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Supply and demand drove costs up. There is correlation between the Biden open border and inflation in all markets, especially housing market. This is a mathematical fact that cannot be disputed.
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
For those that still don’t understand what Benghazi was all about:
🚨So here's the REAL story:
Ambassador Stevens was sent to Benghazi to secretly retrieve US made Stinger Missiles that the State Dept had supplied to Ansar al Sharia in Libya WITHOUT Congressional oversight or permission.
Sec State Hillary Clinton had brokered the Libya deal through Ambassador Stevens and a Private Arms Dealer named Marc Turi, but some of the shoulder fired Stinger Missiles ended up in Afghanistan where they were used against our own military. On July 25th, 2012, a US Chinook helicopter was downed by one of them. Not destroyed only because the idiot Taliban didn't arm the missile. The helicopter didn't explode, but it had to land and an ordnance team recovered the missile’s serial number which led back to a cache of Stinger Missiles kept in
Qatar by the CIA.
Obama and Hillary were in full panic mode, so Ambassador Stevens was sent to Benghazi to retrieve the rest of the Stinger Missiles. This was a "do-or-die" mission, which explains the Stand Down Orders given to multiple rescue teams during the siege of the US Embassy.
It was the State Dept, NOT the CIA, that supplied the Stinger Missiles to our sworn enemies because Gen. Petraeus at CIA would not approve supplying the deadly missiles due to their potential use against commercial aircraft. So then, Obama threw Gen. Petraeus under the bus when he refused to testify in support of Obama’s phony claim of a “spontaneous uprising caused by a YouTube video that insulted Muslims.”
Obama and Hillary committed TREASON!
THIS is what the investigation is all about, WHY she had a Private Server, (in order to delete the digital evidence), and WHY Obama, two weeks after the attack, told the UN that the attack was the result of the YouTube video, even though everyone KNEW it was not.
Furthermore, the Taliban knew that the administration had aided and abetted the enemy WITHOUT Congressional oversight or permission, so they began pressuring (blackmailing) the Obama Administration to release five Taliban generals being held at Guantanamo.
Bowe Bergdahl was just a useful pawn used to cover the release of the Taliban generals. Everyone knew Bergdahl was a traitor but Obama used Bergdahl’s exchange for the five Taliban generals to cover that Obama was being coerced by the Taliban about the unauthorized Stinger Missile deal.
So we have a traitor as POTUS that is not only corrupt, but compromised, as well and a Sec of State that is a serial liar, who perjured herself multiple times at the Congressional Hearings on Benghazi. Perhaps this is why no military aircraft were called upon for help in Benghazi: because the administration knew that our enemies had Stinger Missiles that, if used to down those planes, would likely be traced back to the CIA cache in Qatar and then to the State Dept’s illegitimate arms deal in Libya.
Forward this again and again and again until everyone reads the true story of Benghazi.
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
I’m here at Austin City Hall, where the City Council is about to approve $800,000 for services for illegal immigrants. I’m calling on @GregAbbott_TX , who said at the 2026 RNC that there are no sanctuary cities in Texas, to step up and address Austin’s sanctuary policies.
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
Never forget these morally bankrupt people will cry foul and wring their hands in fake outrage for illegal aliens all while applauding and leering in grotesque joy over the assassination of American patriots.
The lawyer representing an alleged illegal immigrant shot by ICE in Austin is under fire after a deleted social media post appeared to mock Charlie Kirk's assassination.
Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch wrote, "How do you resist getting shot in the neck? Does Charlie Kirk have any advice on that?" — a post surfaced by a screenshot from retired Air Force Lt. Col. Larry Brock Jr. before it was taken down.
Conservatives ripped the post as disqualifying for an attorney publicly challenging the federal government's account of the Austin shooting. Lincoln-Goldfinch told Fox News Digital the post "could be misconstrued" and was removed, adding that the matter was "addressed internally."
Full story here ⬇️ foxnews.com/politics/lawyer-…
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The White House is not a newsroom. It is not a co-working space. It is not a constitutionally mandated annex of CNN, Politico, or MS NOW. Secretary Rubio’s statements are not an attack on the press. They are a statement of the obvious: the president is not required to furnish office space, credentials, and daily proximity to organizations he believes have spent years treating his administration as a target rather than a subject.
That distinction is the entire argument, and it is not complicated.
No one is padlocking CNN’s studios. No one is arresting Politico’s reporters. No one is cutting the power to MS NOW. Rubio was precise on this point because the other side immediately inflates a facilities decision into a regime of censorship. Publication remains free. Criticism remains free. Hostile coverage remains free. What is being withheld is the privilege of embedding inside the building—desks, badges, workspace, and the daily assumption that the People’s House must double as a staging area for outlets the president regards as systematically dishonest.
The First Amendment protects the right to speak and publish. It does not confer a right to occupy federal workspace. Presidents have always controlled access to the West Wing, the briefing room, and the press pool. They have favored some outlets and frozen out others. They have revoked credentials. Courts have sometimes pushed back on individual cases, but they have never established a general constitutional entitlement to a desk inside the White House. Treating that access as an inalienable right is a category error dressed up as principle.
Rubio’s question is the right one: why should an administration be forced to house, credential, and daily accommodate journalists it believes are not covering it honestly? That is not a demand that reporters become cheerleaders. It is a refusal to subsidize the infrastructure of coverage the president considers false, selective, or actively hostile. If an outlet can still file stories from outside the gates—and it can—then the claim that democracy itself has been wounded is theater. Coverage is not the same thing as occupancy.
The counterargument is always the same: “This is viewpoint discrimination.” Of course it involves viewpoint. Every access decision by every White House involves judgment about reliability, conduct, and whether a given organization is using privileged proximity to report or to campaign. The alternative is to pretend that “legacy” brands have a hereditary claim on government real estate no matter how they use it. That is not press freedom. That is institutional capture.
Rubio also noted something the professional class prefers not to hear: a large share of American political coverage now sounds less like reporting than like rooting for the other side. When official statements are treated as presumptively false and adversary statements as presumptively true, the demand for a desk inside the building becomes even harder to justify. The administration does not have to pretend that arrangement is neutral.
None of this requires pretending every White House complaint is accurate or that every banned story was a lie. It requires only that we stop confusing two different things. The press may publish. The press may criticize. The press may sue. What it may not do is convert government workspace into a protected entitlement and then call any withdrawal of that privilege an assault on the Constitution.
Rubio’s formulation is the correct one: they can cover the White House. They just cannot have a desk there. That is not authoritarianism. It is the government declining to provide office space to its most determined critics. If that sounds harsh, it is only because a generation of political journalism has come to treat proximity as a birthright rather than a privilege that can be withdrawn.
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
The lawyer of this illegal is spreading most of these claims. She is a lying mouthpiece.
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
🚨JUST IN🚨
DHS is fact-checking the claims made on the ICE involved shooting in Austin with illegal alien Wilber Rafael Garces Perez.
HERE'S WHAT DHS IS SAYING:
CLAIM: ICE refused to remove the bullet from the illegal alien’s body.
FACT: This is false. ICE does not and would not advise, nor be the authority on, a medical procedure for an illegal alien at a hospital.
CLAIM: The illegal alien had a valid work permit.
FACT: This is false. The illegal alien’s work permit expired in 2025. Furthermore, a work permit does NOT grant legal status.
CLAIM: The illegal alien was ordered removed in absentia.
FACT: Yes. This is why aliens must show up to their removal proceedings. Legal obligations do not end because someone’s address changed.
CLAIM: This illegal alien is here legally.
FACT: This is false. This person is in the U.S. illegally. He entered illegally under the Biden Administration. The illegal alien had no valid work permit, had no protective status, and had a final order of removal from a Department of Justice (DOJ) Immigration Judge.
CLAIM: This illegal alien has received no pain medication.
FACT: This is false. This illegal alien is receiving medical care around the clock, including pain medication.
CLAIM: The illegal alien has been forced to sleep on the floor.
FACT: This is false. This alien was released from the hospital and arrived at the detention facility just a few hours later, where he slept on a bed. Aliens in ICE custody receive a higher standard of living than most prisons that hold U.S. citizens.
CLAIM: This illegal alien was indiscriminately targeted by ICE.
FACT: This is false. This illegal alien was the subject of a targeted vehicle stop. What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is whether or not they are illegally in the U.S.
Resisting officers and evading arrest is dangerous for our officers, illegal aliens, and the public. We remind the public that resisting officers and evading arrest is a felony and a federal crime. Sanctuary politicians need to stop encouraging this dangerous behavior that puts our officers and the public at risk.
This dangerous attempt to evade arrest comes after sanctuary politicians held webinars and provided resources and tips for how to openly defy ICE:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hosted a webinar providing tips for illegal aliens to evade arrests at homes, workplaces, or in public.
Dan Goldman posted a video online calling on illegal aliens to make a plan for ICE encounters.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued multilingual flyers and online resources advising illegal aliens on how to evade arrest.
California Governor Gavin Newsom released guides and sanctuary laws advising illegal aliens how to recognize ICE, block entry, and defy arrest.
CLAIM: That ICE needs to get out of Austin.
FACT: This is false. ICE will not be slowing down nor leaving Austin. DHS is tasked with enforcing the laws passed by Congress. We do not pick and choose which laws to enforce or where to enforce them. We will continue to enforce our nation’s laws.
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
I’m curious to see if @CBS Austin actually airs this part of my interview on ICE. Fingers crossed 🤞
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Work Authorization, Gig Platforms, and a Final Order of Removal
The Austin shooting of a DoorDash driver in September 2026 put a familiar legal gap back in public view. Federal officials described Wilber Rafael Garces Perez as an unlawfully present Venezuelan with a final order of removal. His lawyer said he had entered lawfully and once held a work permit. Those accounts can both sound plausible because U.S. immigration status, work papers, and private hiring systems do not update as one system. They are three different clocks.
DoorDash did not “hire an employee” in the sense the Immigration Reform and Control Act contemplates. Dashers are independent contractors. Form I-9 and E-Verify apply to employees. Contractors generally need neither. Texas does not require every private firm to use E-Verify. DoorDash’s gate is identity verification (government ID and a matching selfie) plus a consumer background check for crime and driving history. A final removal order is an immigration-court and ICE record. It is not a criminal conviction and is not what Checkr-style screenings are built to find. A person can therefore pass platform onboarding and still be removable.
That still leaves the second question: how someone who entered or remained without authorization ever obtains a work permit at all. There is no standalone “illegal work permit.” An Employment Authorization Document is always attached to another benefit. The most common path for recent arrivals is a pending asylum application. After the case has sat for 150 days, the applicant may file Form I-765 under category (c)(8); the card is generally not issued until 180 days have run on the asylum EAD clock. Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole, U or T visas, VAWA, and a narrow DACA cohort are other doors. Each can produce a plastic card that looks like permission to work even while the underlying case is unfinished, or later collapses.
A final order of removal usually ends that permission unless a stay, an appeal, deferred action, or a separate still-pending qualifying application keeps an EAD alive. Status can change after the card is printed. Employers and apps that accept an unexpired EAD or a matching ID are not looking at ICE’s removal docket. That is the mechanical answer to how a Dasher can be both “on the platform” and “subject to removal.”
The policy argument is simpler than the paperwork. Congress built work authorization as an incident of selected humanitarian and family programs, not as a general license for anyone present. Gig companies built contractor marketplaces that verify identity, not immigration-court outcomes. When those designs meet a high-volume delivery labor market, people with unresolved or already-lost cases can still be on the road. Closing that gap would require either treating gig workers more like employees for I-9 purposes, requiring platforms to query enforcement databases they do not now use, or tightening who may receive an EAD while a case is pending. None of those choices is costless. Pretending the current rules already do that work is the cheaper fiction.
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
If Trump was "banning" CNN, Politico and the desiccated husk of MSNBC, they would not now all be bleating at a continuous high public level that they are "banned."
The mere fact of their incessant public whining and reporting on themselves disproves your puerile lies.
The First Amendment protects their right to say what they want. It does not give them a special right to privileged White House access. The First Amendment is for ALL citizens and not just the members of the self-appointed "press."
Trump's ban on MSNOW, CNN, and Politico is not only part of the autocratic playbook, but the timing is no coincidence. Trump is well in the autocratic backfire process, thus, entire media outlets he sees as threats must be banished.
This is a moment of reckoning for America.
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The written Constitution is the law. Founders’ extra-textual opinions are not.
The United States has a written Constitution. That fact is not a stylistic preference. It is the mechanism that was supposed to bind government—including judges—to a fixed set of words that the people actually ratified. When courts treat selected quotations from Hamilton, Madison, or Jefferson as if they were amendments, they substitute a scrapbook of political theory for the document itself.
Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress “to lay and collect Taxes… to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” Those words are immediately followed by a list of specific enumerated powers. For a century and a half the competing readings were well known: Madison’s narrower view that spending must stay within the enumerated powers, and Hamilton’s broader view that the general-welfare language itself conferred a freestanding spending power. In United States v. Butler (1936) the Court chose Hamilton. It did not pretend the text had suddenly changed. It chose one Founder’s theory over another’s and thereby authorized a scale of federal spending that the original structure had not previously supported. Choosing a theory is not the same as reading a sentence.
The same pattern appears in the Establishment Clause. The First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Those are the ratified words. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947) the Court imported Thomas Jefferson’s private metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and State.” Jefferson did not draft the First Amendment. He was not a member of the First Congress that proposed it. The states did not ratify his letter to the Danbury Baptists. The Court treated a metaphor as if it were operative constitutional text. The difference is not subtle. Interpreting the words Congress actually wrote is one activity; replacing them with language no one voted on is another.
Subsequent doctrine only underscored the problem. For decades courts applied the Lemon test. Then Kennedy v. Bremerton School District discarded that framework and told lower courts to look instead to “historical practices and understandings.” One generation of justices invents a test. Another generation discards it. A third reinterprets the historical record. The constitutional text remains exactly where it was. The judges change. When meaning depends primarily on which historical narrative a majority of nine finds persuasive, the Constitution ceases to function as a stable limitation and becomes a document whose content tracks the composition of the Court.
Historical writings can illuminate disputed language. Debates in the ratifying conventions and the First Congress can show how particular phrases were understood by the people who adopted them. That is legitimate context. It is not a license to treat any Founder’s later essay, private letter, or policy preference as if it amended the Constitution. Hamilton cannot amend the Constitution. Madison cannot amend the Constitution. Jefferson cannot amend the Constitution. Nine justices cannot amend it either. Article V exists precisely because the Framers made change difficult. If the country wants Congress to possess a new power, or wants a different relationship between government and religion, the prescribed route is an amendment, not a judicial preference for one eighteenth-century theorist over another.
A written constitution is supposed to constrain government, including the government of judges. Treating selected Founder commentary as a substitute for the text inverts that design. The words remain the same. The question is whether we will continue to treat them as the law.
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
.@larry_kudlow in @NewYorkSun gets it right. Here are the facts:
The dollar was on one side of 89.2% of global FX trades.
Foreign investors still hold enormous amounts of U.S. assets. The principal stablecoins are dollar-denominated. Treasury buybacks are about adding liquidity and managing the maturity structure, not somehow controlling a $30T+ market.
Median household income in 2025: $87,460 — a record.
Official poverty rate: 10.2% — a historic low.
Atlanta Fed GDP forecast: 5.1% annualized real GDP growth in Q3.
And that’s before looking under the hood at the private-sector momentum behind capex and the AI buildout.
The latest numbers show continued employment growth, while business investment and capital expenditures have been expanding, as the CapEx comeback story has continued to broaden out, with nearly 20% more equipment investment in Q2 2026 than at the end of Biden’s term.
Americans deserve honest coverage.
In the New York Times’s latest feeble attempt at delivering a hit piece on the greatest economy in history, the discredited journal selectively excludes data that contradicts this dull narrative. Granted, it’s nothing new that they fail to provide their readers with the full story.
Complicated financial realities should not be reduced to easy-to-read sentences that serve a preordained narrative.
This article’s problem is not complexity. It is selectivity.
If capital is supposedly running from America, why does the data keep showing strong foreign demand for U.S. assets?
If investors are “balking” at Treasuries, someone forgot to tell the bidders.
Norway is not looking elsewhere; it is switching from Treasuries to agency bonds. Still US assets.
Netherlands is bringing gold back from North America, including Ottawa as well as New York, reflecting a home country preference.
We see this morning that Saudi Arabia has dropped out of mBridge and others are likely to follow.
And if digital finance is supposed to threaten the dollar, why are stablecoins overwhelmingly dollar-denominated?
The record is not ambiguous.
nysun.com/article/the-new-yo…
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
CNN says its White House team delivers “fair and accurate reporting.”
Those three words are doing stand-up.
The exhibit is already in the can: a correspondent standing in front of a building engulfed in flames while the chyron blesses the scene with “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING.” Fire in the shot. Peace in the caption. Kenosha still tallies about $50 million in damage. The wider 2020 riot season they kept sanding down to a weather report leaves roughly $2 billion wrecked and 31 people dead. Fair. Accurate. The graphic department should have gotten a Peabody for commitment to the bit.
Once you accept that a burning block can be “mostly peaceful,” the rest of the catalog reads like a sequel.
Covington Catholic kids on a sidewalk become an instant white-supremacy special. A MAGA hat does the reporting. Nick Sandmann spends months as a national prop because the narrative arrived pre-lit.
Jussie Smollett walks in with a story about racist MAGA attackers and CNN treats the screenplay like a wire. Hook, line, panel discussion.
Then the President of the United States starts coming apart in public and the same newsroom keeps the house line: “sharp as a tack.” Americans can see the deterioration. The chyron cannot. Later the books appear. Jake Tapper, after years inside the cover-up, writes himself into the discovery chapter. The decline was always there. The timing of the honesty was the product.
Friday Trump barred CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House for “FICTION and LIES.” CNN answered with the slogan.
The joke writes itself because they already filmed it. The most devastating fact-check of “fair and accurate” is sitting in CNN’s own archive, under a burning building, in 32-point type.
(article below)
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The new Greenland security agreement announced September 18, 2026, is a trilateral update of the 1951 U.S.–Denmark Defense Agreement (revised in 2004). It does not transfer sovereignty or territory. Denmark and Greenland have both stressed that the deal recognizes the Kingdom of Denmark’s territorial integrity and Greenland’s right to self-determination.
What the 1951 agreement already provided
The earlier treaty already gave the United States broad rights:
• Authority to establish and operate bases and deploy troops (subject to Danish notification/approval, which was routinely granted).
• Exclusive U.S. jurisdiction over designated defense areas.
• Overflight and access rights.
• No expiration date.
The U.S. has long operated Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) under that framework, and NATO’s 1955 Status of Forces Agreement covered troop movements. The 1951 pact did not explicitly bar non-NATO countries from bases or investments, and Greenland itself was not a formal party.
Main differences in the new deal
• Greenland is now a party. The agreement binds all three governments and is written to survive even if Greenland later votes for independence. That was a U.S. concern the 1951 bilateral treaty did not address.
• Explicit ban on adversary presence. Non-NATO countries cannot establish bases or maintain a military presence. Sensitive investments (especially in minerals or infrastructure) by adversaries require U.S. written approval. The 1951 text lacked this language.
• Expanded and “permanent” U.S. footprint. The United States can build additional bases and immediately begin a larger military presence. Trump described it as an “infinite life” agreement giving the U.S. the “complete ability to do what is necessary.” In practice this formalizes and extends rights that already existed, now with Greenland’s signature attached.
• No annexation or purchase. Trump had previously demanded ownership; the deal stops well short of that. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s premier have framed it as a security arrangement that leaves sovereignty unchanged.
The full legal text has not been released and is expected to be signed at the UN General Assembly next week, after which Danish and Greenlandic parliamentary approval is required. Analysts have described the outcome as largely an update and political re-packaging of existing rights plus the new adversary and investment-screening clauses.
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
I can't believe I need to explain this...
Becoming an associate member of the EU isn't the same as become the 51st state of the USA.
All countries within the EU are still COUNTRIES!
Becoming a 51st state within the USA makes you a STATE & no longer a country!🍎s & 🍊s
#cndpoli
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Gradient Magnitude retweeted
Dear Canada:
How is being an "associate member" of the EU any less embarrassing than jokes about you being the 51st state of the USA?
The EU is treating you like the Pulp Fiction Gimp and you are loving it.
Where is your national self-respect? Is there any left?
Your pal,
CP
Dear @MarkJCarney we want to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible.
I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to being the first associate member of the EU.
And create a common prosperity and economic security space.
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An honest assessment of Trump’s second term, now nearly twenty months old, has produced a familiar mid-cycle American economy rather than the 4 percent “golden age” advertised in 2025. Growth has been respectable and uneven. Real GDP expanded about 2 percent in 2025 and has tracked in a similar range through mid-2026, with a weak late-2025 quarter, a modest first half of 2026, and a firmer third-quarter pulse. The Federal Reserve’s September 2026 projections put growth near 2.3 percent this year and 2.1–2.4 percent through 2029—close to potential, not a boom. Artificial-intelligence investment and still-solid household spending have carried the expansion; housing has not.
Inflation is the live problem again. After cooling in 2025, prices reaccelerated in 2026. The Fed now expects PCE inflation around 3.7 percent this year before a slow grind back toward 2 percent by 2028–29. Three forces explain most of the rebound: the Iran–Hormuz energy shock that lifted gasoline and diesel, tariff pass-through into goods after a chaotic year of new duties and a Supreme Court ruling that struck down the broadest IEEPA tariffs, and demand from the AI build-out. The Fed raised rates on September 16 for the first time in three years and signaled another hike later in 2026.
The labor market looks tight on the surface and constrained underneath. Unemployment is about 4.1 percent. Payroll gains have slowed, but so has the workforce: net migration appears near zero or negative, which lowers the hiring needed to hold the jobless rate steady and also caps potential output. Studies of intensified enforcement find job losses that spill onto U.S.-born workers in construction, agriculture, and local services, not a simple substitution of natives for deportees. Manufacturing payrolls have slipped even as the White House touts trade deals and a narrower goods deficit in selected windows.
Policy has pulled in opposite directions. Making the 2017 tax cuts permanent in the July 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill,” plus deregulation that the administration scores in the hundreds of billions to more than a trillion dollars of claimed compliance savings, supports investment and after-tax income. Tariffs, energy disruption, and a smaller labor force raise costs. The fiscal picture improved only at the margin: the deficit is still near $1.9–2 trillion, or roughly 5.7–5.8 percent of GDP, and debt held by the public sits around 100 percent of GDP. Interest costs are already about a trillion dollars a year. Equities have nonetheless advanced—the S&P 500 is up on the order of the high-20s percent since inauguration—on earnings, buybacks, and the AI narrative, from valuation levels that leave less room for error.
The rest of the term, through January 2029, most likely looks like more of the same: growth near 2 percent, unemployment in the low 4s, inflation easing only if oil falls and the Fed stays modestly tight, then gradual rate cuts in 2028. A durable Middle East settlement and a pause in tariff escalation would be the fastest path to cheaper goods and an earlier easing cycle. A longer war, another legal tariff wave, or a midterm freeze on fiscal policy would keep inflation and long yields higher. For households living on portfolios, Social Security, and housing equity, the practical meaning is straightforward: real returns will depend less on a growth miracle than on whether energy and import prices recede before sequence-of-returns risk and IRMAA brackets do the damage.
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s September 15 hearing was not a victory lap so much as a midterm stress test. Why do I believe this is important for you? The official subject was the international financial system. The real subject was whether the second Trump term can claim an economic turnaround while gasoline, diesel, mortgage rates, and Treasury yields are all elevated. An honest reading of the record supports a guarded optimism: the labor market and asset prices are holding, the administration has a coherent foreign-policy-plus-sanctions story, and several of Bessent’s hardest numbers check out. The weak spots are fiscal math and energy prices, not collapse.
The facts that land in his favor are straightforward. Unemployment is 4.1 percent and stable. Payrolls are still adding jobs. The S&P 500 is up roughly 27 percent since the January 2025 inauguration. Gross federal debt has crossed $40 trillion, which Bessent did not deny. The 10-year yield near 5 percent is real and is the highest in many years; thirty-year mortgage rates have followed into the high 6s and low 7s. Those last two points are uncomfortable, but they are also the price of a large deficit, war-related spending, and markets that no longer treat Treasuries as a one-way bet. Acknowledging the yield spike is more credible than pretending it is not happening.
Energy is the main tax on households. Regular gasoline near $4.33 and diesel at a record around $6.27 are not talking points; they are AAA numbers. They track the Iran conflict that began in late February and the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz. Headline CPI at 3.4 percent year-over-year is still too high, but core inflation at 2.4 percent shows the non-energy economy is not running hot in the 2021–22 sense. That distinction matters. A war-driven oil shock is painful and politically costly. It is not the same as a broad, demand-driven inflation spiral. If Hormuz traffic normalizes and crude recedes, the CPI print can improve faster than the wage and jobs data would suggest.
On wages, Bessent overreached. Bottom-quartile gains did outpace the top for stretches after the pandemic. Recent Atlanta Fed-style readings show the gap has narrowed or reversed slightly, and real purchasing power at the low end is being eaten by fuel and shelter. The better claim is narrower: nominal pay is still rising, unemployment has not spiked, and tax cuts claimed on more than 60 million returns put cash into working households. That is not the death of a K-shaped economy. It is also not a recession labor market.
The $5,000 “dividend” is the least defensible line. A transfer on that scale is more than a trillion dollars. Saying it can be done without raising the deficit, without naming offsets, is advocacy, not a plan. Markets hear that and mark yields higher. A serious fiscal consolidation—the one Bessent promised is “coming”—would do more for the 10-year than another round of buybacks. The buybacks themselves were not a failure of auctions; they were a limited attempt to lean against a disorderly move. Yields still rose. The honest optimistic take is that Treasury can still issue, auctions are finding buyers, and the dollar remains the funding currency of last resort. That is resilience, not a solved fiscal problem.
Politically, Bessent did what a Treasury secretary in a midterm year is supposed to do. He stayed on message: Iran isolation, jobs, tax cuts, stock-market gains. He did not melt down under Waters or the protesters. He also did not close the cost-of-living argument. Voters feel the pump and the mortgage quote more than they feel a 27 percent equity rally. The optimistic conclusion is still available: the core economy has not broken, employment is intact, markets have absorbed tariffs, war risk, and deficit news without a funding crisis, and energy is the swing variable.
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If the administration can reopen supply routes, keep the labor market from rolling over, and pair any cash transfers with real spending restraint, Bessent’s “turnaround” frame becomes easier to defend. If yields stay at 5 percent and diesel stays at $6, the hearing will look like the moment the fiscal bill came due. The data as of mid-September still leave room for the first path.
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