Weekly Economic Update 07-03-26: Consumer Confidence; Case-Shiller Home Price Index; JOLTS; and June Employment

Happy 250th Birthday, America!!

The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Georgia Institute of Technology or the Georgia Board of Regents. 

Tomorrow, the Republic turns 250 — and while I am often highly critical of what our government has become, it is fitting and appropriate to recognize those men who put their names to the Declaration in the summer of 1776.

Think about what they actually did. A few dozen lawyers, farmers, printers, and merchants — most of them flat broke, all of them committing treason against the most powerful empire on earth — sat in a hot Philadelphia room and bet everything on an idea: that rights come from God and not from a king, and that government exists by the consent of the governed. Jefferson wrote it down. Franklin edited it. Adams argued it across the floor until his colleagues couldn’t say no. They pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” and — this is the part we too often gloss over — they meant it literally. Many of them lost all three. Be totally honest with yourself…how many would be willing to do the same today?

What still astonishes me, all these years later, is how durable the thing they built turned out to be. They didn’t trust power, so they split it up and set the pieces against each other. They didn’t trust men to be angels, so they wrote a system that assumes they aren’t. Madison’s checks and balances, the separation of powers, a Bill of Rights that tells the government what it may not do — that is engineering of the highest order. They were building for people they would never meet. For us.

And in so many ways, I feel we have let them down. The economist in me can’t sit on my hands here. The same founders who warned against standing debt and “unfunded” obligations would faint dead away at our $38 trillion debt and a Congress that hasn’t passed a budget on time since 1997. We have drifted a long way from the frugal, suspicious-of-power crowd that started all this.

But more on that some other week — not this one. This week isn’t for that. This week is for gratitude. Two hundred and fifty years on, the experiment is still running — flawed, loud, and still quite young by historical standards.

Happy birthday, America!