Commentary: The Real President for the Middle Class

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris

President Joe Biden talked incessantly about his “middle class out” economic strategy. Given his record, it would have been more accurate to call it the “middle class down and out” plan. Inflation has eroded away any income gains under Biden’s presidency.

Now Vice President Kamala Harris has her own riff on this theme. Her campaign motto is “Building up the middle class.” It isn’t exactly “Make America Great Again,” but Democrats don’t have a lot of time to come up with anything catchier, given that Harris was reluctantly chosen as the 8th-inning relief pitcher for Old Joe, who had long ago lost his fastball.

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Reports: California Exodus Continues, Southeastern States as Primary Destinations

Austin, Texas

As the California exodus continues, a new migration trend is occurring, with southeastern and Appalachian states taking the top spots as inbound migration destinations, according to new reports.

According to a new Consumer Affairs 2024 Migration Trends report, “California’s mass exodus continues to ensue,” with the South and Southeast region of the country being the “hottest regions for people moving.”

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Commentary: Most U.S. Population Growth Last Year Occurred Outside of Largest Cities

There are 124 cities with a population over 200,000 in the U.S. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s population estimates for last year, over 90 percent of the U.S. population growth last year took place outside of its 124 largest cities. About a third of those cities lost population last year.  The total growth in the population of cities with over 200,000 residents grew by .23 percent, less than half of what the U.S. grew last year.

Roughly a third of those that lost population were located in New York and California. The three largest cities in the U.S., New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, all lost population again in 2023. Between the three cities, over 700,000 people have left since the 2020 census. New York is by far the biggest loser at 546,000. That is about 6.2 percent of its 2020 population.

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Border Crisis Completely Upends Census Bureau’s Population Stats, Report Says

Illegal Immigrants

Immigration into the U.S. has risen so rapidly that it beat out federal projections by decades, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released on Thursday.

The total number of immigrants in the U.S. rose to a record high of 51.4 million as of February 2024, representing 15.5 percent of the total population,according to CIS. The U.S. Census Bureau published projections in November which estimated that the share of foreign-born nationals in the U.S. would not reach 15.5 percent until at least 2039, making the projections “obsolete,” CIS authors Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler wrote.

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Government Releases Another Batch of Data That Wipes Out Previous Economic Gains

People moving refrigerator

New orders for manufactured durable goods, which serve as an indicator for longer-term investments from businesses and consumers, had a huge downward revision for January, following similar revisions seen in jobs data.

Orders for durable goods increased 1.4 percent in February to $277.9 billion, but January’s gains were revised down to -6.9 percent from an initial estimate of -6.1 percent, taking a huge chunk out of previously reported gains, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The revisions for durable goods orders mirror revisions in employment figures, which have repeatedly reported high growth figures that are later revised down, most recently being revised down for January by 124,000 while job growth for February was reported as 275,000.

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More Inflationary Woes: In One Year, Car Insurance Rates Surge 26 Percent

Driver in car

Car insurance rates surged 26% nationwide in the past year and are expected to remain elevated until 2025.

That’s according to the “True Cost of Auto Insurance” report from Bankrate, an independent comparison service company.

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Commentary: Immigration Drove America’s Biggest Population Growth Ever Recorded

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Immigration is behind the biggest annual population increase in the history of the United States, according to an independent research firm.

“US population grew +3.8M in 2023 – the largest one-year increase in US history,” tweeted Eric Finnigan of John Burns Research and Consulting (JBREC) earlier this month.

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Commentary: School Choice Keeps Spreading

Classroom

In just three years, the number of states with universal or near-universal private school choice programs has grown from zero to 10, and the number of students eligible for these programs has increased by 60%. According to the latest ABCs of School Choice – EdChoice’s comprehensive report about all matters pertaining to educational freedom—32 states (plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico) are using school choice as of 2023. Additionally, policymakers in 40 states debated 111 educational choice bills last year alone. Overall, approximately 20 million students—or 36% of all kids—are now eligible for some kind of private-choice program.

But what’s good for children and their families is problematic for the teachers’ unions and their fellow travelers. As such, on January 22—not coincidentally the beginning of National School Choice Week—the Partnership for the Future of Learning released a toolkit, maintaining that “voucher programs are “deeply rooted in segregation, racism, and discrimination.” The PFL, which is comprised of predominantly left-wing outfits—the National Education Association, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Learning Policy Institute, etc.—adds that private schools “do not have necessary accountability measures.”

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2020s on Track to Have the Slowest Population Growth in U.S. History

New Born

The U.S. Census Bureau released its population projections for New Year’s Day and the next decade may be the slowest-growing decade in U.S. history, according to The Associated Press.

The projected population is set to be 335,893,238 by midnight on Jan. 1, 2024, an increase of 0.53% or 1,759,535 people from the previous year, according to the Bureau. Despite this, William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, a public policy nonprofit, said that the 2020-2030 decade looks to be the slowest in history at less than 4%, noting the previous slowest decade for growth was 7.3%, according to the AP.

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