Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz leaned heavily into his Midwestern roots in his speech that wrapped up the third night of the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, painting the Harris-Walz ticket as pro-middle class, pro-freedom, and pro-neighborliness.
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Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado announced on Wednesday that he will retire after serving a potential second term, according to Punchbowl News.
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The federal government overestimated the number of jobs in the U.S. economy by 818,000 between April 2023 and March 2024, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Wednesday, stoking fears of a slowdown in the U.S. economy.
Economists at Goldman Sachs (GS) and Wells Fargo anticipated the government had overestimated job growth by at least 600,000 in that span, while economists at JPMorgan Chase had predicted a lesser decline of 360,000, according to Bloomberg. The downward revision follows a trend of the BLS overestimating the number of nonfarm payroll jobs added, with the cumulative number of new jobs reported in 2023 roughly 1.3 million less than previously thought as of February 2024.
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Ford said Wednesday that it is canceling its plans to build a three-row electric SUV as the wider U.S. electric vehicle (EV) market continues to struggle.
The company announced that it expects to take up to $1.9 billion in write downs and other special charges related to its decision after losing billions of dollars on its EV product line in 2023. In addition to canceling its three-row electric SUV, Ford is also pushing back its plans to roll out an electric pickup truck model until 2027, a one-year setback.
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The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) signed into law by President Donald Trump on Dec. 22, 2017, provided across-the-board income tax cuts for all income levels as well as significant tax relief for American taxpayers. However, most of the tax relief expires on Dec. 31, 2025, which will result in significant tax hikes for most Americans in 2026.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are calling for new legislation in 2025 to make the TCJA tax cuts permanent. But this will only be possible with three election results this November: (1) Trump wins the presidency; (2) Republicans gain majority control of the Senate; and (3) Republicans maintain majority control of the House of Representatives. Failure to achieve a victory sweep for the presidency and both houses of Congress would be devastating for Americans’ pocketbooks, given Democrat animus towards extending the TCJA tax cuts.
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Vice President Kamala Harris has enjoyed a noticeable surge in the polls – particularly national polls – since becoming the Democratic standard bearer, but the rapid shift in her position has left some industry analysts questioning the apparent boost in the formerly quite unpopular vice president’s standing. In her 2020 run, she struggled to break 3 percent before dropping out, according to The Hill.
Prior to becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris suffered from decidedly poor approval ratings and Trump initially held the lead over her in a head-to-head matchup. The average quickly flipped, however, in the wake of several surveys showing Harris ahead. Those surveys, however, have attracted scrutiny from an array of pollsters either due to their lack of transparency about the sampling methodology or from oversampling Democrats.
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This week, the National Association of Scholars (“NAS”) and the Heritage Foundation are sponsoring a panel discussion on diversity ideology in higher education. A number of reports have recently been published on the topic, with most documenting monies spent by state universities on “diversity, equity and inclusion” (“DEI“). The Maryland affiliate of the National Association of Scholars released the most recent such report this summer, but the Virginia affiliate issued one last year, while Idaho, North Carolina, Maine, and Tennessee produced similar documents before that.
The Maryland report reminds state officials that “diversity” is usually a cover for race-based practices that are now likely illegal under the 2023 United States Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (or “SFFA”). That opinion found that racial preferences in university admissions were a violation of federal civil rights laws and also the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. SFFA means that any race-based practice in college is presumptively unlawful. As the Court said, “Eliminating discrimination means eliminating all of it … distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their nature odious.”
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