THE MORNING RANT: Great Economic News You Won’t Get from the Legacy Media

You wouldn’t know it if you rely on the legacy media for your economic news, but there are great things happening in this country. New unemployment claims have plummeted to historic lows, the US trade deficit has plunged, and there is massive industrial investment going on in the U.S., due in large part to President Trump’s “America-first” effort to re-shore industrial production.

But the legacy media is trying to tell a different story.

Of course, there is still the inflation issue. Because we haven’t fully recovered from the Biden inflation shock, President Trump is blamed for not deflating prices back to a pre-Biden level.

Core inflation is currently 2.9%, which is higher than desired, but look at the chart below. This is the most recent core inflation chart (through May 2026) from the Bureau of Labor Standards. The years 2021 through 2024 are the Biden years, all the others are Trump years. Notice anything?

Gas prices need to come down, of course, and I pray that President Trump isn’t goaded into a ground war in Iran that will skyrocket oil prices while destroying his presidency. Ground wars in Asia are even less popular than high egg prices.

Speaking of which, I can go to Wal-Mart right now and buy a dozen large eggs for $1.47. At the end of the Biden presidency, eggs were averaging over $4.00 per dozen. There was one point after Trump’s inauguration that the high price of eggs was dominating the news cycle, since the media thought it was a story that would hurt Trump. Strangely enough, the current low price of eggs is not considered newsworthy.

Perhaps the greatest indicator of economic strength is civilian employment, of which something remarkable is going on. As John Carney just documented at Breitbart Business Digest in a piece titled “The First Half of 2026 Saw Lowest Level of Jobless Claims Since 1969,” new unemployment claims in 2026 are consistently at low levels not seen for almost 60 years. As a percentage of the workforce, these low-numbers are unprecedented in the post-war era, because the workforce was so much smaller all those decades ago.

Weekly initial unemployment claims for last week came in at 215,000, which is a very low level. Even more impressive, the average over the first six months of the year is around 213,000. To put that in perspective, the last time the January through July period had claims this low was 1968 and 1969. The workforce was much smaller then, less than half the size it is now.

As for the overall unemployment rate, it was 4.2% and rising in November 2024 when Donald Trump was elected president. Today it is 4.2% and declining. This is also despite the massive reduction in the federal workforce that Trump has imposed.

Meanwhile, the trade deficit is decreasing due to President Trump’s tariffs and re-shoring agenda. Comically, the media is desperate to report just the opposite, as shown in this weirdly-headlined New York Times piece from last week:

U.S. Trade Deficit Widens in May on Record Goods Imports [NY Times – 7/07/2026]

“Widens” is an interesting word choice. In this context it apparently means a slight one-month increase in the trade deficit from the dramatically lower monthly trade deficits that Trump has achieved.

The United States trade deficit in goods and services widened to $77.6 billion in May as America imported more goods than it sold abroad.

On average, the monthly trade deficit in goods has been $96 billion in the 16 months since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. That’s down about 5 percent from the monthly average in the 16 months before his second term began.

The chart below shows how the Trump administration has slashed the trade deficit since the end of the Biden administration in January 2025. But the New York Times wants you to know it “widened” in May 2026.

With all the re-shoring, there is a corresponding explosion of domestic economic activity. The publication Freightwaves not only documents the volume of goods being shipped, but also what products are being shipped.

“No holiday for booming rail freight” [Freightwaves – 7/08/2026]

Rail traffic on U.S. carriers totaled 482,121 carloads and intermodal units for the week ending July 4, a gain of 8.7% from the same week a year ago.

An 8.7% year-over-year increase in rail shipments over already solid prior-year results tells a story of very strong economic activity. A deeper dive reveals huge increases in the amount of domestically sourced steel, lumber, and other commodities being hauled to supply the industrial expansion under way.

This headline is just one of many similar announcements of industrial growth and new jobs due to re-shoring:

“Toyota to invest $3.6 billion to move Tacoma pickup truck production from Mexico to Texas” [CNBC – 7/06/2026]

The investment is expected to create 2,000 U.S. jobs at the facility, add a second vehicle assembly line and roughly double the size of the 2.7-million-square-foot plant by 2030, the automaker said. It will expand the plant’s annual capacity from roughly 200,000 to 350,000 units, Toyota said.

Beyond the $3.6 billion invested and the 2,000 direct jobs at the Toyota expansion in San Antonio, there will be many billions of other dollars spent as that investment gets recirculated through the economy.

The partisan media repeatedly tells American consumers that the economy is terrible, and then it follows-up with “consumer sentiment” polls as verification that the economy is bad. But their propaganda campaign can’t mask the actual industrial expansion going on.

Consumer prices are still too high – rent, insurance, gas etc. By continuing to deport the millions of uninsured, non-citizens working at below-market wages and taking up housing, President Trump can continue to relieve inflation pressure and keep the country pointed to a great economic future.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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