July 11: A “big, beautiful” win for Trump’s economic agenda

In which, Trump’s economic agenda gets a major shot in the arm, much to the chagrin of a certain tech billionaire.

A “big, beautiful” win for Trump’s economic agenda

With June’s jobs report looking good, markets looking good, and the 2017 tax cuts made permanent (along with additional cuts in discretionary spending), President Trump celebrated July 4th with a huge legislative win: Signing the Big Beautiful Bill into law.

So, now is a good time to assess where we stand with Trump’s economic agenda. Regular readers will recall that at the outset of this year, I explained that the Trump economic plan was a three-legged stool: Tax relief, spending and regulatory cuts, and tariffs.

As of right now, President Trump and the GOP-led Congress have delivered the necessary legislative and executive actions deemed essential to that agenda. Now we’re going to be playing the waiting game as it’ll take 6-12 months for the full effect of these changes to kick in. Until then, there are still concerning trends in the labor market and personal finances. The presence of those trends will require some strong advocacy for the Trump agenda by Republicans as we head towards midterms next year. But, midterms aside, there’s plenty of opposition in the present.

The main hangups to the Trump agenda have been in the judiciary where district judges have been using injunctions like they were going out of style to pause implementation of executive orders, and in the Federal Reserve where Jerome Powell has stubbornly refused to cut interest rates despite no imminent threat of inflation.

With the passage of the BBB and some rather strongly worded SCOTUS rulings, though, the localized judicial resistance to the Trump economic plan may become less of an issue.

That leaves Powell. With the tax cuts passed and additional funding packages on the horizon, GOP members of Congress are joining Trump in their criticism of Powell’s stubbornness on rates.

Meanwhile, a new round of tariff notices were being readied for distribution, without appearing to concern markets too much (heck, even Bitcoin was hitting new highs).

In other words, the Trump economic agenda is moving forward on all fronts to the degree that Chairman Powell’s continuing intransigence on interest rates may soon tarnish his otherwise decent record on handling inflation, not to mention do real economic harm.

The Fed’s next opportunity to cut interest rates comes at the end of this month. It’ll be a telling moment.

Coriolanus Musk

It’s not a perfect analogy, but there’s a fair amount of parallelism between Musk’s announcement this week of his America Party, and the rise and fall of Shakespeare’s tragic Roman legend.