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Unleash Prosperity Hotline Issue #1432: Weekend Edition
01/16/2026 – 01/18/2026
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1) The Loan Shark Full Employment Act
America's Credit Unions estimates that 47 million “subprime” borrowers (effectively one-third of consumers) would be cut off from credit cards under Trump’s proposed 10% interest rate cap.
Maybe that's a wild exaggeration, but even if the number turns out to be half that high, at least 20 million people - most of them with low incomes and with credit scores below 700 - are at risk of losing the plastic card in their wallet. And that's just the credit unions.
Many will rush to payday lenders for emergency loans - and we are strongly supportive of the PayDay industry.
Ironically enough, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who sold Trump the idea of credit card interest caps, also wants to shut down payday lenders.
So now, where will those denied credit cards go to pay their bills? Will they write overdraft checks and pay even bigger penalties?
Many of those in financial straits will go to an old-fashioned alternative: loan sharks.
Ironically, Senator Warren complains that credit card companies with their interest rates on late payments that average 22% are acting like loan sharks.
Not exactly. If you don’t pay back a loan shark on time, you don’t get hit with a 22% interest rate, you get hit in the leg or over the head with a tire iron.
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2) Good News on Jobs
After the BLS reported last week just 50,000 non-farm jobs added in December, the Wall Street Journal front page headline fretted "America's Job Market Has Entered the Slow Lane." After drilling down on the numbers, we find much better news.
It is true that job growth has slowed in 2025, but as we’ve shouted many times, that’s mostly a supply of workers problem, not a demand problem. There are 7.2 million job openings.
The household survey showed the number of people employed jumped by 232,000--more than four times the increase in payrolls. The explanation for this difference is a very positive development in the labor market: full time employment was up as part time work declined.
In December, the number of part-time jobs declined by 740,000, while full-time employment shot up by 890,000:
People exchanged multiple part-time gigs for single full-time jobs in December. That doesn't show up in the aggregate figures, but it's a real improvement.
Further evidence of that was the so-called U-6 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged and underemployed workers, fell in December a significant three-tenths of a percentage point. More people were able to get the kinds of jobs they wanted, like good-paying, full-time work with benefits.
On the wage front, average weekly earnings nudged up from a 3.6% annual increase to 3.8%. That also beat inflation for 2025. Workers’ paychecks are getting bigger and they can buy more with them. Inflation-adjusted weekly paychecks, which fell 4% under Biden, are up almost 1.5% during Trump's second term.
Don’t be at all surprised if we get a big upward revision in the December jobs numbers after January.
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3) Health Care Price Transparency Makes A Comeback
Trump’s Health Care Savings plan announced yesterday was a giant win for our co-founder Dr. Arthur Laffer and the health reformer Cynthia Fisher, who’ve been crusading for medical prices to be posted at every hospital, clinic, pharmacy, and doctor’s office. No more surprise billing.
The plan requires:
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Laffer estimates that full price transparency can cut medical costs by nearly $1 trillion.
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4) Just Another Rent Control Horror Story
How many times do we have to learn this lesson the hard way? Price controls cause scarcity and contribute to homelessness:
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5) …Or Maybe They Know Exactly What They’re Doing
Some proponents know exactly what they are doing when they destroy the private housing stock with rent control. Here is NYC's new housing czar Cea Weaver explaining that (of course) rent control will destroy private ownership of housing and usher in the era of "full social housing":
We decided that fighting for rent control was a strategic and critical first step in the fight for full social housing.
So a lot of times people ask, why are we fighting for rent control when we have NYCHA [NYC Housing Authority]? We should be fighting to save our public housing.
We decided that through a program like Rent Control, we are able to directly challenge the logic of unfettered profit in the real estate market, and we are able to directly challenge housing as a wealth building tool, and through regulation, strike a blow to the entire real estate industry at once. And so the beauty of rent stabilization and rent control is that it weakens the speculative value of the real estate asset. The value is no longer based on what the landlord is able to get, but rather it's based on a state public board who's deciding how much rent is going up...
The idea is that we could weaken the entire industry at once through a strong rent control campaign, and that that would strengthen our ability to do things like fight for social housing.
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6) We’re Regulating the Wrong Person
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