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by Rod D. Martin
October 21, 2026
According to the latest report from the Census Bureau, the poverty rate just hit its lowest level in U.S. history.
Read that again.
That’s not all. America just also hit its highest real median household income in history. The Atlanta Fed’s October 20 estimate puts third-quarter growth at a strong 3.5 percent annual rate. That’s after years of Democrats promising us that 1.6 percent was “the new normal.” It’s also after barely more than a year and a half of Trump back in office.
It gets even better. Child poverty fell to just 13.4 percent, the lowest official rate ever recorded. Hispanic poverty fell to a record low 13.9 percent. Real weekly earnings for blue-collar manufacturing workers are up 4.1 percent since January 2025; construction workers’ earnings are up an even higher 5 percent.
Now add 975,000 more Americans working in just the last two months.
The household survey recorded an increase of 569,000 in August and another 406,000 in September. The unemployment headline concealed that strength: the labor force grew by more than a million over those two months, pushing unemployment from 4.1 to 4.2 percent because new American workers entered the workforce even faster than employers absorbed them.
It’s kind of a miracle. And it’s gathering steam.
Yet to hear the Enemedia — and some conservatives — talk, the exact opposite is true. To them it’s all “muh gas prices.” Which is funny since the average gas price under Joe Biden was higher than the average during Trump’s second term, even with the war.
Something is seriously amiss.
If incomes are rising faster than prices, it isn’t affordability. It certainly isn’t household wealth. The income figure measures the household in the middle. Elon Musk getting richer can’t drag it upward the way he could an average. And the $2,250 gain in 2025 alone is what remains after adjusting for higher prices.
People who spent years watching inflation eat their raises are finally getting ahead. Dismissing that isn’t showing concern for working families: it’s just myopic. And electing the people who gave you all that inflation — and promised to “skyrocket” energy prices to force everyone into an EV — isn’t even sane.
That GDP number is especially striking. Remember that much ballyhooed 1.5 percent second-quarter headline that had the pundits celebrating Trump’s “failure?” I told you then: they were looking at the wrong number. What they were seeing wasn’t a slowdown in growth but a capex boom: the private economy spending its output to buy the equipment that would create an industrial supercycle.
Now even that 1.5 percent headline has been revised away. On September 30, the government raised second-quarter growth to 2.2 percent. More importantly, private domestic demand — American consumers and private investment — grew at a 4.6 percent annual rate, stronger than either previous estimate. The part of the economy I told you to watch was doing even better than we knew.
It’s happening.
The ever-brilliant Larry Kudlow calls the burgeoning boom “the greatest story never told.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says we’ve entered the “acceleration phase,” as the tax changes and deregulation start to produce the results they were literally designed to produce.
I’ve been explaining that process since early 2025. Yet conservatives continue to buy the left’s lies.
It’s time to stop.
Working Families Are Getting Ahead
Starting with Bill Clinton, America’s ruling class told us manufacturing was gone forever. China would build; we would consume. Russia and the Middle East would supply the energy. Europe would regulate. America would borrow, import, and manage its “inevitable” decline and displacement by more dynamic powers.
Trump rejected every part of that nonsense.
The workers now getting those bigger paychecks have every reason to be glad he did. Their employers aren’t just buying equipment and building new factories: they're bidding up the price of the people who know how to use them. They’re training even more.
Nor is the capex boom ending anytime soon. Trump went out and recruited an incredible $18 trillion of investment into the United States in his first months in office. Equipment shipments have risen at an 18.9 percent annual rate in just the latest three months. And on September 28th, the President announced the largest steel plant in American history, a $15 billion titan set to begin construction in Iowa.
The President also negotiated trade deals that pried open foreign markets to U.S. manufacturers; he also exempted foreign companies from tariffs if they begin building plants here. And as a condition of those trade deals — now finalized with countries representing 67 percent of global GDP — he forced countless countries accustomed to buying their energy from Russia and the Persian Gulf to buy it from the Gulf of America instead.
The September 30 energy agreement with South Korea, which I highlighted in my October 3 update, puts $200 billion behind that strategy. It includes $54 billion for North Slope natural gas development and a new Trans-Alaska LNG Pipeline to supply the West Coast and our East Asian allies. Up to 12,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent operating jobs will be created from the Alaska project alone.
The Koreans need reliable energy. We have it. Their investment would put Americans to work supplying them for decades.
The construction workers are building the plants and refineries. The roughnecks are drilling the wells. There will be years of work completing them, and much, much more work running them thereafter.
How did that happen? Trump changed the tax code, and thus the incentives for investment. His One Big Beautiful Bill made immediate business expensing permanent for equipment, and added full expensing for qualifying American production facilities. Combined with unprecedented deregulation plus the trade deals, suddenly there’s no better place to build a factory than right here.
Meanwhile, no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, and no taxes on Social Security (and what sort of obscenity is taxing Social Security anyway?!) help the bottom rung even more than the top.
“Those jobs are never coming back” was a lie, calculated to cover for (intentional) Democrat failures.
There was a time when an American family could live on one breadwinner’s blue-collar wages. That day is coming back, fast. An economy “growing” at Obama’s stultifying 1.6 percent takes nearly half a century to double. Young people can’t find jobs because they’re already taken: they’re locked out of their futures for half their lifetimes, and locked into dependency on the socialists. That is, after all, the goal.
But an economy growing at 5 percent doubles in size in just 14 years. That translates into so much hiring so fast that labor shortages have to be cured by ever-higher wages. It also translates into so much tax revenue, even at lower rates, that you don’t just reduce the deficit: you start paying off the debt, as we did for four straight years before 9/11.
Folks, this ain’t rocket science. This is the difference between Jimmy Carter’s economy and Ronald Reagan’s. It’s not like we haven’t seen this play before.
Bessent calls it “parallel prosperity.” Wall Street and Main Street can both do well at once. A profitable company is sustainable: it expands, hires people, trains them, and pays them more. An unprofitable company does none of those things. Yet the “Democratic Socialist” treats the profits that make prosperity possible as an offense, one that must be crushed in the name of “social justice.”
That’s the choice on November’s ballot.
More Production, Less Inflation
Nowhere is that point more obvious than deregulation, anathema to the Democrats. Trump has eliminated 129 regulations for every new one: there’s nothing like it in history. Which party do you think issued most of those in the first place? Not ours.
A company wants to build; it has customers waiting; it can raise the money. But then it spends years waiting for government to let it proceed. Supposedly the delay protects us. But from what is it protecting us exactly? More goods? Better jobs? The possibility that somebody might make a profit?
In the midst of the Depression, the Empire State Building was completed in just 13 months. Good luck getting a permit in even twice that time in today’s New York.
A process that makes it prohibitively expensive to produce in America sends that production somewhere else. It doesn’t abolish the need for the product. Americans still buy it, but workers in some other country collect the paychecks.
Democrats piled on regulations — and taxes — year after year, amounting to a multi-trillion-dollar burden on the U.S. economy and those pathetic “growth” rates that steal young people’s futures. Trump is rolling them back.
Leftwing economists have long fretted (as they have about global warming, and global cooling, and global overpopulation, and the Ozone hole, and “Peak Oil”, and “two weeks to flatten the curve”) that all this new production will cause inflation. But this Phillips Curve nonsense was discredited 50 years ago: the truth is exactly the opposite.
Production isn’t the enemy of price stability: it’s the means by which supply catches demand. The answer to a shortage of something Americans need is to make more of it. And if supply is plentiful, prices fall.
American factories are already producing more of what this buildout needs. Durable-goods manufacturing grew at a 3.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter; semiconductor production surged at a 28.4 percent pace. The answer to demand for more computing power is to manufacture more chips, not make Americans poorer until they stop wanting them.
The same logic applies to energy. An oil-price squeeze strengthens the case for more American supply. It doesn’t make the factories, workers, or families buying that energy the problem. Alaska’s gas will make everyone richer by bringing prices down.
Likewise, the “expert” class assured us that we needed to lower our expectations, that a “mature economy” can only grow at a lower rate: all the dynamic gains must come from developing economies like China’s. Yet what the heck is a mature economy? If you’d asked anyone in 1900, they’d have said they had one, just before nearly everything we have was invented.
We are entering another such period, with AI and countless other new technologies promising productivity gains beyond anything we’ve ever seen. A worker with better tools can produce much more in the same hour, earning a higher wage without increasing the labor cost of each item he produces.
And like Reagan before him, President Trump has laid a foundation that sets America up to dominate the next half century.
Go Tell Our Story: The Election Is On You
So why aren’t Republicans making this case every day? And no, I don’t mean “the Republicans” in Washington. Trump’s doing more than any President before him. Congress, however flawed, has enacted much of his legislation. The leaders aren’t the problem.
We are.
Historically, the President’s party — whichever President’s party — loses the midterms. But they don’t have to. Midterms are low-turnout elections, which means “every little thing we do is magic.” No need to appeal to the middle, no need to persuade the socialists. Just talk to your own friends and physically take them to the polls.
To keep the majority, all we need is 1,000 extra votes in 20 House races — just four extra votes per precinct. Want to make a difference? You can. But that also means that if you don’t, you’re responsible.
Republicans need to stop acting like entitled children, and start taking responsibility for their neighbors and their futures. It’s time to tell our story, over and over again.
Record real household income and record-low poverty are a pretty great story to tell. So is the lowest murder rate in 126 years, a 99.9 percent reduction in illegal border crossings, or a thousand other things. Nearly a million additional Americans working in just two months is a pretty solid answer to those who told us Trump would fail. And the equipment arriving at new American factories gives us every reason to expect more.
This is nothing else but the greatest story never told.
So go and tell it.
Another fantastic article! I've been forwarding links to your articles to everyone I can think of for the past couple of months to try to educate them before the midterms. Thanks so much for all you do, Rod!
I worry about how much of this impending Golden Age is sustainable if the Democrats win control of the House, as all of the pundits seem to be predicting. Your article suggests that so much investment, construction, trade and growth has already been set in motion that even the incessant impeachment proceedings, investigations and “no” votes on Trump’s budgets and MAGA agenda, as promised by a Democrat-controlled House, will not be able to grind the economy to a screeching halt. I pray to God that you’re right, and even more, that the pundits are wrong.