20+ hour, 10+ min ago (874+ words) President Donald Trump meets with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in the White House Nov. 21. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Image) "Affordability" has become the word of the month as American economic anxieties become a major point of political contention between Democrats and Republicans. Socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani rode to victory in the New York City mayor's race in part due to his promise to address the issue. Of course, he offered what socialists have been selling to the public for more than a century: free stuff, all paid for by the "rich," the "billionaires," or in Mamdani's case, white neighborhoods in the city. But talk is one thing, reality is another. Will the kind of government intervention Mamdani and others are promising deliver positive results for the American people? So far, it hasn't. President Donald Trump and those who seek…...

21+ hour, 10+ min ago (434+ words) Ben Shapiro / @benshapiro Ben Shapiro is host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire. A graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, he is a New York Times bestselling author whose latest book is "The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent." The fate of the Donald Trump administration'and perhaps Republicans in Congress'is tethered to how Americans feel about the economy. And right now, it's hard to find anyone who can say with confidence what the hell is going on. Thursday offered a fresh reminder of the chaos. As The Wall Street Journal noted, "Stocks surrendered gains and closed sharply lower after a whirlwind day of trading that began after Nvidia posted strong results. The Nasdaq composite led indexes lower after being up on the day more than 2%. It closed 2.2% lower. Nvidia…...

1+ day, 11+ hour ago (512+ words) Tourists watch a rainbow at the Grand Canyon near Mather Point on Oct. 9, 2025. (Thomas Frey/picture alliance via Getty Images) Th'r'se Boudreaux is a reporter covering the federal government for The Center Square, with a focus on Congress. THE CENTER SQUARE'The Donald Trump administration announced it is raising prices for nonresidents visiting national parks, a move that worries some tourism advocates but could generate hundreds of millions in extra revenue each year. Beginning Jan. 1, international tourists without an annual pass will have to pay a $100 surcharge to enter the 11 most visited national parks, on top of the parks" standard entrance fees. The annual pass will cost foreign visitors $250, rather than the current $80 price that will stay the same for U.S. residents. The extra revenue will directly go towards park maintenance and repairs. The U.S. National Park Service estimates that the park system…...

5+ day, 21+ hour ago (816+ words) EJ Antoni / @RealEJAntoni EJ Antoni is a public finance economist and the Richard F. Aster research fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. Disapproval of the state of the economy is widespread today, despite many indicators improving since the start of the year. The reality is that most Americans" financial situation deteriorated so much under the Joe'Biden administration'that there"s a long way to go before this affordability crisis is resolved. Fortunately, there are ways to speed up the process. Perhaps the best illustration of where most Americans are economically today, and where they"ve been, is to look at real, meaning inflation-adjusted, average weekly earnings. This tells us not only how much the average American makes each week, but what those weekly paychecks can actually buy. In the first eight months of the Donald Trump…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago (283+ words) Alex Wong via Getty Images The United States added 119,000 jobs in September, blowing past expectations following a slowdown in hiring over the summer. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics" September jobs report, which was delayed by the 43-day federal government shutdown, showed an acceleration in jobs from the'previous month. Vice President JD Vance said the September jobs report indicates most of the job growth is benefiting "native-born American citizens." "The best thing you can say about the Trump economy is that American jobs are going to American workers for a change," he continued. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt celebrated that the report "doubled market expectations." "In stark contrast to the disastrous Biden economy, almost all of these new jobs were in the private sector and went to American-born workers instead of illegal aliens," Leavitt said. "Wages for workers are…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago (717+ words) There have been over 500,000layoffsin the tech industry since 2022 andrecent computer science graduates face a greater unemployment rate in their field than America's average unemploymentrate, Kevin Lynn,the executive director of theInstitute for Sound Public Policy, explained during a HeritageFoundationevent Wednesday. The H-1B visa program islargely toblame, according to Lynn." "The H-1B visa program is by far the largest computersciencesguest worker program in existence," according to Lynn." In 2023, 134,000 American citizens graduated from computer science programs. That same year,121,000 foreign workers entered the U.S. to workcomputerjobs, and among those, 75,000 were in the H-1B visa program, Lynn said." Since the creation of theH-1B visa program in 1990, the "quantity and the quality of the jobs for computer and engineering professions have suffered greatly for Americans," Lynn said." Simon Hankinson, a senior research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation who formerly worked in the Foreign Service and helped process thousandsof…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago (811+ words) Fresh fruits and vegetables on a market stall for sale at the supermarket (Getty Images) Terence Jeffrey / @TerryJeffrey Terence P. Jeffrey is investigative editor for the Daily Caller News Foundation. Had the government shut down in 1958, when Dwight Eisenhower was in office, how many people would have been at risk of losing their federal food stamp benefits? None. There was one good reason for this: There was no federal food stamp program at that time. Now, America is a nation where politicians in both parties argued during this year's government shutdown that politicians in the other party were guilty of depriving people of receiving food stamp benefits from the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., held a press conference on the last day of October in which he blamed Senate Democrats for blocking funding for the…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago (640+ words) Former U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks during the Edward Kennedy Institute's 10th anniversary on Oct. 26 in Boston. (Scott Eisen via: Getty Images) Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand. There were 5% more federal workers2.77 million in 2020 to 2.90 million in 2025when President Joe Biden left the White House, but the costs of paying this vast legion of bureaucrats exploded 24% during the same period, according to a new'report'by a nonprofit government watchdog. Much of the skyrocketing payroll costs is due to spiking paychecks going to employees making more than $100,000 annually in salary during the 2020-2024 period, according to'Open the Books,'the Illinois-based nonprofit that maintains the world's largest, most current internet database of public spending: Most federal workers are paid according to the'General Schedule, which includes 15 grades and 10 pay steps within each grade. The lowest-paid federal worker is a GS-1, who at Step…...

2+ week, 13+ hour ago (303+ words) David Harsanyi / @davidharsanyi David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner and a nationally syndicated columnist. He is cohost of the "You're Wrong" podcast and author of multiple books. Subscribe his Substack. Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked President Donald Trump this week if the affordability issue was a factor in the elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City. "More than anything else, it's a con job by the Democrats," Trump said, before going on to harangue the media and instruct the Republican Party to tell voters prices are down. It didn't. One MIT Sloan study found that government spending was responsible for 42% of the 2022 inflation spike. Biden never recovered. "You're going to see some substantial announcements over the next couple days in terms of things we don't grow here in the United States," Treasury Secretary…...

2+ week, 17+ hour ago (326+ words) Shoppers look at a canned fish display Nov. 4, 2025, at the Market 32 Supermarket in South Burlington, Vermont. (Robert Nickelsberg via Getty Images) David Harsanyi / @davidharsanyi David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner and a nationally syndicated columnist. He is cohost of the "You're Wrong" podcast and author of multiple books. Subscribe his Substack. Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked President Donald Trump this week if the affordability issue was a factor in the elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City. "More than anything else, it's a con job by the Democrats," Trump said, before going on to harangue the media and instruct the GOP to tell voters prices are down. It didn't. One MIT Sloan study found that government spending was responsible for 42% of the 2022 inflation spike. Biden never recovered. "You're going to see some substantial…...