Recent polls by Reuters/Ipsos and CNN have him at 36%, by Rasmussen at 42.
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Overall consumer price index inflation came in at 3.8% yoy in April 2026, core cpi at 2.8% yoy
The overall rate of inflation in April 2026 at 3.8% yoy is 100% higher than the average rate of 1.9% yoy under Trump I.
The core rate in April 2026 at 2.75% yoy is 40% higher than the average rate of 1.965% yoy under Trump I.
Food inflation was 3.2% yoy in April 2026, but energy inflation was 17.53% yoy in April on top of 12.58% yoy in March.
The energy inflation is a self-inflicted wound by Donald Trump. It's almost like he thrills at the prospect of defeat.
Monday, May 11, 2026
US economic growth peaked during the Reagan administration because America is a debt-based economy and we turned our backs on the formula during it
The trend for the growth of the total universe of US debt, TCMDO or total credit market debt outstanding, rolled over after 1985, one year after GDP did.
TCMDO is the real money, almost $108 trillion at the end of 2025. In 1985 it was $9 trillion.
M2 was merely $22 trillion at the end of 2025.
TCMDO is the sum total of debt expansion throughout the sectors of the economy.
Historically, most people have experienced it this way.
You get a full time job, which itself was created by a business selling debt in the form of stocks and bonds in order to expand its operations and future profits, and you go buy a house, putting down $100k on a $500k property. The bank loans you the $400k through fractional reserve lending on a small portion of its reserves but secured by the house. That new money is created out of thin air but is actually represented by the "guaranteed" future income stream of your job for 30 years, because you're a smart, reliable guy who never misses a day of work. TCMDO expands, and expands some more each time this happens.
When the conditions disappear for full time job creation, the process slows down. You can see the decline in the growth of the economy in the decline of the growth of the debt. Yes, everything is still growing, but not as vigorously.
Full time as a percent of population peaked 26 years ago, in 2000, at 53.55%, but retested the 1975 low of 46.74% in 2010 and 2011 at 46.97%, back-to-back years in the Late Great Recession.
Housing strength persisted in the immediate post-Reagan period on the illusory basis of windfalls from massive ordinary income tax cuts combined with the demographic peaking of the 1957 Baby Boom turning 40 in 1997 driving demand, but the hollowing out of the economy had already begun with the move of 20,000 manufacturers abroad after the 1986 tax reform.
Early warning signs began flashing already during the Clinton era.
Clinton immediately raised taxes in 1993 after he promised not to raise them in 1992, began a long series of cuts to federal government employment, and gutted the US Navy.
Americans were already struggling at the time and ominously tapped housing equity to sustain their middle class standard of living. Owners' Equity in Real Estate averaged 70% 1982-1986 inclusive, but plunged ten points within a decade to 60% 1996-1999 inclusive.
Homes had become piggy banks, preparing the way for 1997, the year Clinton and the Republicans went further still and turned homes into mere commodities, which in turn prepared the way for the housing catastrophe of 2008. From 1997 a flood of 70,000 more manufacturers began moving out as globalization kicked into high gear and China gained admission to the WTO in 2001.
Almost no one today wants to say out loud how unpatriotic this whole business was.
Reagan tried to convince us that we know best what to do with our own money, and we promptly turned around and staked our fortunes on foreign investment, not domestic.
Libertarianism is a lie.
Today you will be hard-pressed to identify a major manufacturing concern with 100% of its operations in the US. Tesla is a standout (heavily subsidized by the federal government!), but other than that most of the businesses which remain patriotically committed to the American idea are pretty small beer compared with how it used to be.
The formerly domestic debt expansion was exported abroad, creating middle classes where none existed before, especially in East Asia, and doing so cost businesses A LOT less, the key attraction for them.
As a result, enormous profits accrued to the owners of capital while wage earners here struggled to maintain the American dream. Wealth inequality soared, and now our children are 40 before they buy their first home.
TCMDO grew at a compound annual rate of 8.355% 1945-1985, but at only 6.398% 1985-2025. The change from optimism to pessimism can be traced in the trend lines.
Continued growth of TCMDO at the former rate but after 1985 would have yielded TCMDO at the end of 2025 of $223 trillion, or 106% more "money" than we actually have.
$115 trillion is "missing", or at least something like that. We will never know for sure, but some of us can still imagine because we watched the great betrayal actually happen.
This is why I say socialism is the future, not because I want it or because I think it will work.
People are going to figure this out eventually, get angry, and do the wrong thing, just like we did during the Reagan administration.
Sunday, May 10, 2026
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 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.
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.
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.
Saturday, May 9, 2026
AOC's goal goes far beyond becoming president: It's single payer healthcare
“They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat, and my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Presidents come and go … elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever.”
More.
Friday, May 8, 2026
Elusive full-time jobs which fell off a cliff in the Great Recession hold back couple from having the children they want
 |
| 52% had a full time job on average in 2007, just 49% in 2025 |
... Clare Zakowski, a 28-year-old who works part time as a manager at a therapy practice, says she would welcome a federal paid family leave program, not that Congress is offering. She has always loved children; as a high schooler in Green Bay, Wis., she babysat and ran the activities for a summer camp. “I love their naïveté and innocence,” she told me. “I just think kids rock.” Ms. Zakowski has been with her boyfriend for over seven years, and children have been part of the discussion since the two first got together. But lately, she has been appalled by the manosphere, and worries about how A.I. will affect society. “The news every day is crazy, and it’s been that way for a while,” she said. “It just feels like we’re living in a really, really weird time.” Beyond paid leave (or universal health insurance, for that matter), she yearns for something deeper: a sense of security, something that she has yet to experience in America in her adult lifetime. “I feel like there’d have to be, I want to say a revolution, but basically big political change, like a moral awakening from everyone,” she said.
She had been looking for a full-time, higher-paying job to set herself up for parenthood, but found the search to be so stressful that she gave up. “I know there can be negatives to not planning ahead,” she told me, but “who even knows what the future holds?” ...
More.
Birth dearth blamed on chaos and uncertainty produced by the Great Recession
... In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, however, sometimes referred to as the Great Recession, births in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland declined, and then declined some more, even as their economies recovered throughout the 2010s. Little about those nations’ family policies had changed, and as far as anyone could tell, men were still doing their share of the dishes. The same downward trend held in the United States, where births have fallen by about 23 percent since 2007, despite high rates of immigration until last year. Births have also been declining in East Asian countries, even though governments in the region have thrown buckets of money at the problem. And in France, despite its longstanding pronatalist policies.
... What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.
... The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes. Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad. ...
More.
In 2023 Trump claimed 15 million illegals were in America, then in 2024 he upped it to 16 and 18 million, and then finished the year at 21 million, and now it's 25 million
For a decade from 2009-2019 illegal aliens in the United States were widely estimated at 11 million.
In April 2026 the foreign born civilian noninstitutional population over the age of 16 is 49.66 million, 6.14 million more than in April 2019 and down 780k from the March 2025 high.
Many millions of illegals will remain after Trump is gone, because he is neither serious nor competent.
CNBC: AI has destroyed 342,000 information services jobs since the advent of ChatGPT in November 2022
... information services lost 13,000, part of a continuing trend that has seen the category down 342,000 jobs since November 2022, coinciding with the rise of artificial intelligence. That has equated to a loss of 11% of jobs during the period. ...
More.
Trump's dumbass, incompetent deportation policy of prolonged ICE detention until they cry uncle and leave voluntarily is the mouse that roared
At this rate Trump will have to be president for 138 years to deport 9.5 million illegal aliens.
80k voluntary departures in fourteen months is a drop in the bucket when there are millions of illegals here, but spending tens of billions of dollars to do it sure isn't.
... Immigration judges issued more than 80,000 “voluntary departure” orders
from January 2025 through March of this year, according to court data
obtained by the Vera Institute of Justice and shared with The Washington
Post. ...
Thursday, May 7, 2026
JMIC Update 42 for tanker traffic in the Middle East April 30-May 6 2026
Middle East Tanker Traffic April 30-May 6, 2026
Strait of Hormuz E: 1.14/day
Strait of Hormuz W: 1.14/day
Total: 2.28/day
Normal (2022): 70/day
Down 96.7%
Bab-el-Mandeb Strait SE: 7.28/day
Bab-el-Mandeb Strait NW: 8.14/day
Total: 15.42/day
Normal (2022): 30/day
Down 48.6%
Trump II Virus Deja Vu: Does MV Hondius rhyme with Diamond Princess?
... A 70-year-old Dutch man was the first person to die on April 11 after experiencing days of severe illness, followed by his wife two days later.
... Six Americans disembarked MV Hondius on April 24 on the island of St Helena, 13 days following the first death on board, operator Oceanwide Expeditions revealed on Thursday.
... Oceanwide Expeditions, the Netherlands-based cruise ship company, said Thursday that 30 passengers left the vessel at St. Helena.
The company had not previously revealed publicly that dozens more people left the ship.
The first hantavirus case on board of the vessel was not confirmed by authorities until May 2. ...
Ronald Reagan's faith in the American people's better judgment about how to spend their own money was . . . misplaced
"Well, our loyalty lies with little taxpayers, not big taxspenders. What our critics really believe is that those in Washington know better how to spend your money than you, the people, do. But we're not going to let them do it, period."
-- Ronald Reagan, Nationally Televised News Conference, June 30, 1982
The secret of Ronald Reagan's success was that he stroked the vanity of the people.
Nominal return from SPX since he made those remarks has been 12.48% per annum through April 2026.
Just socking away a one time investment of $2,000 in the S&P 500 that summer and forgetting about it would have yielded you almost $353,000 by now.
But today just 2.6% of Americans in general have at least $1 million in a retirement account, and HALF of retirees aged 65-74 have only $200,000 or less.
Meanwhile, our betters in Washington have put the country $39 trillion in debt, and 73% of us die in debt ourselves, with the average owed just under $62,000.
The government we deserve!
In 1982 Ronald Reagan was really upset about the federal government spending $2 billion a day, in 2025 we spent $20 billion a day
"Our Government is spending money at a rate that is intolerable, if not incomprehensible. Almost $2 billion a day, $1,400,000 a minute... We must reverse the process."
-- Ronald Reagan, 1982
Federal outlays in 2025 are estimated at $7.266 trillion, or $19.9 billion per day.
Now repeat after me: Keystone Kash does not have a drinking problem
I guess it takes but a decade for something to become tradition at the FBI:
“The bottles in question are part of a tradition in the FBI that started well over a decade ago, long before Director Patel arrived,” a spokesman said.
More.
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
Trump spends YUGE in Indiana to defeat incumbent anti-redistricting Republicans in their primary election, and wins big
... In interviews across the state, Hoosier voters described being inundated with television and digital advertising and daily mailers from candidates and the outside groups supporting them. The numbers back that up.
The political advertising tracking firm AdImpact said that $13.4 million was spent on advertising in this year’s Indiana state Senate primaries. For comparison: In the 2024 election cycle, about $280,000 was spent on state Senate primary ads in Indiana — in all races combined.
The bulk of that spending came from a group linked to US Sen. Jim Banks, a close Trump ally. Club for Growth led the direct mail effort for the pro-Trump forces, Indiana Republicans said, and Turning Point USA supplied ground troops for door-to-door get-out-the-vote efforts as the group sought to carry out one of the last political stances taken by its late co-founder Charlie Kirk, who was killed weeks after urging Indiana Republican lawmakers to redistrict.
The incumbents and their supporters bemoaned outside forces’ role in the Indiana primary. Indiana Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray said the primary contests were “really driven from outside the state of Indiana, mostly in Washington, DC, and the money’s coming from outside Indiana as well.”
But the flood of advertising spending — more than 47 times more than was spent on state Senate primaries just two years earlier — proved too much for most incumbents to overcome. ...
Current Bab-al-Mandeb tanker traffic at the end of April 2026 appears consistent with 1Q2026 Suez Canal tanker traffic, nothing more
Suez Canal Tanker Traffic 1Q26 v 1Q22
SOUTH
Tankers per day +1.6 to 7.5
Tonnage per ship +16.7%
NORTH
Tankers per day +0.3 to 7.9
Tonnage per ship +18.9%
Bab-el-Mandeb Strait Tanker Traffic 4/28-5/4/2026
SOUTH
7.42/day
NORTH
8.14/day
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
JMIC Update 41 for tanker traffic in the Middle East April 28-May 4 2026
Middle East Tanker Traffic April 28-May 4, 2026
Strait of Hormuz E: 1.85/day
Strait of Hormuz W: 1.28/day
Total: 3.13/day
Normal (2022): 70/day
Down 95.5%
Bab-el-Mandeb Strait SE: 7.42/day
Bab-el-Mandeb Strait NW: 8.14/day
Total: 15.56/day
Normal (2022): 30/day
Down 48.1%
Monday, May 4, 2026
The consequences of the Reagan Revolution: $11.1 trillion missing real GDP since 1Q1984
Real GDP in 1Q2026 reached $24.175 trillion.
Had real GDP continued to grow at the pre-1984 rate to now, it would have been $35.273 trillion, 46% more than it is.
That's the difference between a compound annual growth rate from 1947 to 1984 at 3.585% continued to 2026 instead of at 2.657% since 1984 to now.
IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES.
Sleepwalking into a big recession: SPX hits new all-time intraday high 7230.12 on May 1 after oil jumps 78% year to date
‘Misplaced euphoria’: Markets are sleepwalking into a recession amid Iran war oil price shock
Global economies could be “sleepwalking” into a “big recession”, as investors continue to underplay the impact of the oil price shock, Amrita Sen, founder and director, market intelligence at Energy Aspect, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday. ...
“This is a massive, massive energy crisis. I have been equally amazed at how the equity market is completely dismissing it, talking about how great Q1 results are. They are not going to be great nearly to the same extent in Q2.” ...
Sunday, May 3, 2026
JMIC Update 40 for tanker traffic in the Middle East April 26-May 2, 2026
Middle East Tanker Traffic April 26-May 2, 2026
Strait of Hormuz E: 1.85/day
Strait of Hormuz W: 1.28/day
Total: 3.13/day
Normal (2022): 70/day
Down 95.5%
Bab-el-Mandeb Strait SE: 7.0/day
Bab-el-Mandeb Strait NW: 7.42/day
Total: 14.42/day
Normal (2022): 30/day
Down 51.9%
Back when America was still truly great, in July 1973, a barrel of oil was just 26 bucks
What?!
A barrel of oil in July 1973 at $3.56 is $26.54 in March 2026 adjusted for inflation.
I keep hearing that Baby Boomers are just sucking this world dry. Keep telling yourselves that, suckers.
Ty Cobb: We're governed by a madman
https://inews.co.uk/news/world/donald-trumps-lawyer-mental-state-unfit-serve-4378218
https://archive.is/uceDe
Christopher Caldwell for The New York Times thinks the American Empire has met its match in the Persian Gulf when it already met it a year ago in the Red Sea
... the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict. In 1991 a million soldiers from more than 40 countries were needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country less sophisticated than Iran and a fraction of its size. When Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in the 1980s, deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side. The United States would have to send a significant portion of its armed forces — which total only 1.3 million troops — to stand a chance of subduing Iran, and that force, if successful, would have to stay for a long time. ...
Here.
Caldwell is just as blind as Trump.
Neither one gets it that the lowly Houthis already beat us to a draw last year in the Red Sea.
Nothing is moving out of the Persian Gulf today, and tanker traffic through the Red Sea is less than half what it used to be in 2022, even under the new conditions of a world desperately thirsty for the Middle East oil no longer coming out of the former.
And neither one gets it that you can't have an American Empire without paying for it.
We're $39 trillion in debt and can no longer impose our will in the world's vital choke-points because elites have pretended since Reagan that low marginal income tax rates are sufficient to maintain American Empire when what those rates have done is impoverish us and enrich our adversaries.
1,135 billionaires are the symbol of our lost empire.
Caldwell steers well clear of naming the obvious remedy, and Trump's Big Ugly Bill will do nothing but put America $62 trillion in debt by the end of 2032.
Taxes must be raised . . . a lot.
Saturday, May 2, 2026
Why I'm not very interested in the redistricting hullabaloo pre- and post- the Supreme Court decision
I view fixed representation at 435 as a crime against the Founders and a crime against the people, and all the recent developments involving this subject simply rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Representation was meant to grow with population, and Republicans stopped that in 1929.
Political power is now more concentrated in fewer hands than ever, resulting in sharply more polarized politics where more is riding than ever before on the outcome of U.S. House elections.
Anti-federalists sought representation at 1:15,000 of population. An early compromise settled on 1:30,000, which grew to 1:50,000 but was never ratified in Article The First.
At this moment in time we have representation at 1:787,290 thanks to the Republicans in 1929.
Now your congressman doesn't know you from Adam, and couldn't care less what you think. Write him or her about an issue, and you'll get a nice form letter back thanking you for writing if you're nice. If you're not nice you will not hear back from your lords and masters.
6,849 U.S. representatives is unimaginable to most people today, let alone 11,415 or 22,831.
The problem is 435 for a country this size would be unimaginable to the Founders.
Friday, May 1, 2026
Trump steaks, Trump wine, Trump gold visa
Trump’s ‘bargain’ $1m Gold Card backfires with just 338 applications
... The Trump Gold Card, which offers purchasers an expedited route to American residency, was unveiled with great fanfare in February 2025. ...
Dirty Rotten CEOs in the news
... The average CEO received $8.4m in total compensation in 2025 compared to $7.6m in 2024. ...
For 384 CEOs in the S&P 500 where CEO compensation data was
available, pay increased by 25% from 2024 to 2025, while average hourly
earnings for workers at private companies increased 1.3% in the same
period. ...
Mark Davis is running for FL-16 on 8647 lol
... Mark Davis, an unaffiliated candidate running in Florida’s 16th
district, drives around with an “8647” license plate, wears an “86 47”
hat, and sells hats and a t-shirt featuring the numbers on his
campaign’s website. ... Davis has been using “86 47” to express his disdain for Trump since he
announced his campaign for the House of Representatives last year. ... Davis is not the only one who has been selling “86 47” merchandise. On
Amazon, hundreds of t-shirts with variations of the numbers are
available for as little as $10. Other websites, such as Redbubble and
Etsy, sell stickers, hats, posters and other variations of “86 47.” ...
On day 60 Lizard Brain turns off the war as of April 7 to restart the 60-day clock again later whenever he wants
Trump tells Congress hostilities in Iran ‘have terminated’ as War Powers deadline hits
... “The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated,” Trump wrote. ...
Thursday, April 30, 2026
JMIC Update 39 for tanker traffic in the Middle East April 23-29, 2026
Middle East Tanker Traffic April 23-29, 2026
Strait of Hormuz E: 2.14/day
Strait of Hormuz W: 0.28/day
Total: 2.42/day
Normal (2022): 70/day
Down 96.5%
Bab-el-Mandeb Strait SE: 6.57/day
Bab-el-Mandeb Strait NW: 7.71/day
Total: 14.28/day
Normal (2022): 30/day
Down 52.4%
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