America Needs Three Cheers for the Economy

Today’s job report barely warrants one cheer, but surely the best is yet to come when President Trump gets his one, big, beautiful bill passed by Congress.

AP/Richard Drew
The Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, speaks during the annual Monetary Policy Forum, New York, March 7, 2025 AP/Richard Drew

We need three cheers for the economy. I’d give barely one cheer for today’s 151,000 jobs number for the month of February, though. That’s it: just one cheer.

Nothing to write home about. There is no recession, but we can do a lot better.  

For all the yelping about tariffs — most of which haven’t even happened yet — there is no giant inflation.

And Fed head Jay Powell is not going to be changing his target rate anytime soon.

Mr. Powell’s telling people that the central bank wants to wait and see what the full impact of the Trump policies will have on the economy.

He’s not going to lunge against tariffs, because for one thing, most sensible economists believe — at worst  — tariffs have a temporary one-time price effect.

Meanwhile, pro-growth measures like tax cuts and deregulation that could boost economic growth to 3 percent or better may be welcomed by the Powell Fed — according to private conversations.

Meanwhile, some of the purchasing managers indexes have shown improvement in services and even slightly in manufacturing — with manufacturing jobs up 10,000 in February.

But surely the best is yet to come, when President Trump gets his one, big, beautiful bill passed by Congress — hopefully even sooner than possible.

When you take out government-related jobs from the private payroll total, though, you’re only left with a gain of 77,000.

The unemployment rate ticked up one tenth to 4.1 percent, but the under-employment rate jumped half a point to 8 percent, which is not good.

Manufacturing hours worked did jump nicely by a half of a percent. So that’s potentially a good sign.

The stock market’s going through a mild correction, but actually corporate profits, the mother’s milk of stocks, are still pretty good — so it’s hard to expect some kind of stock market calamity.

I want an economy with three cheers, though.

And that means full throated passage of Mr. Trump’s economic plan and especially the tax cuts.

And now the President is talking about immediate 100 percent write-offs for business equipment and machinery and get this — for factories as well.

Now that’ll put a torque into the economic stories.

That’ll give us three cheers.

That’s the kind of growthy scenario that the country’s hoping for.

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.


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