So-called libertarian Mackinac Center for Public Policy advocates for limiting local control of zoning laws, blames local governments for high house prices, homelessness, and out-migration as if Michigan were California

 Michigan should embrace zoning reform, reject housing subsidies: Limiting what local governments can zone is not a strange concept

... Michigan needs to learn the lessons of other states. California allows strict local zoning and tries to solve its housing problems through large government subsidies. The result is sky-high housing costs, a large homeless population and people moving elsewhere. ... 

Local governments aren't to blame for federal legislation which turned homes into HELOC piggy banks and mere commodities to be pumped and dumped to escape capital gains taxation.

Fewer than 775,000 people are homeless in the United States, most of them by choice because of mental illness and drug abuse. Meanwhile there are 149,006,000 total housing units in the United States, 15,305,000 of which are unoccupied.

Things are already changing enough to make Michigan more attractive as a place to live. Michigan is a net in-migration state for the first time in 30 years in 2025.

There are no compelling reasons to take away local control of zoning authorities, unless you want the freedom to turn quiet neighborhoods where people want to live into Airbnb hellholes like Austin, Texas where many no longer do.

Gasoline price increases nationally are taking a breather in the last five days

 

Silver is up 12.24% ytd, gold is up 9.15% ytd

 SPX: +7.88% ytd

WTI:  +66.2% ytd

Total global visible oil inventories are forecast to fall to 7.6 billion barrels from 7.8 billion currently by June 1

Demand destruction of 5.6 million barrels per day globally is assumed.

The USA used approximately 20.6 million barrels per day in 2025, or 7.52 billion barrels.

 

IMF: Transits through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait remain half of what they were prior to the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 and have not come close to replacing lost Persian Gulf shipping

 ... In the Red Sea, attacks on shipping that began in 2023 forced many vessels to reroute around Africa rather than use the Suez Canal. More than two years on, transits through the Bab el-Mandeb strait between Yemen and Djibouti remain stuck at roughly half their pre-attack level. ...

More.

 

Despite 2,500 National Guard troops still patrolling Washington DC it is not a crime-free zone

 

I stopped caring about this particular economic measure when I realized that it obscures the fact that the top 20% in this country receive 60% of the income it displays

Frankly, most of the economic charts produced by the government do this kind of thing.

Most of the time the rich use this data to tell you how well things are going, when what they really mean is how well it's going for them.

It's an aggregate measure, so that the vast sums earned by the rich distort higher what's actually happening to the majority. 

In the as-reported numbers at the time, everything actually went sideways for a time during the Great Recession and personal income actually fell, except that even that decline disappeared as the revisions to the data came in. The rich still made money in the Great Recession, enough to lift this aggregate measure ever higher right through the recession even as banks failed by the hundreds and millions lost their jobs and homes.

But the rich use this particular data set right now to tell you things like "you don't know how to shop" and "groceries have never been cheaper", you ignoramus.

They controlled roughly 60% of all income from 2020 to mid-2025, and the top 20% by wealth held nearly 72% of total household wealth as of Q4 2025. 

The top 20% received roughly $14 trillion of the $23 trillion in this chart in March 2026, leaving the remaining $9 trillion, 40%, to be split by the 80%, the rest of us, however we must.

Rising prices of anything will naturally impact the 20% far less than the 80%.

It's another "let them eat cake" moment.