After a four-year economic bacchanalia, America was left with a cost-of-living crisis. Runaway government spending and overregulation pushed up prices for many essentials at a breakneck pace, like the cost of homeownership doubling. Fortunately, the Trump administration has been undoing the damage and setting the stage for an American comeback this year. It’s no exaggeration to say that President Joe Biden left behind an economic mess, including a genuine affordability crisis. Consider the following six data points showing what happened during his tenure in office: The monthly mortgage payment on a median price home more than doubled. The inflation-adjusted value of the average American’s weekly paycheck fell 4%. Native-born Americans were losing jobs while net job growth went to foreign-born workers. The cost of servicing the national debt exploded 117%. Bureaucratic government jobs exploded by more than 160,000 in two and a half years. Multitrillion-dollar annual deficits were enshrined into statute. The runaway spending by Biden and a profligate Congress crushed the American dream with 40-year-high inflation, the fastest rise in interest rates in just as long, a frozen housing market and more. The irony is that all this government spending had the initial effect of making the economic numbers look better or making consumers feel better temporarily. When the government under Biden repeatedly fired off the cash cannon via “stimulus” payments, people thought their personal financial situations had improved because they had more money to spend. But all that cash was chasing the same quantity of products and services in the economy, so everyone quickly bid up prices everywhere. Similar, whenever the government spent a dollar, that was added to gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of economic activity. Runaway government spending, financed by borrowing printed money, sure made GDP look great, until the predictable inflation arrived and robbed wage earners of their savings and incomes. The same happened with the job market. Every government bureaucrat hired under Biden boosted the monthly jobs report, but didn’t add any production to the real economy. Likewise, every illegal alien hired boosted payrolls without employing more Americans. It wasn’t economic health, but more like cancerous growth. Last year, President Donald Trump’s economic agenda was like a shock treatment of chemotherapy to kill the cancer of Bidenomics. The Trump administration has slashed more than a quarter million government bureaucrats, cutting the federal workforce to its lowest level in more than a decade. The deficit is down 27% from this time in the previous fiscal year. And immigration law is actually being enforced. Changes like these are obviously good in the long run, but can result in short-term pain, like how chemotherapy eliminates a tumor, but makes a patient feel worse initially. Slashing all those duplicative and counterproductive federal jobs pulls down the headline payroll number in the monthly jobs report. Similarly, the contraction of government expenditures in the first half of last year reduced the headline figure in the GDP reports. It can be tempting for the government to just spend more money and hire more bureaucrats to make GDP and payroll numbers look better, but that’s not the path to long-term economic health. Fortunately, President Trump is resisting that temptation. Equally fortunate, the pain is nearing an end. Reducing government spending has put downward pressure on inflation, helping earnings rise faster than prices. The average American’s weekly paycheck today can buy 1.6% more than when Biden left office. And there’s more good news in the labor market for Americans. All the net job growth over the last 12 months has gone to native-born Americans, not foreign workers. Furthermore, all net job growth has come from the productive private sector, not government. There’s even been some relief in the housing market, with the monthly mortgage payment on a median priced home falling almost 5%. Much like the increase in inflation-adjusted weekly earnings, this improvement in the housing market clearly hasn’t undone all the damage from Biden’s tenure. Homeownership affordability remains near a record low. But things are moving in the right direction and are set to accelerate this year because of the Trump administration’s pro-growth agenda. Tax reform, including no taxes on tips or overtime, as well as full business expensing, will incentivize working and investing. That’ll boost growth and wages for folks across all income groups. The economic cancer created in the previous administration was certainly large and far-reaching, but chemotherapy is mercifully nearing an end. Once the old, failed public policies are out of the system, the productive private sector economy can start running at a healthy pace in 2026. Cheers to that in this New Year! Originally published in Fox News The post Will Trump Create an American Comeback After Biden’s Dismal Economy? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“Replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism!” says my new socialist mayor. Sounds so nice … No more greedy capitalists hoarding wealth. People share. It’s the socialist dream. What will replace capitalism and individualism? One model is the commune—that socialist system where people share, rather than greedily chasing money. In my new video, TikTokers claim capitalism is “ending.” They sing about the beauty of communes. One asks, desperately, “Where is my commune?!” Good question. They’re hard to find because they keep failing. One of the most famous was founded in 1825 In New Harmony, Indiana. Private property was banned and residents shared everything. The result? After just two years, most residents left. Today, New Harmony is a tourist attraction, meant to “inspire progressive thought,” says the assistant director of the expensively renovated site. “It just has some magic here.” But New Harmony’s magic only exists today because a nepo baby poured her rich father’s money into it. Robert Blaffer started Humble Oil, which became ExxonMobil. After his death, his daughter spent millions of her father’s dollars turning the failed commune into an expensive museum. The “magic” tourists experience in New Harmony comes from capitalism, the only system that creates lasting wealth. The “warmth of collectivism” fails again and again. It’s failing now in Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua and Venezuela. It was tried and abandoned in the Soviet Union, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Benin, the Congo, Somalia, Grenada and Cambodia. Even China and Vietnam’s leaders, to allow their countries to prosper, felt they had to give up pure socialism and allow private property and capitalism. But my new mayor still wants to give “the warm of collectivism” a shot. If he were my age, he would have been a hippie. Hippie communes were popular then. One in Tennessee called The Farm forbade members to have their own money or property. Everyone shared everything. “Mothers would nurse each other’s babies—other parents would take care of you … ” said a former member. “If you want to become a member of the community,” warned The Farm’s lawyer, “you got to put everything you have in the pot. We’re doing this for a lifetime!” But they couldn’t do it for a lifetime. They couldn’t even keep it for a dozen years. There just wasn’t enough money, says the commune’s bookkeeper: “Everybody was saying … there’s not enough food, not enough vegetables, not enough diapers, shoes. All things the children needed.” Only when the commune allowed members to own things, and keep profit from their labor, was The Farm able to survive. Residents now say, “We’re not socialists anymore. We have our own money.” New York’s Oneida Community was founded as a free-love, socialist commune, where “every man in the community was essentially married to every woman and all the property was shared.” But Oneida survives today only because they dropped socialism and became capitalists, selling expensive Oneida silverware. Likewise, an Iowa commune, Amana Colonies, survives because they abandoned socialism to sell appliances. Some Americans (falsely) think Israeli communes, Kibbutzim, succeeded. But they mostly failed, despite getting heavy taxpayer subsidies. Why? Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute explains, “People envied one another … and treated one another really, really bad. It’s obvious why. Some people worked hard. Others didn’t. Yet they had exactly the same.” The surviving few Kibbutzim are capitalist. Members own property and earn their own money. The “warmth of collectivism” doesn’t last. But socialists never admit that their communes fail. “Because to them it’s a moral ideal!” says Brook. “Moral striving for the good, even though it’s a complete disaster and a complete failure everywhere and anywhere it is tried.” No matter what my new mayor and other “progressives” say, the only thing that works—the only thing that really makes life better for people—is private ownership and capitalism. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.  The post The Warmth of Collectivism appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A church in Washington, D.C. has gained the attention not only of hundreds of young Christians, but also the mainstream media.   King’s Church has a size of about 600 congregants and is located in the basement of a bar one mile from the White House. With its growth taking off during the COVID-19 pandemic, that appeared unique enough to have earned the church a lengthy exposé in Vanity Fair labeling it a “MAGA” hot spot.   Writing for the magazine, Tara Palmeri painted King’s Church as a “recruitment machine” and asserts that the congregation is a “long-term investment” for the Republican Party.   “What makes King’s so startling—even unnerving—for the secular left is how effortlessly it fills a void progressives never cracked: blending identity, community, and political machinery,” Palmeri writes.   Palmeri describes the church’s nondenominational contemporary worship service as “half revival, half silent disco.”   However, Pastors Wesley Welch, 34, and Ben Palka, 35, say they have never worked in politics. Palka says they would “have no idea how to engineer a ‘recruitment machine,’” adding, “we’re going to be honest about the issues, but we’re not going to waive a particular political banner.”    “What we’re doing is pretty typical church outreach,” Palka said.  “If a church is in a neighborhood, they’ll reach out to their neighborhood, they’ll canvass the neighborhood, they’ll invite people to participate in church and to explore Christianity, and that’s all we’re doing.”   Welch and Palka founded the church in 2018 with a mission to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to Washington, D.C.  More specifically, Palka says King’s Church aims to “take a robust biblical … worldview and apply it to people’s lives in a way that the jobs, the lives that they’re living are Christ focused and Christ centered.”   Pastors of King’s Church Wesley Welch and Ben Palka. (Virginia Allen/The Daily Signal) The church’s growth did not begin until 2020, when Palka says he watched amid the COVID-19 pandemic as “young people that previously didn’t take their faith very seriously start taking it very seriously.”  What Palka said surprised him most about the Vanity Fair piece was “how out of touch, the mainstream media is with just Christianity 101.”   “They looked into a pretty normal, young Evangelical church and the only way that they could understand it was through the framework of politics in power, because … that must be how they view the world,” Palka said.  The congregation of King’s Church meeting in the basement of Penn Social bar in Washington, D.C. (King’s Church) Congregants of the church say they chose to join the community because of the positive experience they had after walking through the church, or bar, doors.   “I think it’s evident that God is moving in King’s Church,” Avery Lance, 27, says.   “By all reports and metrics, young people aren’t going to church,” Lance said, adding, “people in a city like D.C. are not going to church, but King’s Church kind of stands in defiance of all of that.”   Lance and his wife Danielle lead one of the 25 small groups for King’s Church, providing a time to study scripture, pray, share a meal and “bear each other’s burdens and encourage each other,” Danielle Lance explained. “It’s my favorite night of the week,” she said.   Avery and Danielle Lance, King’s Church congregants. (Virginia Allen/The Daily Signal) On a chilly Sunday morning in January, Welch preached from the book of Daniel in the Bible, using the story of Daniel living in captivity in Babylon as an exhortation to seek the Lord and represent Him regardless of the circumstance.   The church is roughly half Gen Z, 30% millennials, and 20% in the 45 plus age demographic, according to Palka.   “We didn’t seek out to be a church for young people. It’s like the Lord’s just done a revival there,” Welch said, adding, “it has been amazing to see the younger generation come hungry for truth and hungry for the Lord, and receiving it.”   Washington, D.C. is young city with 34 being the median age, according to Census Reporter.   Husband and wife Sandra, 45, and Kristopher Klaich, 48, have been attending the church for over four years. As an “older” couple in the community, they quickly became mentors to many of the younger congregants, joking they are shocked so many young people want to spend time with them.    Kristopher and Sandra Klaich, King’s Church congregants. (Virginia Allen/The Daily Signal) One of those “young people” is Jack Renner who, now 32, has been attending the church since the first year it was founded and believes so many other young people have chosen to join the church because they are hungry for community.    “When you enter King’s Church you can feel the welcoming hospitality there, the love for God and love for our fellow humans,” Renner told The Daily Signal.    As King’s Church continues to minister to the people of D.C. who join them on a Sunday morning or during the week for a small group, Wesley says the vision for the church is not only to one day have their own building, but also to “create a long term ministry here in D.C.”  The post DC Church Counters Left Wing Narrative appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The aspect of life that has the most potential to bring Americans together may be the one that is currently dividing them the most. It is the relationship that people have with the traditional family—consisting of a mother and a father and children. The Census Bureau recently released a report about the living arrangements American mothers have when they give birth to their first child. It did not paint a pretty picture. “There have been sweeping changes to marriage and family structures in the United States over the last several decades,” said the report. “Fertility rates dropped to historically low levels. Marriage rates declined while cohabitation became more common. Childbirth increasingly occurred outside of marriage as legal and cultural norms shifted.” The Census Bureau‘s analysis indicated that since the early 1990s there has been a fairly consistent percentage of mothers who were married when they gave birth to their first child. But this percentage was always above 60%, leaving nearly 40% of first-born children in a household that was not a traditional family. In the period from 1990 through 1994, according to the Census Bureau, only 62.2% of first-born babies were born to a married couple. Another 20.4% of the babies born in that period were born to a mother who was neither married nor “cohabiting” with a partner. Then there were 17.4% who were born to a mother who was cohabiting with a partner with whom she was not married. In the period from 1995 through 1999, the percentage of first-born babies who were born to mothers who were married increased modestly to 63.8%. In the period from 2000 through 2004, it increased again to 66.3%. But then it declined again. From 2005 through 2009, it was 62.9%. From 2010 through 2014, it was 60.0%; from 2015 through 2019, it was 60.7%; and from 2020 through 2024, it was 60.8%. While the percentage of first-born babies born to married mothers declined between 1990-94 and 2020-24, the percentage born to unmarried but cohabiting mothers increased, climbing from 17.4% to 23.9%. And there were still 15.3% of first-born babies in the 2020-2024 period who were born to mothers who were neither married nor cohabitating. The Census Bureau’s report also noted a distinction in the trends among women who had a college education and those who did not. “Marriage became a more common living arrangement among first-time mothers with at least a bachelor’s degree, increasing from 74.4 percent in 1990-1994 to 84.5 percent in 2020-2024,” said the bureau’s report. “In contrast, the prevalence of marital first births among mothers with less than a bachelor’s degree declined from 58.6 percent in 1990-1994 to 40.6 percent in 2020-2024, and the share of women cohabiting at first birth rose from 19.2 percent to 34.8 percent,” it said. In other words, in the period from 2020-24, a significant majority (59.4%) of the first-born babies born to mothers without a college degree were not born in a traditional married-couple household. The Census Bureau’s report concedes that babies born outside a traditional family structure also tend to be born in a less prosperous environment. “Children born to married parents on average have access to more economic resources,” says its report. The Census Bureau’s household income data for 2024 shows two factors that, as this column has noted before, clearly have an impact on that income: family structure and education. Among family households, a home headed by a female householder with no spouse present had a median income of $60,440 in 2024. A home headed by a male householder with no spouse present had a median income of $83,260. But a family household headed by a married couple had a median income of $128,700. That means the median income of a married couple family household was about 113% more than the median income of a family household led by a mother with no spouse. Similarly, households headed by someone with a high school diploma but no college education had a median income of $58,410, while those headed by someone with a bachelor’s degree or higher had a median income of $132,700. The Census Bureau’s data shows that the traditional family and a good education help people lead more prosperous lives. In the decades ahead, this nation’s leaders should work to defend the traditional values that support the traditional family and help our nation—and our children—grow and prosper. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.    The post Traditional Families and American Prosperity appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Award-winning filmmaker and president of Man of Steele Productions Eli Steele joins Jack Fowler to discuss the historical factors surrounding Michael Brown’s 2014 death at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri and how 1960s post-liberal policies were the catalyst that set off years of racial unrest in America beginning in the mid 2010s and lasting until the George Floyd riots in 2020 on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” The post 1960s Liberalism Killed Michael Brown | Victor Davis Hanson appeared first on The Daily Signal.