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.

 

 

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. 

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.

 Trump: I Call Open Borders "Stupid Borders"--"25 Million People Came Into Our Country"

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. 

At 24.13%, foreign born employment as a percent of native born employment is still far higher in April 2026 under Trump II than it ever was under Trump I

 

The 3-year trend for the unemployment level in April 2026 is a rising trend

 

Trump's Dumbass Unemployment Rate climbs to 38.33% in April 2026

 

A new record 105.4 million eating but not working in Donald Trump's April 2026 America

 

48.67% had a full time job in April 2026

 Trump's economic boom isn't.

 

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.

 

Immigrants are giving up their cases and leaving the U.S. in soaring numbers: People facing the prospect of prolonged ICE detention are increasingly abandoning their claims for humanitarian protection and agreeing to depart voluntarily

 

... 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. ...

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?

Rat virus panic hits Texas and Virginia as it's revealed passengers aboard hantavirus cruise returned to those states before outbreak was spotted

 ... 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. ...