“Inflation is falling. The labor market is holding. Growth has been solid.”

The Wall Street Journal is no fan of Trump or the administration and the article takes care to offer no praise to the man at the top, only muted criticism, but it can’t argue with the results.

The vital signs of the American economy are pointing in the same, favorable direction more convincingly than at any point since before the pandemic. Inflation is falling. The labor market is holding. Growth has been solid.

It is a snapshot, not a verdict—but it is the closest the economy has come to achieving a soft landing, a moderation in inflation without recession. Just four years ago, many economists said that was impossible. This past April, as the economy closed in on a soft landing, steep tariffs had forecasters bracing for a new surge in inflation.

Now, it again looks plausible that inflation could return to the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal without a recession.

Friday’s inflation report showed so-called core prices, which strip out volatile food and energy costs, rose 2.5% in January from a year earlier—the lowest since the pandemic price surge began in 2021. While that number has been held down artificially by a data gap from last fall’s government shutdown, it nonetheless showed less of the start-of-the-year price pressure that tripped up the falling-inflation story in each of the past three years.

Meanwhile, separate data Wednesday showed the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3% in January, with employers adding a larger-than-anticipated 130,000 jobs.

“The worst calamity that everyone had in mind didn’t happen,” said Jeffrey Cleveland, chief economist at Payden & Rygel. “People would say to me, ‘The only way you’ll get to 2% inflation is the unemployment rate has to spike.’”

This is big in terms of the economy, but the question is how much will ordinary voters care? It’s entirely possible (especially with the current media and social media we have now) for Trump to succeed and get no credit for it, not only from the Journal, but from anybody. There’s precedent for that. Clinton got credit for Bush’s economy. Trump’s economic success was undeniable to the ordinary person before the pandemic the way that Reaganomics had been.

But only so many people will appreciate a soft landing. And the administration has not been effective about communicating its economic plans and there have been too many distractions. It’s only so much time to make the sales pitch for its economic management ahead of the terms. If it doesn’t refocus on that, it will have limited scope for doing anything else.

The post Wall Street Journal: Trump Achieved Impossible With Economy appeared first on Frontpage Mag.

[H/T Frontpage Magazine]