald Trump had been elected to a second term and was in the process of naming cabinet nominees who would lead an effort to reverse the onerous regulations and economically ruinous subsidy spending of the Biden years.
A policy revolution was entirely predictable, even though, as I wrote at the time, it would take a somewhat different form than many were expecting. There would be no replay of the “Drill, Baby, Drill” agenda of Trump’s first term mainly due to a series of intractable economic factors. Instead, we’d have a “Build, Baby, Build” revolution in which policy changes have focused on setting the conditions for a boom in energy infrastructure like pipelines, LNG export facilities, baseload power generation, major transmission projects, new and expanded mining operations, and more into place.
With business-oriented cabinet officials like Chris Wright at the Energy Department and Doug Burgum at Interior leading the way, it was easy to predict that the second Trumpian energy revolution would focus on measures that allow markets, not the dictates of central government planners, to lead the charge. The command-and-control schemes, crony capitalism, and green subsidies would be repealed or phased away. Banks and investment houses would be put on notice that their discriminatory, ESG-focused lending practices would be policed. Rather than focus their personal energy on finding ways to punish disfavored energy players, administration officials would spend their days finding ways to speed up permitting processes.
Those things and more all came about in Year One of this second Trump presidency. It has been a true policy-driven revolution.
Now, as the dawn of 2026 nears, the direction of the administration’s Year Two agenda becomes equally predictable: Consolidation of the gains made in 2025.
The ending/phasing out of the green subsidies must be maintained since they distort markets by encouraging irrational allocations of capital. The capital thrown at wind and solar will be more productively allocated to building new natural gas and nuclear baseload plants and ensuring existing coal plants stay up and running to keep America’s lights on. The capital misallocated by legacy carmakers – like Ford and GM – to their foundering EV dreams must be reallocated to making cars American consumers can afford and actually desire to own.
With global markets creating rapidly rising demand for U.S. LNG, it’s time to “Build, Baby, Build” those needed new export facilities and the pipelines needed to feed the gas into them. Those energy gains can’t be consolidated without driving into action the streamlined processes to issue the needed permits.
And then there are the mines. Regardless of how quickly their permits can be issued, America can’t have any of the pipelines, LNG facilities, power plants, AI datacenters, or transmission lines without the raw mineral materials that make them work. America can no longer afford to be held hostage to supply chains for these materials dominated by China. That means more mines, and lots of them.
The President and his people have worked overtime throughout 2025 to ensure the executive branch’s side of this policy revolution is in place. Now, Congress must act to enshrine it permanently in law. Getting that done, consolidating the gains made in 2025 into action and statutes, will dominate the energy policy agenda throughout 2026. It’s all very predictable.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Guess what! Inflation, growth, jobs: Conventional wisdom from America’s economic punditry was across-the-board wrong. Again.
At the year’s start the punditry predicted that Trump’s tariffs would cause a surge of inflation and would likely trigger recession. Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released Consumer Price Index (CPI) numbers on Thursday. Reuters’ polling of private economists predicted inflation would accelerate to 3.1% year-over-year, the fastest pace since 2023. The actual BLS figure came in at 2.7%, with core inflation even lower at 2.6%.
But the news gets better. Year-over-year inflation means it includes inflationary pressures from the end of Biden’s presidency. It’s a very lagging figure.
To understand what inflation’s doing now, and to filter out some of the data’s noise, a better gauge is to look at inflation over the last two months, which came in at 1.2% annualized, well below the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
There is a small caveat to this good news. Due to the Schumer government shutdown, BLS was unable to collect all the usual data for the CPI report, so some items were left out. The economists who predicted accelerating inflation are thus arguing that inflation would, with all the data, have been much higher and thus excusing their bad forecasts.
However, as New York Fed President John Williams points out, the missing data “pushed down the CPI reading, probably by a tenth or so.” OK, so topline inflation was 2.8% while the annualized two-month figure goes to 1.8%, still well below consensus forecast and still below the Fed’s target rate.
What about Trump’s tariffs? To be sure, they pushed some prices up faster than they otherwise would have. But the tariffs only applied to a small fraction of all the goods and services sold in America. So, when it comes to overall inflation, the net effect could never be more than a one-time rounding error.
Further, inflation is fundamentally a monetary phenomenon. These tariff-induced price bumps occurred against a background of the underlying inflationary impulse from money supply interacting with money demand. The Fed has run a moderately restrictive policy for years, so naturally inflation is falling.
Assuming at least one of the Fed’s legion of economists can do this two-month calculation and has the temerity to show it to Chair Powell and the rest of the Fed’s leadership, then further Fed rate cuts should be assured and imminent on the road to neutral.
And what about that predicted recession? After inflation, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) soared 3.8% in the second quarter of this year, while the Atlanta Fed’s “Nowcast” of third quarter GDP is a still-impressive 3.5%.
Some of Reuters’ economists will likely portray this slight slowdown in growth as “scary” and a sign of pending recession. Nonsense. The economy is ripping, with the only recession pending threatening the salaries of those economists making silly forecasts.
Finally, those still desperate to argue economic weakness might turn to the labor market. The economy generated about 166,000 jobs a month during Biden’s last year in office. So far under Trump the economy has generated about 50,000 jobs a month. Sounds scary, but much of that decline occurred because federal employment fell by 27,000 jobs a month.
The even bigger jobs story is that employment by foreign-born workers has fallen by about 100,000 a month under Trump. This is what happens when immigration laws are enforced and the border is secured. Put it all together and private-sector native-born employment is doing very well.
And the cherry on top is that after stagnating for the four years of the Biden presidency, median real wages are now rising at a 1.6% annualized rate. Rising wages and plentiful private-sector jobs, not gimmicks like Obamacare subsidies and rent controls, are how you prosper American workers or, in today’s parlance, address “affordability.”
Just don’t be surprised if you don’t hear that from the legacy media.
J.D. Foster is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation. He is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.
The federal government will no longer subsidize transgender procedures for either adults or children.
On Thursday, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued a declaration prohibiting gender transition procedures as valid treatments for addressing gender dysphoria.
“Sex-rejecting procedures for children and adolescents are neither safe nor effective as a treatment modality for gender dysphoria, gender incongruence, or other related disorders in minors, and therefore, fail to meet professional recognized standards of health care. For the purposes of this declaration, ‘sex-rejecting procedures’ means pharmaceutical or surgical interventions, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries such as mastectomies, vaginoplasties, and other procedures, that attempt to align an individual’s physical appearance or body with an asserted identity that differs from the individual’s sex.”
The declaration cited the HHS evidence review on pediatric gender dysphoria care published in May as justification for the cessation of funds. As part of this evidence review, HHS invited peer reviews from other major medical associations. Among those invited, the American Academy of Pediatrics and Endocrine Society declined to participate. However, the American Psychiatric Association and eight other peer reviewers submitted their own reviews, which HHS published along with their own responses last month.
Further justification for the declaration came from evidence reviews and consensus by other European nations: the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Brazil, and Australia.
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will also be proposing new rules barring hospitals which participate in Medicare and Medicaid from performing gender transition procedures, and prohibiting Medicaid from paying for those procedures.
The FDA issued warnings to around a dozen manufacturers of breast binders to cease marketing to children for gender dysphoria. Noncompliance would result in enforcement actions, including product seizures.
HHS will also be reversing the Biden administration’s efforts to make gender dysphoria a protected class within the federal definition of “disability.”
In a press conference on the declaration, Kennedy said medical professionals supportive of transgenderism had “betrayed” their oath and “moral obligation” to do no harm.
“This is not medicine, it is malpractice. We’re done with junk science driven by ideological pursuits, not the well-being of children,” said Kennedy. “Sex-rejecting procedures rob children of their futures.”
One report cited by HHS estimated that 2023 revenue for gender-transitioning drugs and surgeries exceeded $4.4 billion, a figure which is on track to exceed $7 billion by 2030.
CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said children were sold a “dishonest narrative” about gender transitions as healthcare.
“You know what you get when you mix politics and medicine? Politics. There is no medicine left,” said Oz.
53 percent of children are in Medicaid or CHIP programs.
Oz offered a non-comprehensive list of recurring health problems within gender transition patients: puberty blockers associated with reduced bone density, altered brain development, lifelong disrupted sexual dysfunction; cross-sex hormones associated with infertility, loss of sexual function, cardiovascular issues, and long-term endocrine problems; and gender transition surgeries associated with disfiguration, pain, and mental health troubles.
Oz pointed out the high costs of the gender transition surgeries, offering examples of a vaginoplasty ($60,000) and phalloplasty ($150,000).
HHS estimates these bans will result in $250 million in savings for the taxpayer.
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I’ve written frequently here in recent years about the financial fiasco that has hit Ford Motor Company and other big U.S. carmakers who made the fateful decision to go in whole hog in 2021 to feed at the federal subsidy trough wrought on the U.S. economy by the Joe Biden autopen presidency. It was crony capitalism writ large, federal rent seeking on the grandest scale in U.S. history, and only now are the chickens coming home to roost.
Ford announced on Monday that it will be forced to take $19.5 billion in special charges as its management team embarks on a corporate reorganization in a desperate attempt to unwind the financial carnage caused by its failed strategies and investments in the electric vehicles space since 2022.
Cancelled is the Ford F-150 Lightning, the full-size electric pickup that few could afford and fewer wanted to buy, along with planned introductions of a second pricey pickup and fully electric vans and commercial vehicles. Ford will apparently keep making its costly Mustang Mach-E EV while adjusting the car’s features and price to try to make it more competitive. There will be a shift to making more hybrid models and introducing new lines of cheaper EVs and what the company calls “extended range electric vehicles,” or EREVs, which attach a gas-fueled generator to recharge the EV batteries while the car is being driven.
In an interview on CNBC, Company CEO Jim Farley said the basic problem with the strategy for which he was responsible since 2021 amounts to too few buyers for the highly priced EVs he was producing. Man, nobody could have possibly predicted that would be the case, could they? Oh, wait: I and many others have been warning this would be the case since Biden rolled out his EV subsidy plans in 2021.
“The $50k, $60k, $70k EVs just weren’t selling; We’re following customers to where the market is,” Farley said. “We’re going to build up our whole lineup of hybrids. It’s gonna be better for the company’s profitability, shareholders and a lot of new American jobs. These really expensive $70k electric trucks, as much as I love the product, they didn’t make sense. But an EREV that goes 700 miles on a tank of gas, for 90% of the time is all-electric, that EREV is a better solution for a Lightning than the current all-electric Lightning.”
It all makes sense to Mr. Farley, but one wonders how much longer the company’s investors will tolerate his presence atop the corporate management pyramid if the company’s financial fortunes don’t turn around fast.
To Ford’s and Farley’s credit, the company has, unlike some of its competitors (GM, for example), been quite transparent in publicly revealing the massive losses it has accumulated in its EV projects since 2022. The company has reported its EV enterprise as a separate business unit called Model-E on its financial filings, enabling everyone to witness its somewhat amazing escalating EV-related losses since 2022:
2022 – Net loss of $2.2 billion
2023 – Net loss of $4.7 billion
2024 – Net loss of $5.1 billion
Add in the company’s $3.6 billion in losses recorded across the first three quarters of 2025, and you arrive at a total of $15.6 billion net losses on EV-related projects and processes in less than four calendar years. Add to that the financial carnage detailed in Monday’s announcement and the damage from the company’s financial electric boogaloo escalates to well above $30 billion with Q4 2025’s damage still to be added to the total.
Ford and Farley have benefited from the fact that the company’s lineup of gas-and-diesel powered cars have remained strongly profitable, resulting in overall corporate profits each year despite the huge EV-related losses. It is also fair to point out that all car companies were under heavy pressure from the Biden government to either produce battery electric vehicles or be penalized by onerous federal regulations.
Now, with the Trump administration rescinding Biden’s harsh mandates and canceling the absurdly unattainable fleet mileage requirements, Ford and other companies will be free to make cars Americans actually want to buy. Better late than never, as they say, but the financial fallout from it all is likely just beginning to be made public.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
