Every midterm, the final polls set the expectations for election night. Most of the time they land within a few points of the result. Sometimes they miss badly enough to pick the wrong winner. I we...
Every October, the government publishes its September inflation numbers, and within hours Social Security announces how much benefits go up in January. The new figure applies to more than 70 million S...
In the spring of 1983, Social Security was a few months away from being unable to send out full benefit checks on time. The retirement trust fund was projected to run dry that summer. Congress and ...
On September 16, 2026, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since July 2023. The vote was twelve to nothing. The new chairman says inflation is too high and has been for too lo...
If you have ever watched the Federal Reserve cut interest rates and then found that your mortgage quote went up that same week, you are not imagining things and nobody made a mistake. I wanted to w...
There is a number on the sign outside every gas station, and almost nobody knows what is inside it. I have wanted to take one apart for a while. Not the national average, not a chart of prices over...
The federal government now spends more than a trillion dollars a year on interest. That number got a lot of coverage when it crossed, and almost all of the coverage stopped at the number. Nobody sp...
Twenty-five years ago, the biggest fiscal problem in Washington was what to do with all the money. That is not hindsight snark. In January of 2001 the Congressional Budget Office published a ten-ye...
You click the green button, $100 leaves your card, and somewhere between that moment and an ad appearing on a television in a swing district, roughly sixty of those dollars get spent on something el...
The United States government needed 205 years to borrow its first trillion dollars, crossing that line in October of 1981. It added its 38th trillion in 70 days last fall - with no war, no pandemic an...
With the November 2026 midterms roughly 15 weeks away and President Trump polling between 37% and 41% approval, we pulled the 10 lowest presidential approval ratings ever recorded heading into a midte...
We are about to watch the United States turn 250, and every July it is the same flags, fireworks, and founding-era quotes on coffee mugs. So this year I went looking for something nobody puts on a mug...
The Supreme Court has decided thousands of cases over its 235-year history, but a small handful genuinely changed the country. From the 1803 ruling that gave the Court its power to strike down laws, t...
In 2026, the country is debating a 250-foot triumphal arch that President Trump wants built before the July 4 sestercentennial. The legal justification the administration is using is, of all things, a...
Sam Bankman-Fried is currently serving 25 years in federal prison for one of the largest financial frauds in American history. He also happened to be, by the cold math of venture capital returns, one ...