With nine days to go before the midterms, every campaign has a story about the economy. I wanted to see what the numbers themselves say, so I went through the latest readings on growth, jobs, prices, ...
The federal government closed its books on fiscal 2026 on September 30, and the Treasury published the final numbers on October 16. I went through the year-end statement line by line, along with the C...
Money in the 2026 midterms has gone where the Senate is decided. Three races, Texas, Ohio and Michigan, had drawn about $1.3 billion between them by late October, and most of it did not come from the ...
For three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, almost every big day at the Treasury Department sanctions office was about Russia. Hundreds of banks, arms suppliers, oil companies and tankers went onto ...
Midterm elections are usually bad news for the president. His party has lost House seats in 18 of the 20 midterms since the Second World War. They have been good news for the stock market. I went b...
Every election season the same thing happens. As November gets closer, more and more of the political ads on TV come from groups nobody has ever heard of, with names that sound like a charity or a thi...
The most expensive ballot measure in American history cost $418 million, and it lost with 82 percent of voters saying No. In 2022, online sportsbooks and California tribes poured that much into a s...
In March 1964, a group of scientists, economists and activists sent President Lyndon Johnson a memo warning that machines were about to make most human work unnecessary. Less than two years later, une...
Most midterm races are decided by a few points. A handful are decided long before anyone votes. I went through the midterm Senate and governor races since 1970, plus every House race since 1978, ke...
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...