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...
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...