Originally published on Substack. 

​As we celebrate Independence Day, I’m reminded of my time as chief economist at the White House before the disastrous government shutdowns crushed much of the economy during COVID-19. One of the best parts of that job was explaining a genuinely strong labor market: broad-based private hiring, rising participation, and real wage gains that helped families move up.

My job would be much harder today.

The latest June Employment Situation report⁠ shows unemployment at 4.2%, which looks good at first glance. But policymakers should know three things that headline misses.

Payrolls rose by only 57,000 jobs in June, and April and May were revised down by 74,000. Labor force participation fell to 61.5%, the lowest since June 2021. Average weekly earnings rose 3.8% over the year, but the latest CPI report⁠ shows prices up 4.2% and chained CPI⁠ up 4.0%, meaning workers’ weekly pay is barely keeping up or falling slightly in real terms.

That is not a collapse. But it is a warning.

The Headline Hides Weakness

The unemployment rate stayed at 4.2%⁠, and that matters. America is not in recession, and many people are still working.

Originally published on Substack. 

​This week reinforced a lesson that cuts across nearly every policy debate in America:
​
People work better than government.

That may sound obvious, but it’s amazing how often policymakers forget it.

Whether the topic is poverty, jobs, housing, taxes, budgets, or inflation, the instinct in Washington and many state capitals is often the same: create another program, spend more money, or expand government authority. Yet the evidence continues to point in the opposite direction.

Take economic mobility. In my recent article for The Daily Economy⁠, later republished by RealClearMarkets⁠, I challenged the myth that America has a permanent underclass trapped in poverty.

The reality is that most people move through income brackets over their lifetimes as they gain skills, build careers, start businesses, and accumulate wealth. The goal of public policy shouldn’t be managing outcomes—it should be expanding opportunities.
​
The same principle showed up in the latest U.S. jobs report.

​While headlines celebrated job growth, my analysis found much of the increase came from government and government-dependent sectors. A bigger government payroll is not the same thing as a stronger economy. Lasting prosperity comes from productive private-sector growth, entrepreneurship, investment, and innovation. That’s where rising living standards come from, not government expansion.
​
Housing affordability tells a similar story. In my recent RealClearMarkets commentary⁠, I argued that America’s affordability challenges stem largely from supply constraints.

​Too many policymakers focus on restricting growth instead of expanding supply. Whether it’s housing, energy, water, or data centers, abundance—not scarcity—is the path to lower prices and greater opportunity.
​
The question of ownership remains central as well. In my latest property tax work, including Wyoming’s path toward property tax relief⁠, I continued making the case that if government can tax your property forever, ownership is incomplete.

Families should own their homes, not rent them from government through perpetual taxation. The solution starts with spending restraint and using surpluses to reduce and ultimately eliminate property taxes.
​
That same spending restraint is at the heart of the Sustainable Budget Project. Whether examining Alabama’s $18,000 spending problem⁠ or Alaska’s resource trap⁠, the lesson remains remarkably consistent: government spending that grows faster than population growth plus inflation eventually leads to higher taxes, slower growth, and fewer opportunities.

They’re largely the result of inflation, Federal Reserve policy, rising funding costs, and increased lending risks. When policymakers abandon fiscal discipline, families eventually pay the price.
​
One of the highlights of the week was seeing my work published internationally through the Instituto de Liberdade Econômica⁠, where I made the case that free-market capitalism remains the greatest engine of prosperity ever discovered.

No economic system has done more to lift people out of poverty, improve living standards, and expand opportunity.
​
My economic episode this week was on how government failures hurt our ability to prosper in many ways.

Across all these issues, the lesson is the same. Economic mobility requires opportunity. Housing affordability requires abundance. Ownership requires property rights. Growth requires entrepreneurship. Prosperity requires freedom.

Government has an important role, but it cannot replace families, businesses, churches, charities, and communities. Those institutions remain the real engines of human flourishing.

The more we trust people, the more they prosper. And that’s exactly what public policy should be designed to achieve.

Originally published on Substack. 

​The latest April jobs report and first-quarter GDP report tell a story that too many in Washington and on Wall Street do not want to admit: the economy is softer than the headlines suggest, inflation is heating back up, and working Americans are not seeing the kind of real progress that justifies all the market celebration. The stock market may be cheering, but the fundamentals look weaker, narrower, and much less durable than the valuations imply.

Growth Is Positive, But It Is Not Prosperity

Real GDP rose at a 2.0 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026.

Cutting the bloated federal workforce is one of the few genuine bright spots. But outside that, the economy is not delivering the broad-based, productivity-enhancing growth people were promised.
​
Manufacturing was essentially flat in April and remains well below where protectionists claimed it would be. Information employment is down sharply from its 2022 peak. Transportation and warehousing is still down substantially from its February 2025 peak. That is not an industrial revival. It is stagnation.

Paychecks Are Rising, But Hours and Inflation Matter

Average hourly earnings rose 3.6 percent over the year to $37.41 in April, and the average workweek edged up to 34.3 hours. That puts average weekly pay at roughly $1,283 before taxes.

But families do not live on nominal wage growth alone. They live on purchasing power. When quarterly PCE inflation is running at 4.5 percent, wage gains do not go nearly as far as they should. Workers may see higher paychecks, but too many are still losing ground after inflation, especially with goods and energy pressures still hanging around.

Protectionism and Uncertainty Are Hitting the Real Economy

This weakness is not happening in a vacuum. Tariffs and broader policy uncertainty are part of the drag. Manufacturing, information, and finance have all shown signs of weakness, while the promised factory comeback has failed to materialize.

Deregulation and some tax reforms could help at the margin, and full expensing is a major positive for investment. But that gets undercut when policymakers raise distortions elsewhere, including a bigger SALT deduction and carveouts that make the tax code less neutral and less pro-growth.

Trump 45 got more right early on with deregulation and tax reform before protectionism took over. Trump 47 has leaned much harder into the damaging part first.

Bad Policy Is the Through Line

Some blame belongs to Biden-era excess spending and to the Fed under Powell for letting inflation do so much damage after Covid. That is real. But Trump’s flawed Covid-era policies helped start the decline, and the current administration’s mix of protectionism, immigration restrictions, policy volatility, antitrust populism, price-control thinking, and geopolitical escalation is making things worse.

War risk pushes up energy costs. Trade fights push up goods prices. Policy uncertainty freezes hiring and investment. This is not classical liberalism. It is economic self-sabotage dressed up as strength.

Wall Street Is Pricing a Better Economy Than the One We Have

Stocks can keep rising for a while, but valuations eventually have to answer to fundamentals. Right now, the fundamentals are slower real growth, hotter inflation, weaker labor-market internals, and narrow job gains. That is not a foundation for lasting prosperity. It is a warning sign.
​
Three Key Takeaways for Policymakers

• A 2.0 percent GDP growth rate with 4.5 percent PCE inflation is not a healthy economy. It is the result of repeated policy failure.
• A 4.3 percent unemployment rate does not tell the full story when participation is falling, underemployment is elevated, and job growth is too concentrated in government-adjacent sectors.
• The answer is a policy reset toward classical liberalism: spend less, stabilize money, expand free trade, keep what works on investment and deregulation, and stop punishing growth with tariffs, carveouts, and political theater.​

Originally published on Substack. 

​Prices Hit Home

The latest Consumer Price Index report should end the fantasy that inflation is gone. March CPI jumped 0.9 percent in a single month, and the 12-month headline rate rose to 3.3 percent. Core CPI increased 0.2 percent in March and 2.6 percent over the past year. Even by the cleaner measure, inflation is still running above where price stability should be. The Federal Reserve’s long-run inflation target is 2 percent, measured by PCE, not CPI, but the point remains the same: prices are still rising too fast, and families know it.

Inflation always hurts working families first and worst. When prices rise faster than paychecks, people do not need a lecture from Washington about “resilience.” They need relief. Instead, they get shrinking purchasing power, tighter budgets, delayed purchases, and more debt. They feel poorer because bad policy is making them poorer.

Weak Labor Signals

This would be bad enough if the economy were otherwise humming along. But it is not. Inflation moving higher while job growth weakens is the kind of combination that should make every policymaker nervous. That is how stagflation creeps back into the conversation: not all at once, but through a steady mix of higher costs, weaker confidence, and slower growth.

The bigger problem is that Washington keeps feeding the fire instead of putting it out.

The Fed’s Long Shadow
​
Start with the Federal Reserve. The Fed’s total assets were $6.694 trillion as of April 8, according to FRED’s WALCL series.

That matters because a bloated central bank balance sheet is not neutral. Years of extraordinary intervention distorted asset prices, encouraged misallocation of capital, rewarded leverage, and helped fuel the inflationary pressures Americans are still dealing with. Easy money always looks clever on the way up. Then families get the bill on the way down.

There should be a rule to reverse this. The Fed’s balance sheet should be put on a predictable path back toward roughly 6 percent of GDP over time, absent a true emergency. Emergency tools should not become permanent habits. Monetary policy should not be a standing engine of distortion. Sound money requires rules, restraint, and humility.

Tariffs Raise Costs

Then there is trade policy. Tariffs are taxes on Americans. They raise input costs for producers, increase prices for consumers, and create uncertainty for businesses trying to plan investment and hiring. There is no magic here. Protectionism does not create prosperity. It redistributes pain and calls it patriotism.
​
That is especially damaging at a time like this. When inflation is already too high and growth is already soft, piling more costs onto supply chains is economic malpractice. Businesses do not absorb these costs out of kindness. They pass them through, delay expansion, or cut back elsewhere.

Overspending Adds Fuel

Fiscal policy is no better. Washington has spent years overspending up to $7 trillion per year, subsidizing consumption, picking winners, and pretending deficits do not matter. The result is exactly what basic economics would predict: weaker incentives for productive investment, higher interest costs, and a more fragile growth outlook.

This is where the case for fiscal rules matters. I have long argued for a spending limit based on population growth plus inflation so government grows no faster than the private economy can sustain. Spend above that, and you get what we have now: bloated budgets, more debt, and less room for families and businesses to thrive. Fiscal discipline is not austerity. It is the minimum requirement for sanity.

War and Uncertainty

Add wars and geopolitical instability to this mess and the risks multiply. Conflict disrupts energy markets, rattles supply chains, clouds business expectations, and makes already-high prices even more volatile. At the same time, policy uncertainty from tariffs, deficits, and regulatory swings freezes hiring and investment. Businesses sit on their hands when Washington cannot stop moving the goalposts.

That is how families get squeezed from every direction. Prices rise. Growth weakens. Job prospects soften. Confidence fades. And the people who caused much of the mess ask for even more power to manage it.

Less Government, More Prosperity

None of this should be surprising. Government tried to print prosperity, spend prosperity, and tariff its way to prosperity. It failed. Again.

The answer is less government. That means monetary rules instead of discretion, spending restraint instead of endless deficits, open markets instead of tariffs, and a foreign policy that understands war is costly in both lives and living standards. Families do not need more central planning. They need room to work, save, invest, and build.

I have made this case in my writings for years because the lesson keeps proving true: prosperity comes from free people and free markets, not from Washington trying to micromanage the economy. Inflation is not just a statistic. It is a policy failure with a grocery bill attached.

Closing Thoughts

March’s CPI report is a warning. Inflation is still too high. The Fed is still far from restored normality. Washington’s tariffs, overspending, and war-driven uncertainty are making the outlook worse, not better. If policymakers want to help families, they should stop distorting markets and start shrinking government.

Subscribe to Let People Prosper on Substack and stay engaged. Share this with someone who is tired of paying for Washington’s mistakes, and follow along for more analysis on how we can restore sound money, rein in spending, remove barriers to growth, and let people prosper.
​
Three key takeaways for policymakers

• Restore a monetary rule. Inflation is still above the Fed’s 2 percent target, and the balance sheet remains massively elevated at about $6.7 trillion. The Fed should follow a rules-based path that steadily normalizes its footprint and gets the balance sheet back near its pre-2008 norm relative to GDP of 6%.
• Adopt a fiscal rule. Federal spending should reduced then capped to grow no faster than population plus inflation. That is the surest way to stop chronic overspending, reduce inflationary pressure, and protect taxpayers from government that keeps growing faster than the real economy.
• End cost-raising intervention. Tariffs, subsidies, and war-driven uncertainty raise prices and weaken growth. The better path is simple: less government, freer markets, stronger incentives to produce, and more room for families to prosper.

Originally published on Substack. 

Today’s U.S. jobs report was better than expected, and that is welcome news. The economy added 178,000 jobs in March, the unemployment rate edged down to 4.3%, and average hourly earnings rose 3.5% over the past year, according to the latest BLS employment report. After the weakness earlier this year, that is a solid bounce.

But let’s not kid ourselves. One better month does not mean the labor market is healthy. It means March was better than February. That is not the same thing.

The Headline Was Better
​
A gain of 178,000 jobs is real progress, well above what some expected. February payrolls had dropped by 133,000, so March was clearly an improvement. Americans keep working, businesses keep hiring when they can, and that resilience should be acknowledged.

But the same BLS report also says payroll employment has “changed little on net over the prior 12 months.” That is the line that matters most. This was a good month inside a labor market that has been sluggish for more than a year, with declines in six of the last fourteen months.

Private Hiring Still Looks Weak

The private sector added 186,000 jobs in March. That is better than a decline, but it is still not broad-based strength. The problem is not the size of the gain. It is how concentrated is that gain.
​
According to the BLS data, health care added 76,000 jobs, construction added 26,000, transportation and warehousing added 21,000, and social assistance added 14,000. Those sectors did most of the work.

Meanwhile, financial activities lost 15,000 jobs, and BLS said manufacturing, wholesale trade, retail trade, information, professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and other services showed little change.

That is not a broad private-sector expansion. That is a narrow labor market being carried by a few sectors.

Government Jobs Declined Again
​
Government employment fell by 8,000 in March, including an 18,000 drop in federal government jobs, according to the BLS report. That federal decline is good news on its own, as it is the fewest federal employees in 60 years and the lowest share of total employment since at least 1939.

But the broader lesson is more important. If federal payrolls (good) are shrinking while only a small private sectors addition (not good), that means the labor market is still too weak underneath the surface. A truly healthy economy would show broad hiring across many private industries, not just a few pockets doing the heavy lifting, which are dominated by government.

The 12-Month Trend Is Still Soft

The annual trend looks worse than the headline.
​
BLS says construction had shown little net change over the prior 12 months. Transportation and warehousing is down 139,000 jobs since its February 2025 peak. Financial activities is down 77,000 since its May 2025 peak. And federal government employment is down 355,000, or 11.8%, since its October 2024 peak, per the same report.

Health care remains the standout, adding an average of 29,000 jobs per month over the prior year. That is good. But it also proves the larger point: too much of the labor market’s strength is concentrated in too few places that are dominated by government.

The Labor Force Drop Matters

The unemployment rate dipped to 4.3%, but not for the best reason.

The BLS report shows the civilian labor force fell by 396,000 in March. The number of people not in the labor force rose by 488,000. The labor force participation rate slipped to 61.9%, and the employment-population ratio fell to 59.2%.

That means part of the lower unemployment rate came from fewer people being counted in the labor market, not from a broad surge in employment opportunities. That is why this report is better described as encouraging than reassuring.

Wages Help, but Families Are Still Squeezed

Wage growth at 3.5% over the year is better than falling behind inflation, at least for the moment. But it is hardly a huge cushion when families are still dealing with elevated prices for food, housing, insurance, and energy.

And this is where bad policy keeps making things worse.

Tariffs are taxes. They raise costs for businesses and consumers. Energy shocks tied to the war in Iran threaten to push gas prices and broader inflation higher. Years of overspending and monetary excess already strained affordability.

Families do not experience the economy through one payroll headline. They experience it through their budget, and their budget is still under pressure.

Bad Policy Still Drives the Weakness

The jobs report does not assign causes. That is not its job. But the policy backdrop matters.

A labor market with weak breadth and falling participation is more vulnerable to policy mistakes. Tariffs discourage trade and investment. Regulatory burdens raise costs and reduce flexibility. Overspending fuels inflation and weakens real purchasing power. Energy instability pushes input costs higher across the economy. Policy uncertainty makes businesses more cautious about hiring and expanding.

So, yes, March was better. But the economy is still carrying the weight of too many bad policy choices. That is why this report is not a vindication of the current policy path. If anything, it is a reminder of how resilient Americans are despite Washington’s mistakes.

Three Takeaways for Policymakers

1. Don’t oversell one month.

March’s 178,000 job gain was a welcome bounce, but BLS says payrolls have changed little on net over the prior 12 months.

2. Private-sector strength is still too narrow.

Most of the March gains came from health care, construction, transportation and warehousing, and social assistance, while many other industries were flat or down, according to BLS.

3. A lower unemployment rate means less if the labor force is shrinking.

The BLS report shows the labor force fell by 396,000 in March and participation slipped to 61.9%.

The Bottom Line

March was a bounce. Good.

But the private sector still looks too weak, too narrow, and too vulnerable to bad policy. Federal jobs fell, which is fine. The bigger issue is that broad private-sector hiring still is not there. And when the labor force is shrinking, a lower unemployment rate is not nearly as comforting as it looks.

Policymakers should stop making affordability worse through tariffs, overspending, and more distortion.

​Nonfarm payrolls fell by 92,000, the unemployment rate climbed to 4.4 percent, and labor force participation slipped to 62.0 percent, its lowest level since late 2021. The household survey showed 185,000 fewer Americans working and 203,000 more unemployed.

This is not a healthy labor market. It looks increasingly like a jobs recession. And the deeper data suggests the problem is worse than the headline.

The Sector Data Is Flashing Warning Signs
​
The detailed industry employment tables show job losses spreading across key sectors tied to production and investment.

In February alone:
• Manufacturing: −12,000
• Construction: −11,000
• Transportation and warehousing: −11,300
• Information: −11,000
• Leisure and hospitality: −27,000
• Private education and health services: −34,000

Even health care, long the strongest job-creating sector, lost 28,000 jobs.

Meanwhile, gains were limited to a few smaller areas like financial activities and other services.

The broader industry employment chart shows a troubling pattern: job losses are spreading while growth is concentrated in fewer sectors.

Healthy labor markets grow broadly. Weak ones do not.

The 12-Month Trend Is Even More Concerning
​
Looking at the past year of industry employment data tells a similar story.

Most job growth came from private education and health services, which added roughly 650,000 jobs.

But several key sectors declined:
• Transportation and warehousing: about −160,000 jobs
• Manufacturing: about −100,000 jobs
• Professional and business services: about −90,000 jobs
• Information: about −70,000 jobs

The long-term private employment trend still rises over decades, but the recent slope is flattening quickly.

Private sector jobs have now declined in four of the last nine months.

Put simply: the U.S. economy has lost jobs overall since April 2025, and total job gains from May 2025 through February 2026 are now negative. Businesses are not hiring into this level of policy uncertainty.

The Workers Hit First

Another troubling sign is which workers are being hit first.

According to the latest unemployment breakdown:
• Teen unemployment: 14.9 percent
• Black unemployment: 7.7 percent
• Hispanic unemployment: 5.2 percent
• Asian unemployment: 4.8 percent

Younger workers and minority workers are usually the first to suffer when labor markets weaken.

The pattern is already emerging.

BLS Revisions Reinforce the Weakness

Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics revisions also show the labor market has been weaker than previously reported.
Revisions adjusted prior months lower, confirming that hiring momentum has been fading for some time. In other words, the slowdown did not begin in February. It has been building.

Protectionism Has Not Revived Manufacturing

The policy explanation matters. Protectionist tariffs were supposed to revive American manufacturing. Instead, manufacturing employment continues to decline.

Tariffs are simply taxes on American businesses and American families. They raise costs for manufacturers who rely on imported inputs and equipment.

I have written about this repeatedly in my work on trade policy and economic growth. The economic logic is simple: taxing production inputs makes domestic production less competitive.

You cannot rebuild American industry by making it more expensive to produce in America.

Overspending and Regulation Are Making It Worse

Trade policy is only part of the story. Washington’s spending explosion has increased deficits, fueled inflation, and forced tighter financial conditions. At the same time, regulatory pressure across industries has increased compliance costs and discouraged investment.

The result is predictable: businesses delay hiring when policy becomes unstable. And now geopolitical uncertainty risks making things worse.

The war with Iran began after the jobs survey period, so it did not cause the February weakness. But higher energy prices and global instability could easily compound the slowdown already underway.

The Fed Cannot Solve This

Some policymakers will respond by urging the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. That would miss the point.

The Fed mainly controls nominal variables like inflation and credit conditions, not real variables like employment or productivity.

If job losses are driven by tariffs, overspending, regulation, and uncertainty, monetary easing will not fix the cause.

The better approach is for the Fed to continue shrinking its balance sheet while policymakers address the real problems.

The Policy Reset We Need

The path forward is clear.
• End tariffs, which would deliver an immediate tax cut for American businesses and families.
• Reduce federal spending, easing inflation pressure and restoring fiscal stability.
• Cut regulatory burdens, allowing businesses to invest and hire.
• Stabilize economic policy, so employers can plan with confidence.

Real economic growth comes from production, entrepreneurship, and innovation. That means giving markets room to work.

A Direct Call to Policymakers and the Media

If you are a policymaker, staffer, or journalist reading this, the labor market is sending a warning signal. The data are clear. Job losses are spreading. Hiring momentum is fading. Participation is falling.

Ignoring these signals will only make the eventual downturn worse.

If you want deeper analysis, data interpretation, or policy solutions grounded in economic research, reach out. My work focuses on spending restraint, pro-growth tax policy, and economic freedom, and I regularly brief policymakers and media outlets on these issues.

You can explore more of my research at my writings or subscribe to vanceginn.substack.com.
​
The labor market warning lights are flashing. Now it is time for policymakers to act before they become sirens.

​If you listen closely to today’s labor debates, you’ll hear a familiar refrain: workers need more protection from Washington. But scratch the surface, and what many politicians really mean is more power for unions, more mandates for employers, and fewer choices for workers themselves.

That’s backward.

In this episode of the Let People Prosper Show, I talk with Vinnie Vernuccio, one of the sharpest labor-policy minds in the country and a longtime advocate for actual worker freedom. We talk about what it really means to be pro-worker in a 21st-century economy—one defined by flexibility, technology, and individual choice, not 1930s labor law.

This is a timely conversation. Between renewed pushes for the PRO Act, rising use of AI in the workplace, and growing attacks on independent contracting and right-to-work laws, the future of work is being shaped right now. And too often, workers are treated as political props rather than individuals with agency.

This episode pushes back—hard.

🎧 Watch or listen to the full episode on YouTube, Apple Podcast, or Spotify, and visit my website at vanceginn.com for more information about my work at Ginn Economic Consulting.

Originally published on Substack. 

You’ve probably heard the line by now: “Don’t worry, the December jobs report was fine.” It wasn’t. Not on the surface. Not in the details. And not when you step back and look at where the labor market has been headed for years.

The weakness we’re seeing today did not start in December. It didn’t start in 2025. And it didn’t even start in 2022.

It started with man-made policy failures in 2020—destructive lockdowns, massive bailouts, and monetary excess—that broke labor-market institutions and left lasting damage. What we’re seeing now is the compounding effect of those decisions.

This is not a failure of free-market capitalism. It’s a failure of government interference.

December Was Weak—Even Before You Look at the Trend

Start with the actual numbers from the December Employment Situation report.

• Household employment rose by 232,000
• Nonfarm private-sector payrolls rose by 37,000
• Government hiring accounted for 13,000 Monday payrolls—a large share of the 50,000 total job gain

Those numbers are often spun as “mixed.” They’re not.

A 37,000 increase in private-sector jobs in a $28-trillion economy is weak. It signals that employers are pulling back, not expanding. And when government employment does the heavy lifting, it masks underlying weakness rather than fixing it.

Meanwhile, the household survey is volatile and often overstated month to month. It captures self-employment, multiple jobholding, and informal work—not sustained employer demand.

When private-sector hiring slows this sharply, the economy is already losing momentum.

The Labor Market Has Been Frozen Since 2022

Now zoom out. Both major labor market surveys tell the same story over time: the labor market has been essentially frozen since 2022, and it’s getting worse.
​
Household employment has been flat since January 2025. After a brief rise early in Trump’s second term, employment fell after “Liberation Day” and never recovered. That sideways movement explains why workers feel stuck.

Private-sector payroll growth peaked in 2021–2022 and has decelerated steadily since, with further deterioration in 2025 amid increased policy uncertainty.

This is not cyclical weakness. It’s institutional damage.

Participation Confirms Structural Failure
​
The employment-to-population ratio tells us why this feels so bad.

• The overall employment-to-population ratio is declining
• Baby boomer retirements explain part of this—but not all
• The prime-age (25–54) ratio is only slightly above 2022 levels and has flattened

This means fewer workers are supporting the economy, fewer opportunities are expanding, and growth potential is shrinking. That’s not how healthy labor markets behave.

Job openings remain elevated, but high openings without strong real wage growth reflect friction and mismatch, not prosperity.

The Real Damage Came From “Pow-flation”

The affordability crisis didn’t just appear. It was engineered.
​
After Trump-Fauci-Biden lockdowns, Washington responded with massive fiscal bailouts and unprecedented debt. The Federal Reserve, under Jerome Powell, monetized much of that debt in 2020 and 2021, artificially suppressing interest rates.

That persistence matters because wages never caught up.

Real Pay Is Still Lower—and Families Feel It
​
Real (inflation-adjusted) average weekly earnings are just now back to where they were in January 2021.

That figure understates the harm.

What matters is the cumulative loss in purchasing power—the area under the curve. Families didn’t just lose ground once. They’ve been losing ground for years.

Prices reset higher.

Paychecks did not.

That’s why affordability dominates every economic conversation—and why no amount of political messaging can change how people feel.

This Is Not a Market Failure

Let’s be clear about something: free-market capitalism did not fail. Markets didn’t shut down the economy in 2020. Markets didn’t print trillions of dollars. Markets didn’t freeze labor mobility or distort incentives. The government did.

What we’re living with now is the delayed cost of central planning, emergency powers, and monetary excess—not too much freedom.

What Must Change

If policymakers want to fix the labor market and restore affordability, the solution is not more intervention.

It requires:

• Ending runaway federal spending
• Abandoning protectionist trade policies
• Rolling back failed industrial policy
• Reducing regulatory and executive-order uncertainty
• Restoring price stability and labor-market flexibility

In short: get government out of the way. That’s how real wage growth returns, how opportunity expands, and how people prosper.

Final Thought

You’re going to hear a lot of spin in the months ahead. Some will claim the job numbers prove success. Others will claim disaster.

Both sides miss the point.

The labor market has been weak for years because policy broke it. Until leaders confront that truth—and stop repeating the mistakes that caused it—affordability will remain out of reach.
​
Free markets didn’t fail. The government did.

​Today’s episode is our first of 2026, focused squarely on the latest economic headlines—and what they mean for your wallet, your work, and the direction of the country.

Washington has been busy. From another federal budget fight and renewed debates over health care subsidies, to fresh inflation data and major corporate developments, policymakers are already setting the tone for the year ahead. The choices being made now will shape whether families see real relief—or continued pressure—from higher costs and slower growth.

In this episode, we’ll look beyond the headlines to examine what’s really driving these developments, where policy is helping—or hurting—affordability, and what leaders should prioritize if they’re serious about restoring growth and prosperity in 2026. Tune in to the full episode on YouTube, Apple Podcast, or Spotify, and visit my website for more information.