OPINION:
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta announced Friday that economic growth reached 5% as 2025 came to a close. That’s a mighty impressive figure given the volume of negativity that the nattering nabobs have been generating since President Trump won a second term. It might get even better this year.
AAA reports that the price at the pump is the lowest it has been since 2021. The result would have been even more impressive had blue states such as California not skewed the average with taxes and regulatory costs that make gasoline nearly $2 more expensive per gallon than it is in Oklahoma.
Golden State liberals who hate affordable fossil fuels are no match for this administration. Shortly after U.S. forces removed Nicolas Maduro from Caracas, Mr. Trump broke out his pen and signed an executive order to “safeguard Venezuelan oil revenue held in U.S. Treasury accounts from attachment or judicial process.”
Expect the surge in crude to keep inflation in check by making energy more affordable and driving down the prices of goods shipped by car, truck or train. Concerns that overseas adventurism might overshadow the White House domestic agenda fade as it seems this was the plan all along, and it’s going to help ordinary Americans.
The Fed is stacked with globalists who aren’t fans of Mr. Trump, but it reluctantly recognized in December that it was time to cut rates. Thirty-year mortgage rates just dipped below 6%. Analysts for Realtor.com wrote in their forecast for the year ahead that “rising incomes, which should outpace inflation, give buyers more purchasing power, helping to shrink the share of a paycheck that has to be put toward the mortgage.”
Leftists were even wrong about the wisdom of “bailing out” Argentine President Javier Milei in the final days of a parliamentary election. Naysayers complained that offering a $20 billion currency swap to stabilize the monetary system in Buenos Aires wasn’t “making America great again.”
On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed on X that the “limited draw” on that lifeline has been fully repaid. Now secure in his position, Mr. Milei is organizing an alliance of regional allies to advance free market capitalism. “There are already 10 countries we’re working with to keep advancing our proposal: embracing the ideas of freedom and standing firm against the cancer of socialism,” Argentina’s president said in a CNN interview last week.
Mr. Trump understands the value of having friends around the world and that it’s equally important to sever ties with negative influences. The U.S. government formally withdrew from 66 international organizations, including the U.N. Population Fund, which bankrolls abortion, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which promotes fairy tales about mankind controlling the weather.
“We are rejecting the outdated model of multilateralism that treats the American taxpayer as the world’s underwriter for a sprawling architecture of global governance. President Trump’s withdrawal shows that the era of writing blank checks to international bureaucracies is over,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement Saturday.
Cutting waste overseas and here at home ensures that taxpayer dollars will have a greater impact. A newly established Justice Department division will start prosecuting scammers who have been siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal trough.
Just six months ago, a bunch of Nobel Prize-winning economists kvetched about the “upside-down priorities” of the current approach. It’s almost as if Mr. Trump knows what he is doing and the “experts” are the ones who don’t have a clue.
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