On the menu today: It is the morning of Christmas Eve; today is the last Morning Jolt until December 29. Over on the Three Martini Lunch podcast — now in its end-of-the-year awards programming — each day Greg and I try to pick a good news item, a bad news item, and a crazy news item. Every now and then, the news cycle offers three bits of good news, or more frequently, nothing but bad news. With Christmas a day away, let’s focus on what’s going right in this country and the world — good news on the economic front, reductions in crime, and even some comeuppance for past wrongdoing. Read on.

The Good Economic News

The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis unveiled the good news Tuesday morning:

Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 4.3 percent in the third quarter of 2025 (July, August, and September). . . . In the second quarter, real GDP increased 3.8 percent. The increase in real GDP in the third quarter reflected increases in consumer spending, exports, and government spending that were partly offset by a decrease in investment. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, decreased.

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal notes the strange contradiction in economic pessimism in consumer surveys, coupled with consistently high spending rates:

Consumer confidence is down in surveys, but you wouldn’t know it from the healthy 2.4 percentage-point contribution to third quarter GDP. Healthcare, prescription drugs and international travel were leading contributors, with healthcare accounting for a third of the increase. Is this an Ozempic boom? . . . Trumponomics boils down to a bet that the pro-growth impact of deregulation and tax reduction can offset the damage from tariffs, which are tax increases. Imagine how well the economy would be doing without tariffs.

Note that Americans are working the same number of hours over the past two quarters, so from the official numbers, Americans are producing more in the same amount of time on the job.

Some will fairly wonder why, if the economy has been so much more productive in the stretch from April to September, we didn’t see a corresponding hiring boom. (In fact, earlier this month Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned, “Fed staffers believe that federal data could be overestimating job creation by up to 60,000 jobs a month. Given that figures published so far show that the economy has added about 40,000 jobs a month since April, the real number could be something more like a loss of 20,000 jobs a month.”) Some attribute this to developments in artificial intelligence; U.S. companies are figuring out how to produce more of their goods and services, without having workers work more hours or hiring many more workers.

Still, more goods and services means more products on the shelves, more competition for customers, more growth, more profits, more dividends, and all kinds of beneficial follow-on economic effects. Whatever your economic perspective, we want the U.S. gross domestic product to go up.

Keep in mind, there are those who argue gross domestic product is not a useful measurement of the economy. John Tamny, editor of RealClearMarkets, writes: “Some will add that consumer spending also played a big role in the GDP report, but consumption is an effect of growth that already happened. Which means GDP is a monument to double counting in addition to a fraudulent measure of economic growth. Wise minds will dismiss this most worthless of numbers that only an economist could love.”

Crime Is Down, Everywhere, All at Once

Axios notices the research work of Jeff Asher, pointing to an astonishing drop in crime nationwide that accelerated dramatically in the past year:

The number of crimes reported to law enforcement agencies almost certainly fell at a historic clip in 2025 led by the largest one-year drop in murder ever recorded — the third straight year setting a new record — and sizable drops in reported violent and property crime. This assessment will not be confirmed until the FBI releases formal estimates for 2025 sometime in the second half of next year, but it is based on a variety of sources all saying the same thing.

The drop in crime in 2025 continues a trend that began in 2023, accelerated in 2024, and likely became historic in 2025. A roughly 20 percent drop in murder in 2025, as is suggested by the current data, would be by far the largest decline ever recorded, eclipsing the decline in 2024 — currently pegged at -15 percent by the FBI but that’s subject to a likely upward revision next year.

Other types of crime are seeing large reported declines as well. These drops range from a nearly 23 percent decline in motor vehicle thefts in the [Real-Time Crime Index] to a smaller 9 and 8 percent drop in theft and aggravated assault respectively according to the RTCI. These numbers won’t be finalized for a while, but they paint the picture of large drops in crime even if the current numbers potentially overstate that drop by a small bit.

Some Trump fans will be itching to attribute this to the National Guard deployments in U.S. cities, but this development is more complicated than that. True, no criminal in his right mind tries to mug, carjack, or purse-snatch someone when there are National Guard troops across the street.

Asher writes, “The drop has been felt everywhere with sizable declines in every crime type across every population group that is measured by the RTCI.” The administration deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June and Washington, D.C., in August, and federal forces arrived in Memphis in October 2025.

So, we’re seeing the drop in communities where National Guard troops are on the streets, as well as communities without those troops. New York City, for example, has enjoyed declining crime numbers in the first half of the year, and it has not had a new deployment of National Guard troops. (Since 9/11, service members from the New York National Guard have participated in Joint Task Force Empire Shield, establishing a military presence on the ground around New York City transit centers such as at the World Trade Center hub, Grand Central Station, LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports, the Port Authority Bus terminal, and various bridges and tunnels in the city.)

Deployment of National Guard troops on city streets will undoubtedly have at least a short-term effect on crime rates. But America’s communities really need top-quality police work, prosecutors who are willing to take cases to trial and put criminals behind bars, and judges and juries that will convict them. The good news is, it looks like a lot of places are seeing more effective police work.

Actions, Meet Consequences

Even some things that seem like bad news can be interpreted as good news, depending upon your perspective. The continuing exodus of respected staff and scholars from the Heritage Foundation is a depressing turn for one of the most important think tanks in the history of the conservative movement. But it also is a demonstration that the people who worked there are not obedient automatons, and when Kevin Roberts steers the institution into a ditch and doesn’t make any serious effort to make amends or undo the damage, good, smart, principled people will head for the door and find opportunities elsewhere.

As the Editors of NR write:

A Heritage Foundation that was once synonymous with free markets, the rule of law, and a strong national defense has, to a large extent, abandoned or downgraded those things in pursuit of newer, populist ideological fashions in an apparent finger-in-the-wind attempt to stay in the good graces of the power brokers of the new right. (At the same time, Roberts alienated the Trump campaign last year by persisting in portraying Project 2025 as the Trump 2.0 playbook, despite the Trump team’s pleas for Heritage to stop.)

Elsewhere, a little bit more than a year ago, former President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter for his six felonies and six misdemeanors and then followed that up with a blanket preemptive pardon. I wrote in the aftermath, “To be a Biden is to be above the law, and that’s been clear for a long time.”

But escaping the long arm of the law does not mean escaping all consequences. Hunter Biden is now lamenting that he is $15 million in debt:

It’s awful. Litigation sucks. I’ve been, I’ve look, I’ve been tied up in, in criminal and civil and in courts and, you know, I mean, like, I got, you know, I don’t know, 14, $15 million in debt that I have no idea that — holy s***, I’m gonna be able to pay off. I, I have, you know, I mean millions of dollars in debt that, you know, nobody’s riding to the rescue for Hunter Biden. My dad, you know, entered the, by the presidency as the poorest man to ever take the office. And he left the presidency, the, you know, not poorest, I mean, which he’s fine, but you know, like he has no, we have no generational wealth.

I don’t have any, you know, despite what these guys say, like there’s no billions of dollars buried underneath my dad’s house and, you know, Delaware.

Note that when Hunter Biden says, “My dad entered the presidency as the poorest man to ever take the office,” he neglects to mention that Joe Biden’s net worth in 2019 was estimated at $9 million. “Poor” is an extremely relative term when Hunter Biden uses it.

As one person on X observed, “it’s weird he’d have this problem given in the past he has run international investment firms, sat on the boards of energy companies and launched an incredibly successful art career selling original paintings for many hundreds of thousands each. Why would such a multitalented guy not be able to earn his way out?”

The former president insisted that Hunter Biden is “the smartest man he knows.” While every father wants to see the best in his son, for a long, long time the rest of us looked at Hunter Biden and saw him as a grifter whose fortunes were made by selling access to his dad. Joe Biden is enjoying a long-overdue retirement. And now Hunter Biden has nothing of value left to sell.

ADDENDUM: Merry Christmas to all. Remember to keep your shoes on at the Christmas party tonight at Nakatomi Plaza.

A lot of people find the Christmas season strangely depressing, and oftentimes we can find ourselves looking at a Norman Rockwell image of what the holiday ought to be and feel some part of our lives falls short of that ideal. At times like this, remember that if nothing else, at least you’re not going through childbirth in a manger alongside cows and other animals. (I have my doubts that it was truly a Silent Night.) Nor are you waiting twelve days for three monarchs to get here with gifts that are luxurious but not terribly practical for a new mom.

And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, enjoy the movies and Chinese food tomorrow, or whatever it is you do during this stretch of year.