Happy Labor Day? Inflation is eating up our paychecks! Usually around Labor Day weekend, unofficially the end of summer vacation season, travel costs begin to drop.
Page F2From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 9 September 2026
White House books $320 billion in savings the same week a watchdog counts $4 billion in crypto losses.
As it ran on the front
Friday's jobs report said employers added 162,000 positions in August, nearly triple what forecasters expected, with unemployment holding at 4.1 percent. The same week, The Hill's Defense & National Security desk ran a separate ledger: $320 billion saved over four years, credited to a foreign policy built on border security, allied-financed weapons purchases, and hawkish action in the Middle East. Two ledgers, one week, both showing gains. The job here is to check them against the receipts that also landed this week.
On Aug. 27, Public Citizen filed its own count: $4.7 billion, at least, that Trump's cryptocurrency products have cost investors — most of it traced to the meme coin he launched three days before his second term began. That figure comes from a drawer already open, not a new report, but the timing sets it down next to the $320 billion savings claim on the same books. One number is the government's own accounting of what it saved. The other is a watchdog's accounting of what a different set of investors lost, in a venture that carries the president's own name.…
…(cont) Then there's the number workers carry home. On Aug. 31, AAA clocked the national gas average above $4 a gallon every day in August for the first time on record — $4.08, ninety cents more than a year ago. Four days later, diesel hit $5.85 a gallon, an all-time high, the kind of number that rides through freight and delivery costs into everything else on the shelf. Workers World counted the same thing from the other end: gas up 30 percent over last year, airfares following it up.
So the ledger reads: $320 billion saved, on paper, in a foreign policy accounting. $4 billion lost, on paper, by crypto investors. $4.08 at the pump, $5.85 for a gallon of diesel, both records, both paid in cash, both this week. The jobs number is real — 162,000 added, unemployment steady. What is also real is which column the savings sit in and which column the workers sit in. The $320 billion is booked as government savings. The gas and diesel receipts are booked as household spending. Nobody at the White House has reconciled those two ledgers, hon, but they're sitting on the same desk.
“They're bragging about $320 billion in savings the same week diesel hits $5.85 a gallon and four billion in crypto money disappeared into the president's own coin. Every one of those numbers is true, they just never put them on the same page where you could add them up. Somebody saved $320 billion — it wasn't the guy paying $4.08 to get to work.”
“The jobs numbers came in almost triple what economists expected — that's a real report, unemployment held at 4.1 percent, nobody's spinning that. The $320 billion is verified savings, allied nations finally paying for their own weapons instead of us. The crypto losses, that's investors making their own bets, that's not on anybody — and the diesel record, that's global energy markets, not — wait, did I bring up why the market moved? Forget I said that.”
The receipts
Friday’s jobs report offered something Americans have not seen much of lately: an economic surprise on the upside. Employers added 162,000 jobs in August, nearly triple what economists expected, while unemployment held steady at 4.1%. The numbers are hardly spectacular by themselves.
Welcome to The Hill's Defense & NatSec newsletter {beacon} Defense &National Security Defense &National Security The Big Story Trump’s foreign policy saves taxpayers $320 billion over 4 years: Report President Trump’s foreign policy approach in the second term - hard border security, shifting weapons support to allied-financed purchases…
The average price for a gallon of diesel fuel in the United States hit an all-time high average price of $5.85 on Friday as the Trump administration's war on Iran and its resulting disruptions to the global energy market showed no signs of ending. "Trump did it! Diesel hits a new record high!" economist Dean Baker wrote sardonically on…
· Watchdog Finds Trump Crypto Schemes Have Left Investors on the Hook for Over $4 Billion in Losses from the morgue, 27 Aug 2026
· Trump Hammered Over Iran War That Drove Gas Prices Above $4 Per Gallon Every Day in August for First Time Ever from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.