After witnessing a dual Republican majority force a $1.3 trillion spending bill through Congress, it’s easy to feel like conservatives are losing the war against the swamp.
Yes, it’s true Washington bureaucrats and politicians are still spending our money with reckless abandon. However, taxpayers can take comfort in knowing there will soon be less of them, according to recent job trends.
The Washington Post recently made an announcement taxpayers thought they would never live to hear: The greater Washington area job market is slowing down. This is not a drill. The greater Washington, D.C., region added only 43,800 jobs from January 2017 to January 2018.
Compare that to 2016, when the greater D.C. area averaged 60,000 new jobs every month. You read that right. The labor force in the nation’s capital is growing annually at a rate slower than it used to grow monthly.
It gets better — the article also reported the Bureau of Labor Statistics had to issue a correction for its 2016 data. The greater Washington region added 5,600 fewer jobs than originally thought.
The swamp is draining. Really.
Meanwhile, the U.S. economy added 313,000 jobs in February, its biggest gain in more than 1.5 years. Unemployment is the lowest in almost two decades, and wages are up, thanks to a steady Trump-driven diet of tax cuts and deregulation.
The State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency took the hardest hits, collectively eliminating 6,600 jobs over the past year.
Economist Stephen Fuller explained the slowing regional job market to the Washington Post: “What has happened is we weren’t growing as fast as we thought we were … The bread-and-butter sectors of the local economy are now flat or declining during the second half of last year.”
[Also read: If you read the New York Times and the Washington Post, you’re probably extremely confused about the economy]
Of course, plenty of other sectors of the D.C. economy, including bars, restaurants, and hotels, are growing. The “bread and butter” Fuller is referring to are the unelected, unchecked sectors of the economy dedicated to spending other people’s money.
To paraphrase a stump speech given by fiscally conservative hero Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, Washington is a city without a real economy. It doesn’t produce anything, other than complexity that creates problems, then happily profits off everyone else’s failure to comply.
When the business of politics in Washington, D.C. does well, it hurts the rest of America.
The federal government didn’t create $21 trillion in national debt overnight, and it won’t disappear overnight either. We have a long road ahead of us to reign in spending and restore constitutionally-limited government.
However, we can finally say this: After decades of fighting to help grassroots America take back its seat at the table, the results are in and the numbers don’t lie.
The cadre of fiscal conservatives in the House and Senate dedicated to draining the swamp is growing. The Beltway machine built to manipulate government and appropriate money and power only to the wealthy and well-connected is shrinking.
It may be at a slow drip, but rest assured: the swamp is draining.
Adam Brandon (@adam_brandon) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president and CEO of FreedomWorks.
