How's the economy?

Robert Reich

Meanwhile. . .

 NPR  - Virtually everyone has heard of New York City's Wall Street, but have you heard of Dallas' financial hub, dubbed "Y'all Street?" Wall Street banks are setting up camp in the city. It's already home to Goldman Sachs' second-largest U.S. presence after its Manhattan headquarters. The company plans to dwarf that office with a   $700 million, 800,000-square-foot campus in Dallas, expected to open in 2028. The state's business-friendly laws make it easier for companies to protect themselves against lawsuits and other challenges from shareholders.

Treating addiction

Brittney Melton, NPR  - Many of us have someone in our lives who struggles with a substance use disorder. One study found nearly one-third of Americans know someone who died from a fatal overdose.
But studies also show that many doctors, nurses and other clinicians actively avoid treating this vulnerable group of patients.

It’s not that they don’t have tools. There are low-cost, life-saving prescription medications, proven for decades to reduce cravings for alcohol and opioids in ways that save lives. Most American medical professionals simply don’t offer these treatments to their patients. 

Instead, research shows, many clinicians view people experiencing addiction with fear, distrust and hostility. … This kind of stigma among health workers remains widespread, and it affects decisions about how and when physicians care for patients.

…. Nearly a decade after President Trump declared opioids a national public health emergency, most U.S. medical schools still don’t teach addiction care as a core, normalized part of the profession.

New federal data released just last month shows that in 2025 — as Trump was extending the national opioid public health emergency — 80% of Americans facing addiction still received no treatment at all for their substance use.

I think about this a lot when I talk to people on the street experiencing severe addiction and when I interview family members grieving loved ones lost to alcohol and drugs.

What would their path have been like if the first doctor or nurse they encountered early in their illness said, “What you’re experiencing is treatable, we have good medications, and we can help.”

California hit with decline in wine sales

NY Times - - In California, a place famous around the world for its viticulture, winemakers produced less wine last year than at any point in the last quarter century. It’s often cheaper to let grapes rot on the vine than to harvest them because so many unsold bottles clog the shelves of storerooms and wine shops.  So on a sunny morning in Soledad, Calif., in a valley made famous by the author John Steinbeck, Jason Smith acquiesced to simple economics.

A worker unceremoniously drove a tractor and ripped out Mr. Smith’s pinot noir grapes from the ground. Another set fire to the wooden posts that for years had propped up the vines. And Mr. Smith leaned against his white Suburban, under the shade of a coastal oak, watching one of his pinot vineyards go up in smoke.

He had decided to sell all of his land and shut down his family business, which had survived for 51 years. “There’s literally no way for me to make money,” Mr. Smith, 57, said.

Trump war on history

Art News - For fiscal year 2027, the White House has proposed giving the Smithsonian $961.3 million in federal funding, roughly an 11 precent cut from the $1.08 billion Congress provided to it fiscal year 2026 and the institution’s lowest proposed funding level since at least 2020.

The reductions would fall most heavily on facilities spending, which would drop by about 21 percent from $152 million in fiscal 2026 to $120 million under the new proposal, reducing it from roughly one-seventh to about one-eighth of the Smithsonian’s overall budget….

The proposal would reduce the Smithsonian’s federally funded staffing by about 6 percent, cutting the equivalent of full-time positions from 4,047 in fiscal 2026 to 3,804 under the fiscal 2027 request. It would also cut the salaries and expenses account by $87.2 million, bringing it from $928.5 million in the current fiscal year to $841.3 million.

…. President Trump has kept the Smithsonian in the headlines for months as a target of his second administration’s push against what it calls “anti-American” interpretations of history. her patriotism. Hartig defended the museum’s scholarship as “fact-based” and said it was committed to telling a complex story of America through “competing perspectives.”….

President Trump’s second term has already brought major proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Park Service.

Wildfires

Congressional Insider - Fast-moving wildfires in British Columbia forced more than 20,000 people from their homes and pushed the province into a state of emergency. Officials said the Bald Range wildfire spread fast along Okanagan Lake and reached several towns in hours.

Summerland, home to about 12,000 people, was ordered evacuated, along with about 8,000 people in and around Peachland. Premier David Eby said the fire caused major losses, trapped some residents, and led to air evacuations. British Columbia already had more than 100 wildfires burning, with many still out of control in hot, windy, dry weather.

Anthony Fauci

The Hill -  The push to charge former COVID czar Anthony Fauci with contempt of Congress is full of pitfalls for prosecutors, should the Justice Department choose to take up the case.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved the criminal referral Thursday, arguing that Fauci's assertion of his Fifth Amendment rights 111 times during a hearing the week before amounts to contempt. 

Spearheaded by Chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the resolution has not been vetted by the full Senate, something former prosecutors say is key in building a contempt case.

But even if the measure is taken up and approved after the August recess, experts see other issues with a potential case, questioning grand jurors' interest in bringing charges after an individual asserted a valid constitutional right, as well as Trump administration appetite for a case that could diminish the power of a presidential pardon.

"Fauci would have a bulletproof motion to dismiss on Fifth Amendment grounds. He may invoke the right if he has reasonable fear that his testimony could be used against him in a criminal proceeding. Based on Rand Paul's statements that he would like to see Fauci 'behind bars,' Fauci has that reasonable fear," said Barb McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Michigan.

Paul and the committee's Republicans argue the pardon received by Fauci from former President Biden negates his right to a Fifth Amendment claim, as he has no reasonable fear of prosecution.

But that pardon only covers the period from January 1, 2014, through January 19, 2025, meaning Fauci could still face charges for things such as perjury before the committee or any state-level crimes.  Indeed, three state attorneys general have all issued subpoenas to Fauci after launching investigations into him.

Middle East

Daily Beast - Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine is reportedly quietly working toward an exit from Donald Trump’s Iran war, even as the president appears to believe more air strikes could force a deal.

 NBC News - Israel will not accept the 15-point plan from President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday.

“I want to clarify this: Israel rejects the 15-point document. I have heard people saying, ‘You didn’t say that.’ So here I am saying it again,” he told a Cabinet meeting. “The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed,” he added.

Trump, who last month touted a breakthrough in his Gaza peace plan, said Hamas has agreed to lay down its arms. However, the Board of Peace’s proposal calls for a phased Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza alongside the disarmament of Hamas.

The Guardian - Iran has issued tough new demands for reopening the strait of Hormuz, while the United Arab Emirates said one of its ships was targeted by an Iranian missile, as a deal to open the strategic waterway remained out of reach on Saturday.

Iran’s politburo-like body known as the supreme national security council said the strait of Hormuz will not open until the United States “corrects its behaviour”, and its state broadcaster published a statement from the council’s secretary, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who is also a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The US must never threaten Iran again, the statement said, and must permanently end the war with Iran and its armed allies in the region. The US must lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports and withdraw its military from the area. It also must “completely compensate” Iran for war damage, lift sanctions and “unconditionally” release frozen assets.

There was no immediate comment from the US, which has wanted an acceptable deal on the strait before ending the blockade. According to the interim deal signed in June, a schedule to end sanctions and a plan for compensation would be part of the final deal, and negotiations would address frozen assets.

Polls

Pew Research -   As the Trump administration and some states seek to expand the use of capital punishment, 66% of Americans now favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, up 6 percentage points since 2021. But majorities also say the death penalty does not deter serious crimes and see some risk of an innocent person being put to death.

Donald Trump

Epoch Times -   President Donald Trump announced on Friday nearly $2 billion in investments for critical mining projects, as well as more than $180 million in grants to expand the American mining workforce. He unveiled his plans at a mining industry roundtable at the State Department, which brought together nearly 200 business leaders, educators, and government officials to support domestic mining companies.

Climate

Patriotwise - A climate-education program backed by a Washington nonprofit has quietly trained more than 2,000 American judges while a new national security report accuses it of advancing Communist China’s energy agenda.

A report says the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project has trained over 2,000 U.S. judges on climate and energy law.

National security analysts claim the group’s work helps constrain American energy producers while lining up with Chinese strategic interests. Senate and House Republicans are demanding investigations into alileged foreign influence and ideological bias in judicial trainings.

The Environmental Law Institute insists its climate curriculum is neutral, science-based education and denies telling judges how to rule.

Middle East

NY Times - A top Iranian national security official delivered a sweeping set of demands on Saturday that he said the United States must meet before the Strait of Hormuz can reopen to maritime traffic, throwing the fate of the critical trade waterway into question.

Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued a statement carried by state media laying out multiple requirements for reopening the strait. He called for the United States to lift its naval blockade and sanctions on Iran, withdraw the U.S. military from around Iran, pay war reparations and release frozen Iranian assets, as well as end attacks on Iran’s allies in the region and threats against the country.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Iran’s demands. A previous cease-fire between Iran and the United States, agreed to in June, had said that sanctions would be fully lifted only in the event of a final deal regarding Iran’s nuclear program. And U.S. officials have said in the past that Iran could only access its frozen funds if it committed to giving up its highly enriched uranium first.

The statement from Mr. Zolghadr came as Iran and Oman have been negotiating an agreement on the future management of the Strait of Hormuz, which sits between the two countries. Iran effectively closed the strait in retaliation for being attacked by the United States and Israel in February.

Mr. Zolghadr’s list of demands upended expectations that a deal with Oman would soon allow commerce to flow through the strait once more and ease global energy prices. They will likely put pressure on President Trump to consider Iran’s conditions if he wants to lower consumer prices for Americans, which pose a risk for Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Greenland

The Guardian - An American oil company connected to Donald Trump is preparing to sink wells in remote Greenland despite not having received permission from the local authorities.

As the US president renews his threats to claim the vast Arctic territory, materials to prepare for drilling were brought ashore in recent days on Greenland’s eastern coast.

That has prompted Greenland’s government to issue a “strong warning” that no approval had been granted to land the kit. “All future logistical matters must be advised and approved by the mineral resources authority – before they are carried out,” the government said in a statement.

Trump's immigrant policy will cut health facility jobs for thousands of Haitians

Newsworthy News -  As over 300,000 Haitians lose legal status at once, the United States is about to test whether it can keep hospitals, nursing homes, and hotels running after pushing out a huge share of the workers who make everyday life possible.

Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are losing Temporary Protected Status and work permits, exposing deep dependence on immigrant labor in healthcare and hospitality.

Reports say tens of thousands of Haitian workers staff nursing homes, home care, hospitals, and hotels, in jobs that were already hard to fill before this change.

….President Trump’s move to end Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status cuts off legal status and work permits for more than 300,000 Haitians who have lived and worked in the United States for years. Temporary Protected Status was designed as a short-term shield from danger in home countries, but in practice many Haitians built stable lives and steady careers under it. A Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for the termination, and the Department of Homeland Security set hard deadlines when their Employment Authorization Documents expire, turning long-time legal workers into people at risk of arrest or deportation almost overnight.

Senate takes a break after approving Blanche

The Hill - The Senate adjourned for a five-week recess early Saturday morning after passing a bill to fund the federal government until Dec. 11 and confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general. Senate Republicans also agreed to set aside — for the moment — President Trump’s demand to approve another budget resolution to pave the way for tens of billions of dollars in new military spending and to pass the SAVE America Act.

Senators will return to their home states or take congressional delegation trips abroad for the next several weeks and are not due to return to Washington until Sept. 14.

Passage of the continuing resolution to fund the government past the election takes a lot of pressure off senators in both parties ahead of the September work period as both Democrats and Republicans were eager to avoid stumbling into another government shutdown before the midterm election.

The stopgap funding measure passed 90 to 6…The funding bill was held up by an intense fight within the Senate GOP conference over a provision added at the behest of the White House to delay the implementation of a ban on  intoxicating hemp-derived products that Congress enacted in November.

….The Senate later voted largely along party lines to narrowly confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.

Keeping quiet about congressional wrongdoing

Roll Call -Four months ago, calls denouncing misconduct came swiftly, and all at once. Now, it’s near silence.

Allegations surrounding two House Republicans reached a fever pitch this week, as Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina dropped out of his reelection campaign due to a report detailing “inappropriate conduct” toward two female staffers and Rep. Max Miller of Ohio doubled down on denying domestic abuse allegations made by his ex-wife. 

With the House gone for August recess, lawmakers often rely on social media and press releases to comment on the issues of the day. But so far it’s crickets from many who previously condemned a pair of colleagues accused of sexual misconduct by their staff earlier this year. 

“It’s a leadership problem. Mike Johnson should be saying, ‘I have a problem in my caucus. I have a problem in my Congress, and it is my job to fix that,’” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. 

When asked about Miller, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told Politico that “domestic events” are “not my business.” He said he spoke with Edwards briefly about the “serious allegations” against him. On social media, Johnson most recently posted about communism in America.

“What should a speaker do in this case?” Johnson told Politico. “I mean, I call out alarming behavior. … We have a very active and engaged Ethics Committee; they’ve done more work than they need to. I wish it wasn’t necessary. But there’s been a lot in this Congress on both sides of the aisle.”

“There’s all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time; it’s not my business to get engaged in it,” he added.

 

Federal appeals court rejects Trump's ballroom construction

The Hill - A federal appeals court panel blocked President Trump’s White House ballroom in a 2-1 vote on Friday, saying that work must stop except for below-ground construction, including installations Trump says are needed for security. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit panel ruled that Congress retains control over funding for development at the White House and had not authorized Trump’s project.

The court paused its order for two weeks to allow the Trump administration to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court.  “We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for. Until now,” the majority wrote.

Immigration

MS NOW - President Donald Trump signed two key executive orders on Thursday aimed at limiting the scope of birthright citizenship, a longstanding priority of his second term.

The first executive order expands the definition of people the administration says are ineligible for birthright citizenship to include "alien enemies of the United States, members of foreign terrorist organizations and large categories of people who lobby and act on behalf of foreign government."

Trump also signed another executive order aimed at ending "birth tourism," in which foreign nationals travel to the U.S. to give birth so their children automatically receive U.S. citizenship.

According to federal regulations, it is already illegal for people to obtain tourist visas "for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States."

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump called birthright citizenship "a disgrace."

Workers

NBC News - The U.S. economy shed 23,000 jobs in July, a sign that the labor market had not stabilized after four months of positive growth.  The unemployment rate ticked down only slightly to 4.1%.

….In yet another troubling sign for the labor market, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that it revised down the prior two months by a combined 103,000. May’s jobs total was cut by 66,000 to 129,000 total jobs added, while June’s total was lowered by 37,000 to a total gain of 57,000.

…. The change in workers’ average hourly earnings also fell well short of economists’ expectations. Wage growth was 0.1% from June, or 3.2% from one year ago. That’s also below inflation, which was 3.5% in its most recent reading.

Economists had been expecting wages to continue pacing at 3.5% from a year ago, but instead wage growth slowed. “The labor market is stalling again,” wrote Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, who called the report “bleak.”

In a post on X, Long also pointed to another troubling data point: The labor force participation rate in July was the lowest since February 2021, a sign that workers are dropping out of the workforce.

Supreme Court

Alternet -   When rationalizing its alarming injection of politics into legal decision, conservatives on the John Roberts Supreme Court are dumping years of legal analysis and precedent in favor of historical arguments. In essence, legal theory appears to be taking back seat to what law in America used to look like, says Florida International University philosophy Associate Professor Eric Scarffe.

They’re using history, said Scarffe, to do what judicial philosophy long has not: remove judgment from judging.

“Rather than promoting judicial restraint, … key cases reveal how the ‘history and tradition test’ has been weaponized to enable one of the most radical revisions to this nation’s constitutional order since the New Deal,” argued Scarffe. “It has been used not only to overturn previous decisions and precedent, but also to fundamentally shift the way the Court engages in judicial review.”

Congressional Insider -   Kamala Harris publicly urged Democrats to “revisit” expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices and to rethink the Electoral College and statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, escalating a live fight over the rules of American democracy.

Harris said the Supreme Court should consider expanding to 13 justices. She called for revisiting the Electoral College and granting statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Republican leaders denounced the ideas as partisan power grabs.

Video clips show Harris urging supporters to brainstorm reforms beyond past limits. She listed court expansion, stronger rules for Supreme Court ethics and testimony, Electoral College changes, multi-member districts, and new states as options to weigh. Her message invited debate rather than outlining a detailed bill, but it marked a clear endorsement of pushing structural reforms when Democrats next have power to act. The broad menu signals a larger fight over how the system should work in coming years.

Supporters frame court expansion and related steps as repairs to a system they say has lost balance. They argue a bigger court could reduce outsized power of single seats and reflect a growing nation. They also claim an updated Electoral College or national popular vote would better match voter will. Statehood backers say Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico deserve full representation. These points echo Democratic reform talk that has moved from fringe idea to mainstream discussion in recent years

Climate change

The Guardian -   The human-driven climate crisis made the conditions that led to blazes roaring across Canada, which have caused toxic smoke to spew throughout the country and into the US, twice as likely to occur, a new analysis has found.

Heightened global temperatures, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, amplified the risk of fire-prone weather in Ontario and the Northwest Territories, scientists found. These provinces have been racked by fires this summer, causing towns to be evacuated and unhealthy smoke to unfurl across multiple cities in North America.

There are currently nearly 700 fires ablaze across Canada, with a huge 3.8m hectares of the country, mainly in its sprawling boreal forests.

Trump's battleships

The Hill -   President Trump’s new class of battleships, which are envisioned to anchor the U.S. Navy’s “Golden Fleet,” are expected to cost around $275 billion to build, according to a government report released Wednesday. The first of 15 ships, the USS Defiant, is projected to cost around $23.4 billion to construct, with each subsequent vessel costing about $18 billion, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis said. The first battleship could take eight years or longer to construct.

The new class of battleships, which Trump unveiled in December, was initially set to be powered by gas turbine engines, which are on cruisers and destroyers. Later, the president said the vessels would be propelled with nuclear reactors. “They’ll be the fastest, the biggest and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump said in December, adding that the vessels would weigh more than 30,000 tons.

….The president aimed for the new ships to be built by 2028, a timeline that industry experts said would be unlikely.  “It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower,” Mark Cancian, the senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Defense and Security Department, wrote in late December. “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”

Trump fired his Navy secretary, John Phelan, in April in part over not making enough progress in constructing the battleships.

Data centers

NY Times -   You don’t have to be a technophobe to hate data centers these days. And you don’t have to have much skin in the game, either. Even if there’s no blocky, gas-guzzling, million-square-foot behemoth coming soon to a neighborhood near you … you probably still loathe these bad boys. More than half of Americans say they’d support a national ban.

Savvy politicians are converting the pitchforks into votes. In Michigan, where OpenAI is building a very big, very unpopular data center, a progressive organizer campaigning on a moratorium walloped two better-funded candidates in a House Democratic primary on Tuesday. That same day in Kansas, Democrats nominated a candidate for governor who has made opposing these facilities a core part of her platform.

It makes political sense for them. Energy prices are high, driven by Trump’s war in Iran, and data centers make that worse. And the president has pushed A.I. companies to build out infrastructure faster than ever, arguing that to do otherwise would be to hand the race for A.I. dominance to China.

Plenty of A.I. wonks agree with him. It takes years, in some cases, to connect data centers to the grid — too slow to meet the technology’s monstrous power demands. But Trump can read the room, and Americans are upset about data centers jacking up their electricity bills. (Nearly four in five say they’re worried about that, recent polling found.

Europe's climate change

NPR -   Europe's heat wave has drawn back the waters of Serbia's river, revealing Nazi-era German warships that were sunk in 1944 during their retreat.

NewsHill -  Human-driven warming has shifted Spain’s climate so decisively that the kind of hot, dry fire-weather behind its recent record wildfires has moved from near-exceptional to relatively routine, with scientists estimating it is now around 20 times more likely than it would have been without climate change.

A World Weather Attribution analysis finds that the extreme fire-weather conditions behind central Spain’s 2026 “record-sized inferno” are now at least 20 times more likely because of human-caused climate change.

In today’s climate, similarly intense wildfire conditions are expected roughly once every six years in central Spain, rather than being exceptionally rare events.

Broader research shows extreme fire-weather days in Southern Europe have more than doubled in recent decades, and Spain’s 2025 fires burned roughly four times the average area of the previous 30 years.

Americans aren’t embracing socialism

Hartmann Report - Americans aren't embracing socialism—they're rejecting 45 years of Reaganomics, billionaire rule, and an economy rigged against the middle class. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan, declared yesterday morning, seems to have broken the brains of Republicans and the chattering class.

Donald Trump’s pathetic bleats notwithstanding, people voting for progressive Democrats and “democratic socialists” aren’t voting for communism or even socialism; they’re trying to get America to the same sort of economy and form of government that works for everybody — a system somewhat like the one a majority of us had before Reaganism

Anthony Fauci

NBC News -  The Republican-led Senate Homeland Security Committee voted along party lines to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he declined to answer lawmakers’ questions during a fiery hearing last week.  Fauci, who has been a target of the right since he served as a top health official during the Covid pandemic, repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment right during the hearing, explaining in his opening remarks that he believed Republicans would try to use his testimony to prosecute him.

Utah's fertility rate plummets

NY Times - Utah has long been famous for its large families. From the Osmond singers to “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the picture has been one of young people marrying and having a lot of babies.

But Utah is now experiencing the biggest fertility rate drop in its modern history. After a peak in 2007, Utah’s rate has plummeted by more than 37 percent, the largest decline of any state in the country. Utah, which was No. 1 in the nation for fertility rates for years, is now ranked sixth.

Utah is a leading example of a demographic transformation that is sweeping the United States and other rich countries, as young women increasingly delay childbearing. As the trend deepens, the worry is that more women would forgo having children altogether, a choice that could have serious consequences for the country, economically and politically. For the first time, about half of all 30-year-old women are childless.

Elections

The Guardian -  Michigan Democrats didn’t choose El-Sayed because he’s “unabashedly liberal”. Or because he’s a democratic socialist (in fact, he’s not). Abdul El-Sayed’s win proves change is possible for Democrats. His next fight may determine their future

They chose him because he’s a fighter – at a time when America needs fighters willing to stand up to the worst tyrant who has ever occupied the Oval Office.

Corporate Democrats – such as Haley Stevens, along with Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries – aren’t up to the task because they won’t bite the corporate hands that feed them campaign money. They won’t criticize the billionaire class. They refuse to talk about how big money has corrupted America.

Yet it’s big corporations and the billionaire class that are supporting Trump’s authoritarianism.

They’ve sucked up to Trump for corporate welfare, giant tax cuts, tariff exemptions, antitrust acquiescence and war contracts.

They’ve given Trump hundreds of millions for his inauguration, his ballroom, his 250th birthday, his Super Pac.  Jamie Dimon and his cronies on Wall Street; Elon Musk and his billionaire bros; Brad Carp and his corporate lawyers; Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the Ellisons – all have sold their integrity for huge profits.

Most Americans view rising living costs as biggest barrier to a better life

The Guardian - Americans may seem increasingly divided on beliefs and values, but in a new survey of more than 30,000 adults from across the country spanning generations and economic classes, a majority of Americans agree there’s a significant barrier to achieving a better life: the rising cost of living.

When asked to describe what a better life in three to five years would look like, 60% of Americans said they wanted greater financial security, according to a survey that was conducted by the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility and the WK Kellogg Foundation in mid-April.

In interviews that accompanied the survey, respondents often defined financial security as being able to afford basic necessities without worry.

“A better life for me and my family would look like being able to buy a home, and being able to afford all the basic necessities, rent, utilities, car, food, healthcare – as well as being able to have enough left over to save for the future for retirement and vacations,” said a 35-year-old respondent from Dearborn Heights, Michigan.

Though it may appear to be a simple goal, many Americans believe it’s out of reach. Forty per cent of respondents described themselves as either “getting by but financially vulnerable” or “struggling to meet basic needs”. Groceries and food costs in particular are causing financial distress, with 90% of respondents listing it as their top cost-of-living concern, followed by housing, transportation and healthcare.