You won’t see this on the Sunday shows, and you won’t see it above the fold in major papers. You also won’t see it on very many social media posts or reflected by the fake polls.
But the numbers are public, and they tell a story the liberal doom loop industry would rather you never read.
Start with the number the Federal Reserve actually cares about. Core inflation (consumer prices stripped of volatile food and energy) rose 2.4 percent over twelve months ending in August. That is the slowest annual pace since March 2021.
That means everything the Biden administration inflicted on this country — the printing spree to support boondoggle climate projects with DEI requirements, and the insulting phony Janet Yellen lecture that inflation was transitory as a result — has been ground back down to the lowest reading in five years. Nobody is going to throw a parade. So let’s look at where the pressure actually broke.
On August 14, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr released the first broadband report card for the administration. Speeds are up more than 50 percent, the digital divide has shrunk by about a quarter, competition and choice have increased, and prices have gone down. The media ignored it. The blue-check economists mocked it. And neither could be bothered to acknowledge the underlying data. To the Left, facts are often inconvenient.
Wireless is the one line item in the American household budget that has spent a decade going the wrong direction for the telecom giants and the right direction for you.
Since Trump was elected in 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s (BLS) wireless services index has fallen while the overall consumer price index has climbed. Not held steady. Fallen. That means that while things like a gallon of milk or a year of college have gotten more expensive, the thing that got faster every single year also got cheaper.
That is what competition can do when Washington gets out of the way. Carr deserves credit for keeping that pressure on the industry, including through his brilliant “Delete, Delete, Delete” agenda, which has been ripping up outdated government bureaucracy, root and stem.
For four years, we were also told that bringing better internet to rural Americans required even more bureaucracy and a blank check. It took neither. The number of rural Americans without high-speed service has dropped 44 percent in two years. Fixed wireless download speeds are up 25.1 percent, and upload speeds are up 36.9 percent since late 2024. And 77 percent of Americans can now choose among three or more broadband providers. It turns out that when you let people build, they build.
None of this means the job is finished. Ten and a half million Americans still don’t have a decent connection at home, and nine million of them live in rural counties that Democratic administrations continue to overlook.
But President Trump and Chairman Carr have built momentum in the industry. Faster service, more choices and lower prices are a win for American families.
Which brings us to an opportunity to build on that success. Right now, your cellphone is often “locked” to one service provider, and switching carriers comes with different hurdles and stipulations depending on your provider. A single, uniform national standard could let customers who have paid off their phones unlock them and take them to a better deal. Chairman Carr has a chance to give Americans more freedom to choose — and keep the competition that lowers wireless prices.
John Fredericks is the host of the nationally syndicated “The John Fredericks Radio Show.”
