Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

Founder/CEO, Martin Capital. "Philosopher Capitalist". Christian, Anti-Communist. Part of the team that started PayPal. SUBSCRIBE here &

Grace Hall

Joined October 2008

1.7K Following

287K Followers

136K Posts

Pinned Tweet

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

3 days ago

The “Greatest Story Never Told” Just Keeps Getting Better - Trump’s economy has produced an all-time record-low poverty rate and record-high household income. Now nearly a million more Americans are working than just two months ago. Time to tell the story. According to the latest report from the Census Bureau, the poverty rate just hit its lowest level in U.S. history. Read that again. That’s not all. America just also hit its highest real median household income in history. The Atlanta Fed’s October 20 estimate puts third-quarter growth at a strong 3.5 percent annual rate. That’s after years of Democrats promising us that 1.6 percent was “the new normal.” It’s also after barely more than a year and a half of Trump back in office. It gets even better. Child poverty fell to just 13.4 percent, the lowest official rate ever recorded. Hispanic poverty fell to a record low 13.9 percent. Real weekly earnings for blue-collar manufacturing workers are up 4.1 percent since January 2025; construction workers’ earnings are up an even higher 5 percent. Now add 975,000 more Americans working in just the last two months. The household survey recorded an increase of 569,000 in August and another 406,000 in September. The unemployment headline concealed that strength: the labor force grew by more than a million over those two months, pushing unemployment from 4.1 to 4.2 percent because new American workers entered the workforce even faster than employers absorbed them. It’s kind of a miracle. And it’s gathering steam. Yet to hear the Enemedia — and some conservatives — talk, the exact opposite is true. To them it’s all “muh gas prices.” Which is funny since the average gas price under Joe Biden was higher than the average during Trump’s second term, even with the war. Something is seriously amiss. If incomes are rising faster than prices, it isn’t affordability. It certainly isn’t household wealth. The income figure measures the household in the middle. Elon Musk getting richer can’t drag it upward the way he could an average. And the $2,250 gain in 2025 alone is what remains after adjusting for higher prices. People who spent years watching inflation eat their raises are finally getting ahead. Dismissing that isn’t showing concern for working families: it’s just myopic. And electing the people who gave you all that inflation — and promised to “skyrocket” energy prices to force everyone into an EV — isn’t even sane. That GDP number is especially striking. Remember that much ballyhooed 1.5 percent second-quarter headline that had the pundits celebrating Trump’s “failure?” I told you then: they were looking at the wrong number. What they were seeing wasn’t a slowdown in growth but a capex boom: the private economy spending its output to buy the equipment that would create an industrial supercycle. Now even that 1.5 percent headline has been revised away. On September 30, the government raised second-quarter growth to 2.2 percent. More importantly, private domestic demand — American consumers and private investment — grew at a 4.6 percent annual rate, stronger than either previous estimate. The part of the economy I told you to watch was doing even better than we knew. It’s happening. The ever-brilliant Larry Kudlow calls the burgeoning boom “the greatest story never told.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says we’ve entered the “acceleration phase,” as the tax changes and deregulation start to produce the results they were literally designed to produce. I’ve been explaining that process since early 2025. Yet conservatives continue to buy the left’s lies. It’s time to stop. Working Families Are Getting Ahead Starting with Bill Clinton, America’s ruling class told us manufacturing was gone forever. China would build; we would consume. Russia and the Middle East would supply the energy. Europe would regulate. America would borrow, import, and manage its “inevitable” decline and displacement by more dynamic powers. Trump rejected every part of that nonsense. The workers now getting those bigger paychecks have every reason to be glad he did. Their employers aren’t just buying equipment and building new factories: they're bidding up the price of the people who know how to use them. They’re training even more. Nor is the capex boom ending anytime soon. Trump went out and recruited an incredible $18 trillion of investment into the United States in his first months in office. Equipment shipments have risen at an 18.9 percent annual rate in just the latest three months. And on September 28th, the President announced the largest steel plant in American history, a $15 billion titan set to begin construction in Iowa. The President also negotiated trade deals that pried open foreign markets to U.S. manufacturers; he also exempted foreign companies from tariffs if they begin building plants here. And as a condition of those trade deals — now finalized with countries representing 67 percent of global GDP — he forced countless countries accustomed to buying their energy from Russia and the Persian Gulf to buy it from the Gulf of America instead. The September 30 energy agreement with South Korea, which I highlighted in my October 3 update, puts $200 billion behind that strategy. It includes $54 billion for North Slope natural gas development and a new Trans-Alaska LNG Pipeline to supply the West Coast and our East Asian allies. Up to 12,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent operating jobs will be created from the Alaska project alone. The Koreans need reliable energy. We have it. Their investment would put Americans to work supplying them for decades. The construction workers are building the plants and refineries. The roughnecks are drilling the wells. There will be years of work completing them, and much, much more work running them thereafter. How did that happen? Trump changed the tax code, and thus the incentives for investment. His One Big Beautiful Bill made immediate business expensing permanent for equipment, and added full expensing for qualifying American production facilities. Combined with unprecedented deregulation plus the trade deals, suddenly there’s no better place to build a factory than right here. Meanwhile, no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, and no taxes on Social Security (and what sort of obscenity is taxing Social Security anyway?!) help the bottom rung even more than the top. “Those jobs are never coming back” was a lie, calculated to cover for (intentional) Democrat failures. There was a time when an American family could live on one breadwinner’s blue-collar wages. That day is coming back, fast. An economy “growing” at Obama’s stultifying 1.6 percent takes nearly half a century to double. Young people can’t find jobs because they’re already taken: they’re locked out of their futures for half their lifetimes, and locked into dependency on the socialists. That is, after all, the goal. But an economy growing at 5 percent doubles in size in just 14 years. That translates into so much hiring so fast that labor shortages have to be cured by ever-higher wages. It also translates into so much tax revenue, even at lower rates, that you don’t just reduce the deficit: you start paying off the debt, as we did for four straight years before 9/11. Folks, this ain’t rocket science. This is the difference between Jimmy Carter’s economy and Ronald Reagan’s. It’s not like we haven’t seen this play before. Bessent calls it “parallel prosperity.” Wall Street and Main Street can both do well at once. A profitable company is sustainable: it expands, hires people, trains them, and pays them more. An unprofitable company does none of those things. Yet the “Democratic Socialist” treats the profits that make prosperity possible as an offense, one that must be crushed in the name of “social justice.” That’s the choice on November’s ballot. More Production, Less Inflation Nowhere is that point more obvious than deregulation, anathema to the Democrats. Trump has eliminated 129 regulations for every new one: there’s nothing like it in history. Which party do you think issued most of those in the first place? Not ours. A company wants to build; it has customers waiting; it can raise the money. But then it spends years waiting for government to let it proceed. Supposedly the delay protects us. But from what is it protecting us exactly? More goods? Better jobs? The possibility that somebody might make a profit? In the midst of the Depression, the Empire State Building was completed in just 13 months. Good luck getting a permit in even twice that time in today’s New York. A process that makes it prohibitively expensive to produce in America sends that production somewhere else. It doesn’t abolish the need for the product. Americans still buy it, but workers in some other country collect the paychecks. Democrats piled on regulations — and taxes — year after year, amounting to a multi-trillion-dollar burden on the U.S. economy and those pathetic “growth” rates that steal young people’s futures. Trump is rolling them back. Leftwing economists have long fretted (as they have about global warming, and global cooling, and global overpopulation, and the Ozone hole, and “Peak Oil”, and “two weeks to flatten the curve”) that all this new production will cause inflation. But this Phillips Curve nonsense was discredited 50 years ago: the truth is exactly the opposite. Production isn’t the enemy of price stability: it’s the means by which supply catches demand. The answer to a shortage of something Americans need is to make more of it. And if supply is plentiful, prices fall. American factories are already producing more of what this buildout needs. Durable-goods manufacturing grew at a 3.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter; semiconductor production surged at a 28.4 percent pace. The answer to demand for more computing power is to manufacture more chips, not make Americans poorer until they stop wanting them. The same logic applies to energy. An oil-price squeeze strengthens the case for more American supply. It doesn’t make the factories, workers, or families buying that energy the problem. Alaska’s gas will make everyone richer by bringing prices down. Likewise, the “expert” class assured us that we needed to lower our expectations, that a “mature economy” can only grow at a lower rate: all the dynamic gains must come from developing economies like China’s. Yet what the heck is a mature economy? If you’d asked anyone in 1900, they’d have said they had one, just before nearly everything we have was invented. We are entering another such period, with AI and countless other new technologies promising productivity gains beyond anything we’ve ever seen. A worker with better tools can produce much more in the same hour, earning a higher wage without increasing the labor cost of each item he produces. And like Reagan before him, President Trump has laid a foundation that sets America up to dominate the next half century. Go Tell Our Story: The Election Is On You So why aren’t Republicans making this case every day? And no, I don’t mean “the Republicans” in Washington. Trump’s doing more than any President before him. Congress, however flawed, has enacted much of his legislation. The leaders aren’t the problem. We are. Historically, the President’s party — whichever President’s party — loses the midterms. But they don’t have to. Midterms are low-turnout elections, which means “every little thing we do is magic.” No need to appeal to the middle, no need to persuade the socialists. Just talk to your own friends and physically take them to the polls. To keep the majority, all we need is 1,000 extra votes in 20 House races — just four extra votes per precinct. Want to make a difference? You can. But that also means that if you don’t, you’re responsible. Republicans need to stop acting like entitled children, and start taking responsibility for their neighbors and their futures. It’s time to tell our story, over and over again. Record real household income and record-low poverty are a pretty great story to tell. So is the lowest murder rate in 126 years, a 99.9 percent reduction in illegal border crossings, or a thousand other things. Nearly a million additional Americans working in just two months is a pretty solid answer to those who told us Trump would fail. And the equipment arriving at new American factories gives us every reason to expect more. This is nothing else but the greatest story never told. So go and tell it.

RodDMartin's tweet photo. The “Greatest Story Never Told” Just Keeps Getting Better - Trump’s economy has produced an all-time record-low poverty rate and record-high household income. Now nearly a million more Americans are working than just two months ago. Time to tell the story.

According to the latest report from the Census Bureau, the poverty rate just hit its lowest level in U.S. history.

Read that again.

That’s not all. America just also hit its highest real median household income in history. The Atlanta Fed’s October 20 estimate puts third-quarter growth at a strong 3.5 percent annual rate. That’s after years of Democrats promising us that 1.6 percent was “the new normal.”

It’s also after barely more than a year and a half of Trump back in office.

It gets even better. Child poverty fell to just 13.4 percent, the lowest official rate ever recorded. Hispanic poverty fell to a record low 13.9 percent. Real weekly earnings for blue-collar manufacturing workers are up 4.1 percent since January 2025; construction workers’ earnings are up an even higher 5 percent.

Now add 975,000 more Americans working in just the last two months.

The household survey recorded an increase of 569,000 in August and another 406,000 in September. The unemployment headline concealed that strength: the labor force grew by more than a million over those two months, pushing unemployment from 4.1 to 4.2 percent because new American workers entered the workforce even faster than employers absorbed them.

It’s kind of a miracle. And it’s gathering steam.

Yet to hear the Enemedia — and some conservatives — talk, the exact opposite is true. To them it’s all “muh gas prices.” Which is funny since the average gas price under Joe Biden was higher than the average during Trump’s second term, even with the war.

Something is seriously amiss.

If incomes are rising faster than prices, it isn’t affordability. It certainly isn’t household wealth. The income figure measures the household in the middle. Elon Musk getting richer can’t drag it upward the way he could an average. And the $2,250 gain in 2025 alone is what remains after adjusting for higher prices.

People who spent years watching inflation eat their raises are finally getting ahead. Dismissing that isn’t showing concern for working families: it’s just myopic. And electing the people who gave you all that inflation — and promised to “skyrocket” energy prices to force everyone into an EV — isn’t even sane.

That GDP number is especially striking. Remember that much ballyhooed 1.5 percent second-quarter headline that had the pundits celebrating Trump’s “failure?” I told you then: they were looking at the wrong number.

What they were seeing wasn’t a slowdown in growth but a capex boom: the private economy spending its output to buy the equipment that would create an industrial supercycle.

Now even that 1.5 percent headline has been revised away. On September 30, the government raised second-quarter growth to 2.2 percent. More importantly, private domestic demand — American consumers and private investment — grew at a 4.6 percent annual rate, stronger than either previous estimate.

The part of the economy I told you to watch was doing even better than we knew.

It’s happening.

The ever-brilliant Larry Kudlow calls the burgeoning boom “the greatest story never told.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says we’ve entered the “acceleration phase,” as the tax changes and deregulation start to produce the results they were literally designed to produce.

I’ve been explaining that process since early 2025. Yet conservatives continue to buy the left’s lies.

It’s time to stop.

Working Families Are Getting Ahead

Starting with Bill Clinton, America’s ruling class told us manufacturing was gone forever. China would build; we would consume. Russia and the Middle East would supply the energy. Europe would regulate. America would borrow, import, and manage its “inevitable” decline and displacement by more dynamic powers.

Trump rejected every part of that nonsense.

The workers now getting those bigger paychecks have every reason to be glad he did. Their employers aren’t just buying equipment and building new factories: they're bidding up the price of the people who know how to use them. They’re training even more.

Nor is the capex boom ending anytime soon. Trump went out and recruited an incredible $18 trillion of investment into the United States in his first months in office. Equipment shipments have risen at an 18.9 percent annual rate in just the latest three months.

And on September 28th, the President announced the largest steel plant in American history, a $15 billion titan set to begin construction in Iowa.

The President also negotiated trade deals that pried open foreign markets to U.S. manufacturers; he also exempted foreign companies from tariffs if they begin building plants here. And as a condition of those trade deals — now finalized with countries representing 67 percent of global GDP — he forced countless countries accustomed to buying their energy from Russia and the Persian Gulf to buy it from the Gulf of America instead.

The September 30 energy agreement with South Korea, which I highlighted in my October 3 update, puts $200 billion behind that strategy. It includes $54 billion for North Slope natural gas development and a new Trans-Alaska LNG Pipeline to supply the West Coast and our East Asian allies.

Up to 12,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent operating jobs will be created from the Alaska project alone.

The Koreans need reliable energy. We have it. Their investment would put Americans to work supplying them for decades.

The construction workers are building the plants and refineries. The roughnecks are drilling the wells. There will be years of work completing them, and much, much more work running them thereafter.

How did that happen? Trump changed the tax code, and thus the incentives for investment. His One Big Beautiful Bill made immediate business expensing permanent for equipment, and added full expensing for qualifying American production facilities.

Combined with unprecedented deregulation plus the trade deals, suddenly there’s no better place to build a factory than right here.

Meanwhile, no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, and no taxes on Social Security (and what sort of obscenity is taxing Social Security anyway?!) help the bottom rung even more than the top.

“Those jobs are never coming back” was a lie, calculated to cover for (intentional) Democrat failures.

There was a time when an American family could live on one breadwinner’s blue-collar wages. That day is coming back, fast.

An economy “growing” at Obama’s stultifying 1.6 percent takes nearly half a century to double. Young people can’t find jobs because they’re already taken: they’re locked out of their futures for half their lifetimes, and locked into dependency on the socialists. That is, after all, the goal.

But an economy growing at 5 percent doubles in size in just 14 years. That translates into so much hiring so fast that labor shortages have to be cured by ever-higher wages. It also translates into so much tax revenue, even at lower rates, that you don’t just reduce the deficit: you start paying off the debt, as we did for four straight years before 9/11.

Folks, this ain’t rocket science. This is the difference between Jimmy Carter’s economy and Ronald Reagan’s. It’s not like we haven’t seen this play before.

Bessent calls it “parallel prosperity.” Wall Street and Main Street can both do well at once. A profitable company is sustainable: it expands, hires people, trains them, and pays them more. An unprofitable company does none of those things.

Yet the “Democratic Socialist” treats the profits that make prosperity possible as an offense, one that must be crushed in the name of “social justice.”

That’s the choice on November’s ballot.

More Production, Less Inflation

Nowhere is that point more obvious than deregulation, anathema to the Democrats. Trump has eliminated 129 regulations for every new one: there’s nothing like it in history. Which party do you think issued most of those in the first place? Not ours.

A company wants to build; it has customers waiting; it can raise the money. But then it spends years waiting for government to let it proceed.

Supposedly the delay protects us. But from what is it protecting us exactly? More goods? Better jobs? The possibility that somebody might make a profit?

In the midst of the Depression, the Empire State Building was completed in just 13 months. Good luck getting a permit in even twice that time in today’s New York.

A process that makes it prohibitively expensive to produce in America sends that production somewhere else. It doesn’t abolish the need for the product. Americans still buy it, but workers in some other country collect the paychecks.

Democrats piled on regulations — and taxes — year after year, amounting to a multi-trillion-dollar burden on the U.S. economy and those pathetic “growth” rates that steal young people’s futures. Trump is rolling them back.

Leftwing economists have long fretted (as they have about global warming, and global cooling, and global overpopulation, and the Ozone hole, and “Peak Oil”, and “two weeks to flatten the curve”) that all this new production will cause inflation.

But this Phillips Curve nonsense was discredited 50 years ago: the truth is exactly the opposite.

Production isn’t the enemy of price stability: it’s the means by which supply catches demand. The answer to a shortage of something Americans need is to make more of it. And if supply is plentiful, prices fall.

American factories are already producing more of what this buildout needs. Durable-goods manufacturing grew at a 3.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter; semiconductor production surged at a 28.4 percent pace.

The answer to demand for more computing power is to manufacture more chips, not make Americans poorer until they stop wanting them.

The same logic applies to energy. An oil-price squeeze strengthens the case for more American supply. It doesn’t make the factories, workers, or families buying that energy the problem. Alaska’s gas will make everyone richer by bringing prices down.

Likewise, the “expert” class assured us that we needed to lower our expectations, that a “mature economy” can only grow at a lower rate: all the dynamic gains must come from developing economies like China’s.

Yet what the heck is a mature economy? If you’d asked anyone in 1900, they’d have said they had one, just before nearly everything we have was invented.

We are entering another such period, with AI and countless other new technologies promising productivity gains beyond anything we’ve ever seen. A worker with better tools can produce much more in the same hour, earning a higher wage without increasing the labor cost of each item he produces.

And like Reagan before him, President Trump has laid a foundation that sets America up to dominate the next half century.

Go Tell Our Story: The Election Is On You

So why aren’t Republicans making this case every day? And no, I don’t mean “the Republicans” in Washington. Trump’s doing more than any President before him. Congress, however flawed, has enacted much of his legislation.

The leaders aren’t the problem. We are.

Historically, the President’s party — whichever President’s party — loses the midterms. But they don’t have to.

Midterms are low-turnout elections, which means “every little thing we do is magic.” No need to appeal to the middle, no need to persuade the socialists. Just talk to your own friends and physically take them to the polls.

To keep the majority, all we need is 1,000 extra votes in 20 House races — just four extra votes per precinct. Want to make a difference? You can. But that also means that if you don’t, you’re responsible.

Republicans need to stop acting like entitled children, and start taking responsibility for their neighbors and their futures. It’s time to tell our story, over and over again.

Record real household income and record-low poverty are a pretty great story to tell. So is the lowest murder rate in 126 years, a 99.9 percent reduction in illegal border crossings, or a thousand other things.

Nearly a million additional Americans working in just two months is a pretty solid answer to those who told us Trump would fail. And the equipment arriving at new American factories gives us every reason to expect more.

This is nothing else but the greatest story never told.

So go and tell it.

653

315

152

24K

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 21 hours ago

@SonaMetz1 Well you say that, but there sure are a lot of Iranians here who love it.

281

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 24 hours ago

I just can't get over this: "Make Iran Great Again". The guys who did this are amazing. And it'll make you cry. #JavidShah‌‌‌‌‌ #LionAndSunRevolution

164

657

62K

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 21 hours ago

@AndishehAazaad Javid Shah!

137

Who to follow

Dusty Deevers

@DustyDeevers

Follower of Christ, husband, father, pastor, abolitionist. OK State Senator District 32, Vice Chair @OKFreedomCaucus. Christ is Lord!

Conservative Baptist Network

@BaptistNetwork

A network of autonomous churches focused on missions, evangelism, cultural engagement, and biblical Truth.

Jared Longshore

@JaredLongshore

Associate Pastor @Christ_Kirk Undergrad Dean and Fellow of Theology @NewSaintAndrews Write at https://t.co/Q86CIQGArq

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 21 hours ago

@maryaa_maryam Javid Shah!

274

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 21 hours ago

@KathleenJo62219 Amen.

386

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 21 hours ago

@VividProwess @netanyahu As many times as possible!

133

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 21 hours ago

@ikwilson This is the beginning, not the end.

266

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 21 hours ago

@MarioNawfal Wow. They really want all their neighbors to hate them, don't they? Great way to see the region's F-35 fleets respond to this travesty.

751

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 21 hours ago

@SaraHermanw0 About time. It is a travesty that this isn't already a requirement.

612

RodDMartin retweeted

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

3 days ago

Iran’s War, China’s Hand, and Trump’s Leverage - Don Ma and I discuss why Russian and Chinese support has limits, how Iran’s proxies threaten global shipping, and what Trump needs from Ukraine to bring energy prices under control.

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 22 hours ago

@fitnessfreak5 They always are.

169

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

2 days ago

And yet they tell us we should trust voting machines.

Bala 🧤

@BalaiBB

2 days ago

they’re calling it “Black October” and i don’t think people realize how serious this is in the last 48 hours there have been over 27 major cybersecurity incidents. not in a month. not in a week. in 48 hours any ONE of these would normally be the biggest story of the year PHP: critical vulnerability in the software running 80% of the web. severity 9.2 out of 10 Node.js: high-severity flaw letting attackers take over servers remotely. affects versions 22, 24, and 26 Java: also compromised. three of the most used programming languages on earth hit at the same time GitLab: a perfect 10 out of 10 severity hole in every version since 2014 Railway: hosting platform compromised. API keys for OpenAI, Claude, Stripe potentially exposed Signal: a bug that could leave your mic and camera on after you hang up WordPress: hackers stole a plugin maker’s keys and planted backdoors on websites LiteLLM: an AI tool downloaded 3.4 million times a day was poisoned with a password stealer and that’s not even half the list thousands of AI agent swarms are reportedly scanning and attacking vulnerable servers right now. automated. around the clock security researchers are saying this might be the early stages of a global cyber incident that nobody fully understands yet if you run a website, use cloud services, store API keys on hosting platforms, or use any software built on PHP, Node.js, or Java you are potentially affected update everything. rotate your API keys. change your passwords on critical services. enable 2FA everywhere you haven’t already this is not a normal week on the internet. this is something different

431

21K

10K

RodDMartin retweeted

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

2 days ago

And yet they tell us we should trust voting machines.

10K

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 22 hours ago

@yesitswhouthink It was great! It's up on YouTube now.

189

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

1 day ago

This is kind of a big deal.

Heartlander News

@HeartlanderNews

2 days ago

Though the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) denies any involvement with the letters fouled with white powder sent to lawmakers across the nation, one former member told Heartlander News that he is concerned about radicalized factions of the group. “People inside DSA do hold extremist views, and it should frighten all of us,” Jake Altman, a DSA member from 2013 to 2022, told Heartlander News. “The reality is, they are quite radical. They are quite extreme. They look to the French Revolution and they look to the Bolshevik Revolution as models.” More than 100 suspicious letters are circulating in the U.S. mail system, according to preliminary information shared with ABC News. Preliminary information also found that the white powder was not hazardous, according to NBC News.