Stocks After Midterm Elections: 80 Years of Data
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...
Super PACs Explained: How Outside Groups Spend Without Limits
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 Measures in American History
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...
When America Was Sure Machines Would End Work
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...
The Biggest Blowouts in Midterm Election History
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...
The Biggest Polling Misses in Midterm Election History
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...
How Your Social Security Raise Is Calculated
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...
The Year Social Security Almost Ran Out of Money
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 ...
Every Fed Rate Hike Cycle Since 1954, And What Followed Each One
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...
How a Treasury Yield Becomes Your Mortgage Payment
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...
Where Every Dollar You Spend on Gas Actually Goes
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...
Where the Trillion Dollars of Interest on the National Debt Actually Goes
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...
In 2001, Washington Was Worried About Paying Off the Debt Too Fast
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...
The $100 Donation File: Where Your Political Money Actually Goes
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...
How Long Did It Take America to Add Each Trillion of National Debt?
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...