Friday’s jobs report shows the American labor market is turning a corner. The unemployment rate fell to 4.4%, and average wages grew 40% faster than inflation. Rising real wages are a stark contrast to the Biden administration, where 25% inflation caused an affordability crisis that President Donald Trump and Republicans are digging us out from.
The report also showed that unproductive government jobs have fallen by nearly 300,000 over the past year, reducing a significant drag on the real economy. The number of discouraged workers declined by almost 200,000 last month, and the number of Americans quitting their jobs increased significantly, indicating that workers are increasingly confident they can find a job.
Topline job creation remains mediocre, but hires are a lagging economic indicator. In fact, the labor market is far stronger than this headline number suggests.
Recent economic growth smashed expectations, with GDP rising by more than 4% in the most recent quarter. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model suggests growth will continue above 4%, representing a historic rise in living standards. Holiday spending also exceeded expectations, with Visa and Mastercard announcing growth of more than 4%, revealing a healthy American consumer.
Small businesses, America’s job creation engine, will respond to the strong economy and consumers by expanding and hiring, setting the stage for strong job gains in the months ahead.
According to a new Citizens Bank survey of small businesses, two-thirds of small businesses expect their revenues to increase in the first quarter of this year. And a new JPMorgan Chase survey finds that three-quarters of small businesses anticipate revenue growth.
Fast economic growth and increasing Main Street revenues don’t happen in a vacuum, as many left-wing pundits would have you believe. They are the direct result of good public policy that empowers businessmen, not bureaucrats.
Exhibit A is Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law last July, which cut taxes for entrepreneurs and employees. The bill restored and made permanent 100% immediate expensing for small businesses, encouraging expansion, development, and hiring. It also made permanent the 20% small business tax deduction, allowing more stores to become profitable.
It expanded the standard deduction and child tax deduction and exempted tip and overtime income, giving workers what should be their largest tax refunds in American history this spring. Funds that will help folks overcome Biden’s affordability crisis.
Sadly, every Democrat in Congress voted against these significant middle-class tax cuts and in favor of the biggest tax hike in American history. Republicans need to sell this win to independents and apolitical folks every day from now until the midterms to keep control of Congress.
Mass deportations, the Epstein files, and transgender bathrooms may be the issues that matter most to the MAGA base, but they are not the ones that will get Republicans the 51% coalition needed to win. They will not motivate Martha, three doors down the block, Jorge, in the apartment complex across the street, or David and Michael, the brother duo trying to get their Main Street cafe off the ground.
No matter what the latest America First social media influencer says, preserving and expanding the opportunity economy will always be the winning message the broad conservative coalition needs to overcome the Democrat siren song of “free stuff.”
The Trump administration and Congressional Republicans have notched numerous wins to advance this engine of increased well-being and affordability. Now it’s time to connect the dots for the general public. Big job gains in the months ahead will help drive these victories home.
Alfredo Ortiz is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, CEO of Job Creators Network, author of “The Real Race Revolutionaries,” and co-host of the Main Street Matters podcast.
U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) recently told Newsmax that Americans should begin feeling the economic impact of President Donald Trump’s signature tax and budget law within the next 90 days as key provisions are implemented.
Biggs made the remarks during an interview on Monday, December 22, referencing what supporters officially call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1), a broad tax and spending statute signed into law earlier this year.
Biggs said Americans will start seeing the tax changes “pretty quickly,” adding that the core provisions would “start spinning up in the next 90 days.”
He told the outlet that the rollout of the new tax policy would stimulate economic activity. “So you’re going to see some new things with regard to Social Security, overtime, tax on tips, and that’s going to actually cause some economic stimulus,” Biggs said.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was enacted on July 4, 2025, following passage in both the U.S. House and Senate. It includes a wide range of tax code changes, spending provisions, and policy adjustments central to the Trump administration’s domestic agenda.
The law permanently extends several individual and business income tax cuts originally enacted in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and includes a number of deductions and tax incentives. It also makes significant changes to Medicaid eligibility requirements and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), raises the debt ceiling, and allocates funding across defense, border enforcement, and other federal priorities.
Biggs was among Arizona’s congressional Republicans who supported the bill during its floor votes. All six Republican members of Arizona’s U.S. House delegation voted in favor of the legislation when it returned to the chamber for final approval in July.
The bill passed the House on a 218-214 vote after earlier Senate approval. It then went to President Trump, who signed it into law later the same day.
Biggs’s comments come as Republican lawmakers and supporters highlight the expected timelines for implementing tax cuts and credits included in the legislation. Trump allies have repeatedly emphasized that many provisions are designed to reduce tax burdens for individuals and businesses once they take effect in 2026.
The law’s changes to federal tax rates and deductions, including those affecting child tax credits and specific income brackets, could impact Arizona households in 2026 as those provisions begin phasing in. It also includes changes to federal funding streams that intersect with state budgets, such as SNAP and Medicaid, both of which have significant participation among Arizona residents.
Despite Halloween being long over, Katie Hobbs has decided to spend the Christmas season playing dress-up as a Trump-loving, tax-cutting, leader of the middle and working class.
On November 20th, Governor Hobbs released her so-called “Tax Cuts for Middle-Class Arizonans” plan. If some of these concepts sound familiar, that’s because every single provision in her plan was word-for-word copied straight out of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) tax package signed into law by President Trump on July 4th:
Increase the standard deduction from $15,000 to $15,750 for single filers, $31,500 for joint filers – straight from the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB)
Adding an additional $6,000 deduction for seniors over 65 – straight from the OBBB
Deducting tipped income from taxable income – straight from the OBBB
Deducting overtime income – straight from the OBBB
Deducting car-loan interest on new American-made vehicles – again, right out of the OBBB
So, after spending months opposing the OBBB, trashing Congressional Republicans, and urging its defeat, Hobbs has now decided to pretend that it was her idea all along…
During the latest marathon cabinet meeting on Dec. 2, Energy Secretary Chris Wright made news when he told President Donald Trump that “The biggest determinant of the price of energy is politicians, political leaders, and polices — that’s what drives energy prices.”
He’s right about that, and it is why the back-and-forth struggle over federal energy and climate policy plays such a key role in America’s economy and society. Just 10 months into this second Trump presidency, the administration’s policies are already having a profound impact, both at home and abroad.
While the rapid expansion of AI datacenters over the past year is currently being blamed by many for driving up electric costs, power bills were skyrocketing long before that big tech boom began, driven in large part by the policies of the Obama and Biden administration designed to regulate and subsidize an energy transition into reality. As I’ve pointed out here in the past, driving up the costs of all forms of energy to encourage conservation is a central objective of the climate alarm-driven transition, and that part of the green agenda has been highly effective.
President Trump, Wright, and other key appointees like Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin have moved aggressively throughout 2025 to repeal much of that onerous regulatory agenda. The GOP congressional majorities succeeded in phasing out Biden’s costly green energy subsidies as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on July 4. As the federal regulatory structure eases and subsidy costs diminish, it is reasonable to expect a gradual easing of electricity and other energy prices.
This year’s fading out of public fear over climate change and its attendant fright narrative spells bad news for the climate alarm movement. The resulting cracks in the green facade have manifested rapidly in recent weeks.
Climate-focused conflict groups that rely on public fears to drive donations have fallen on hard times. According to a report in the New York Times, the Sierra Club has lost 60 percent of the membership it reported in 2019 and the group’s management team has fallen into infighting over elements of the group’s agenda. Greenpeace is struggling just to stay afloat after losing a huge court judgment for defaming pipeline company Energy Transfer during its efforts to stop the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
350.org, an advocacy group founded by Bill McKibben, shut down its U.S. operations in November amid funding woes that had forced planned 25 percent budget cuts for 2025 and 2026. Employees at EDF voted to form their own union after the group went through several rounds of budget cuts and layoffs in recent months.
The fading of climate fears in turn caused the ESG management and investing fad to also fall out of favor, leading to a flood of companies backtracking on green investments and climate commitments. The Net Zero Banking Alliance disbanded after most of America’s big banks – Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and others – chose to drop out of its membership.
The EV industry is also struggling. As the Trump White House moves to repeal Biden-era auto mileage requirements, Ford Motor Company is preparing to shut down production of its vaunted F-150 Lightning electric pickup, and Stellantis cancelled plans to roll out a full-size EV truck of its own. Overall EV sales in the U.S. collapsed in October and November following the repeal of the $7,500 per car IRA subsidy effective Sept 30.
The administration’s policy actions have already ended any new leasing for costly and unneeded offshore wind projects in federal waters and have forced the suspension or abandonment of several projects that were already moving ahead. Capital has continued to flow into the solar industry, but even that industry’s ability to expand seems likely to fade once the federal subsidies are fully repealed at the end of 2027.
Truly, public policy matters where energy is concerned. It drives corporate strategies, capital investments, resource development and movement, and ultimately influences the cost of energy in all its forms and products. The speed at which Trump and his key appointees have driven this principle home since Jan. 20 has been truly stunning.
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.
President Trump has certainly shaken up, if not severely damaged, the climate hoax and Green New Scam in just 10 short months. Here’s a list of his 10 top climate-related accomplishments for which we should all be thankful this holiday season:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed to end the government’s “scientific” basis for the climate hoax by rescinding the Obama EPA’s 2009 illegal and incorrect determination that emissions of greenhouse gases endanger the public welfare. As part of this effort, the Department of Energy issued a report by top climate scientists concluding that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions will have no detectable effect on global climate change.
President Trump, again, pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, an unconstitutional effort by Presidents Obama and Biden to adopt a United Nations treaty without ratification by the Senate.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act terminated hundreds of billions of dollars of the climate-related “Green New Scam” spending of the (so-called) Inflation Reduction Act, including all subsidies for electric vehicle purchases.
President Trump has directed his administration to reduce Green New Scam spending that survived the One Big Beautiful Bill by means of bureaucratic review, red tape and delay. The rent-seeking and piratical thieves who want to steal from taxpayers played hardball to save some of their ill-gotten gains. The President is now showing, rather impressively, that he can play hardball right back.
President Trump signed into law a bill terminating California’s electric vehicle mandate. Greens had tried to mandate EVs in California to force carmakers to only make EVs for the entire nation. Thanks to the President, that will not happen in the foreseeable future.
The EPA scored an appellate court victory in its effort to reclaim $20 billion in Biden EPA Green New Scam panic spending made infamous by the Project Veritas video, “We’re Throwing Gold Bars Off the Titanic.”
President Trump halted a number of offshore wind projects and cut funding for many others. There are other projects that deserve to be terminated, such as the largest U.S. offshore wind farm being built by Virginia’s Dominion Energy, but a great start has been made so far.
Stunningly, President Trump stopped cold a U.N. treaty to implement a global tax on shipping emissions by threatening would-be signatories with tariffs. This treaty would have been the first global climate tax.
President Trump boycotted and sent no delegation to the United Nations climate conference (COP-30) in Brazil, rendering the annual meeting even more confused and meaningless than it usually is.
President Trump delivered a blistering speech to the United Nations blasting the climate hoax for about 15 minutes or so. The President summed up his views on climate in this one memorable sentence: “The carbon footprint is a hoax, made up by people with evil intentions and they’re heading down a path of total destruction.”
That’s quite a list. But much is left to be done. Some of the big items are as follows:
The EPA must finalize its rescission of the endangerment finding and then successfully defend the rescission in the Supreme Court.
All the Green New Scam spending must be terminated as soon as possible. Every dollar spent is a dollar stolen from taxpayers and invested in making us more energy dependent on Communist China.
It is not enough to withdraw only from the Paris Climate Accord. President Trump must withdraw the United States from the 1992 parent treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
And it would be really awesome if President Trump also withdrew the U.S. from the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the bogus treaty allegedly addressing the imaginary “ozone hole.” That treaty, the follow-on Kigali Amendment ratified during the Biden administration, and language in the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2020 signed by President Trump, has only been used to make refrigeration and air conditioning pointlessly more expensive.
I heard Al Gore tell a group of conservatives in January 2006 that the real purpose of the Montreal Protocol was to demonstrate that a global environmental treaty could be implemented. That “success” was then subsequently used as precedent for the UNFCCC and its spinoff climate treaties, the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Climate Accord. The ozone hole hoax paved the way for the climate hoax and Green New Scam. It’s all been a multi-trillion-dollar fraud on American consumers and taxpayers.
America became great before these pointless environmental treaties. It has been greatly harmed and dangerously hamstrung by them since their ratification. If MAGA means anything, it means exiting international efforts to cripple the U.S. with junk science-based environmental treaties. And it would make a great Christmas present to the nation. Just a suggestion.
