Jim Bohn

EU Conservatives Won Big With the Help of Younger Voters. Here’s How.

One of the most significant and underreported political events of recent years is the changing nature of youth politics.  In places as diverse as India, Canada, Japan and the United States, younger voters are increasingly supportive of conservative- and libertarian-leaning political parties and candidates. 

The growing interest in conservatism among the young was evident in the June European Parliamentary elections.  Strong support and heavy turnout by younger voters enabled conservative parties to make large gains. 

This post covers three topics. First, what happened in the EU elections and what was the role of younger voters in the conservative surge?  Second, what do Europe’s conservative parties stand for?  And third, what can the Republican party in the United States draw from the European’s success in attracting young voters? 

What happened in June?

Conservative parties gained forty seats in the 720 members EU parliament.  Their gains aren’t large enough to take control.  However, conservative gains will give them greater ability to shape EU policy in a wide range of areas including economics, immigration, energy and foreign policy. 

The conservative showing was particularly strong in France and Germany, the two largest EU nations in terms of both population and economic output.  France’s National Rally gained seven and now controls the largest single block, 30 seats, out of that country’s 81-member delegation. Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble and The Environmentalists, a green party, were crushed.  In Germany, gains by the Alternative for Germany advanced that party from fourth to second place in terms of the number of seats controlled in the largest EU delegation. 

Instrumental in conservative gains were younger voters.  Political observer Yascha Mounk highlights the role of young voters in the success of conservative parties in the EU election.

“Remarkably, these developments are fueled, not slowed, by young voters. In Poland, a plurality of voters under the age of 30 supported the far-right Konfederacja. In France, the National Rally did a little better among voters under the age of 35 than it did in the population as a whole. In Germany, the young are now significantly more likely to vote for the far right than the old, with the AfD outpolling the Greens among those who are younger than 25.”

What do the conservative parties stand for?

One of the main differences between politics in the European Union and the United States is that the EU’s proportional representation system allows many more parties to obtain seats in a legislative body that the first-past-the post system in the United States.  While the United States has two major parties, several dozen different parties are represented in the EU parliament.  Most of these parties have joined one of seven different coalitions though some act on their own. 

While conservative parties are often derided as “far right”, most Americans would find a lot to like in the platforms of Identity and Democracy or the European Conservative and Reformists, the largest conservative blocks, or the Alternative for Germany, the largest group of independents. 

One reason that conservatives are so often derided in the media is that EU politics are far to the left of those in the United States.  One measure of how far left EU politics are is that the “centrist” block in parliament consists of a coalition of establishment parties and self-described socialists.  Pundits rarely dispense the same opprobrium to parties of the left which include many former communists and anti-capitalist parties. 

Another is that news media in Europe have strong financial incentive to support ruling parties.  Unlike the United States, in which most media is privately owned and funded, state run media is common in Europe and private media organizations in most European countries receive substantial direct or indirect financial support from their governments.  Government ownership and funding provides an incentive for media to provide ruling parties with favorable coverage and disparage the opposition.

The European conservatives mostly share the following positions: 

• Conservative parties tend to view open border immigration as a security issue and oppose unfettered mass migration into the EU.
• Conservative parties tend to be more supportive of the continued use of fossil fuels and oppose net-zero policies for carbon emissions.
• Conservative parties opposed the most extreme COVID lockdown measures.
• Conservative parties either oppose or have taken a more moderate stance toward the continuation of the NATO/Ukraine war with Russia. 

Their views on economics are more heterodox.  Writing in Intereconomics, Philip Ruthgrab provides a thoughtful summary of their range of positions of the conservative parties.

• Conservative parties tend to be pro-business and seek to reduce the tax and regulatory burdens on their domestic private sectors. 
• Conservative parties generally want more national autonomy over economic decision making.  Party positions range between those seeking greater flexibility within the EU to those seeking outright exit as Britain voted to do in 2020. 
• Some want EU member states to strictly adhere to EU fiscal rules on deficit spending while others want more fiscal flexibility.

In short, the range of opinion of the European conservatives on most issues is broadly similar to the positions of the Republican Party in the United States. 

What does this mean for Trump and the Republican Party? 

What did the European conservatives do to woo young voters, and can the Republican Party do the same in the United States?  Here are three takeaways from the EU elections for the GOP. 

1. Don’t back down when attacked 

Europe’s conservative parties have not backed down from attacks from establishment politicians and the elite media. 

Europe’s conservative parties have also been subject to political persecutions like those waged by the Democrats against Donald Trump.  Germany’s AfD has been subject to ongoing harassment by the security state.  Establishment politicians in Germany have gone so far as to suggest banning the AfD, Germany’s second largest political party. 

The attacks on conservative parties have been ineffective in part due to the unpopularity of the establishment parties.  Some 70 percent of Germans and two-thirds of the French disapprove of the performance of their current governments.

Rhetorical attacks and lawfare of the establishment elites are seen by many young people as an attempt to silence their critics and deflect from the failures of the governing parties.  As the 25-year-old Bence Szabó from Hungary told the BBC,   “Everything coming from the right is being demonized, but we can actually solve the issues that the left tried to solve – and failed.”

Harassment and persecution of political opponents is decidedly undemocratic and authoritarian.  It makes the EU look like a banana republic writ large, albeit with espresso rather than coffee. 

2. Understand the concerns of the young 

Conservative parties also emphasized issues that have a major impact on the economic and physical well-being of young people.  These include inflation, crime, the COVID lockdowns, and the high cost of housing. 

Basic economic concerns were a motivating factor for Lazar Potrebic, a 25-year-old from Serbia. He told the BBC “We are not extremists. We are just angry. We feel like our needs are not being met. People our age are taking really important life steps. We’re getting our first jobs, thinking about starting a family…but if you look around Europe, rent prices are going through the roof – and it’s hard to get work.”

Young Europeans are particularly concerned with two issues where the conservatives sharply differ with the establishment parties and the parties of the left: mass immigration and the war in Ukraine. 

One is immigration.  Young people feel the effects of Europe’s open borders policies more acutely than the old.  In a widely circulated post, Boris Palmer, mayor of the city of Tübingen in Germany, explains why:

“[young Germans] experience what irregular migration means on a daily basis,” Palmer wrote on Facebook on Monday.  “Above all, the young men who have arrived alone are changing the living environment of young people. In the park, in the club, on the street, on the bus, at the train station, in the schoolyard.” 

The war in Ukraine also weighed heavily on the minds of young Europeans who don’t want their nation or themselves to be dragged into another world war. In early 2022, the war in Ukraine replaced climate as the top concern of young Germans. Since then, young Germans have been in what some observers have termed a “permanent crisis mode.” The AfD’s Maximilian Krah put the war in terms young people can understand in a TikTok video:

“The war in Ukraine is not your war. Zelenskyy is not your president. … But this is costing you money and you are running the risk that Germany gets dragged into this war, otherwise you will have to go and fight on the eastern front where your grandfather’s brothers and cousins lost their lives…”,

In contrast to the AfD, Germany’s Green party has been the most enthusiastic supporter greater escalation of the war with Russia.

3. Harness the power of social media

Young people are more likely than the old to get their information from social media. Conservative gains among younger voters in part to skillful use of social media by conservative parties. 

In contrast to Europe, the Republican party and Republican politicians in the United States lag far behind the Democrats in the use of social media to connect with voters.  there are some exceptions, the most noteworthy of which is Donald Trump. 

Social media allows political figures to sweep aside gatekeepers in the media and communicate directly with voters.  Young people appreciate the frankness of direct connections. 

The German news outlet Deutsche Weil characterized the conservative Alternative for Germany as the TikTok Party.  “The AfD reaches as many young people in Germany on TikTok as all the other parties combined. Traditional parties in Germany have so far done little to counter the AfD and its modern social media strategy.” The same is true of France’s National Rally whose president, Jordan Bardella, is just 28 years old.  Bardella’s TikTok channel is filled with clips of him speaking directly to viewers, or at rallies and debates, as well as doing ordinary things like enjoying a chocolate or having a glass of wine.  It is working.  Bardella has 1.7 million followers and his videos have garnered over 40 million likes, 5 million more than the TikTok channel of President of Fran

The latest issue of the Fed’s Beige Book shows an economy stagnant with growing downside risks.  The Fed’s analysis of the economy shows that Bidenomics is a failure.

The Fed’s own summary of economic activity says it all. 

• Growth has stalled: “Economic activity was about flat on balance, but performance was quite mixed both across and within sectors.”

• Consumers are increasingly pinched: “Several reports mentioned weakness in discretionary spending, as consumers’ price sensitivity remained elevated.”

• Job growth is negligible and losses rising: “Employment was unchanged overall, and wages increased at a slow-to-moderate pace.  Labor demand weakened somewhat, as job openings fell slightly, and layoffs picked up a bit.”

• Downside risks are increasing: “The outlook was cautiously optimistic on average, but selected contacts expressed either greater uncertainty or an uptick in downside risks.” 

In short, economic growth has stalled and the risk of a recession is increasing. 

The Fed’s own data shows that Biden’s economic agenda isn’t working for the average American.  Employment isn’t growing and the Fed’s interest rate policies haven’t brought inflation down to the Fed’s target range. 

The combination of economic stagnation and inflation harkens back to the stagflation of 1970s.

Indeed, Economist Larry Summers, who was Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, see the economy headed into a period of prolonged stagflation. 

The Opportunity Agenda is catching on in Germany too.  A new survey shows a growing affection for conservative parties among young Germans. 

Like young Americans who increasingly find a second Trump presidency more attractive than four more years of the failures of Joe Biden, young Germans are finding a lot to like in the economic program and immigration platform of the three major right-of-center parties in Germany. 

The conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the most popular of Germany’s multiple political parties among German’s between 14 and 29 with 22 percent support according to the findings of the 2024 Jugend in Deutschland a survey. 

The AfD is the closest thing in Germany to the MAGA wing of the Republican Party in the United States.  The AfD’s economic program calls for deregulation and less state control of industry.  The AfD seeks a negotiated solution to the war in Ukraine.  And the AfD opposes Germany’s open borders immigration policies. 

The second most popular party among young Germans according to Jugend in Deutschland is the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) with 20 percent support.  The CDU/CSU most closely resembles the establishment Republicans in the United States. 

The pro-business Free Democratic party get 8 percent support among young Germans. 

In total, 50 percent of young Germans support the three pro-economic freedom parties. 

In contrast, only 35 percent of young Germans support the three parties of the left on economic policy.  The Greens have 18 percent support, the Socialists 12 percent and the former communists 5 percent. 

Young Germans are drawn to conservative parties because of their messages on economic policies and immigration according to Klaus Hurrelmann, a Professor of Public Health and Education at the Hertie School in Berlin, who was interviewed by the European Conservative. 

“The assumption that young people are left-wing is wrong. We can speak of a clear shift to the right among the young population. … The AfD has clearly succeeded in presenting itself as a protest party for the traffic lights and as a problem-solver for current concerns.”

Among the chief concerns for young people is not climate change, LGBTQ rights, or gender ideology, as the mainstream globalist press might have it, but rising costs and a lower standard of living due to inflation (65%), the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East (60%), and overpriced and scarce housing (54%).

Young Germans turned out heavily for freedom-oriented political parties in the previous German election in response to the COVID lockdowns and the country’s rising pension debts. 

A new survey from the National Endowment for Financial Education (NAFE) reveals the truly dire nature of the financial situation of young people in America today.

When asked how well the statement “I am just getting by financially” describes their current situation, 71 percent of Gen Zs (18 to 29 year-olds) said that statement describes their financial situation at least “somewhat well” and one in four said that statement describes their situation completely or very well. 

The financial situation of Millennials (30 to 44 year-olds) is just as bad.  Almost one in three—31 percent—of Millennials said that just getting by describes their financial situation completely or very well and another 34 percent said “somewhat well.”

Among those 45 and over, a still very high 57 percent said “just getting by” describes their situation at least somewhat well. 

Saving requires the ability to put some money away at the end of the month.  Saving is particularly important for young people who should be accumulating assets to meet important life goals like getting married, buying a home, or helping children pay for a college education.

Most young Americans are having difficulty meeting their immediate expenses. 

The NAFE survey found that only 29 percent of Gen Zs and 36 percent of Millennials were able to save consistently; they always had some money left over at the end of the month.

By comparison, 38 percent of Gen Zs and 37 percent of Millennials never or rarely had any money left over at the end of the month.  

The inability of younger Gen Zs to save may be due to college costs.  Older Gen Zs and Millennials, however, are in their prime earning years and many do not have children to provide for.

Most young people that are not able to save now may never be able to.  A study of the lifetime earnings of five million Americans by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that for the median American, earnings stagnate between 35 and 55. 

The result is that large numbers of Americans have little hope for their financial future. 

The NEFE survey asked whether respondents agreed with the following statement “I feel like I will never have the things I want in life.”

Fifty-nine percent of Gen Zs and Millennials at least somewhat agreed that they would never have the things that they want in life. 

And when asked whether they ‘were concerned that the money they had or will save won’t last,” 72 percent of Gen Zs as well as 72 percent of Millennials were at least somewhat concerned their savings would run out.

GOUSA believes that the biggest problem that America faces doesn’t come from abroad. Rather, it’s that our elites don’t believe in American values such as free speech, individual liberty or the free enterprise system.  Jonathan Turley’s April 19 column provides more evidence of the elite disdain for these American values. 

Stanford University is at the very top of the hierarchy of American higher education.  Holders of Stanford diploma are well represented among those in  top government jobs, in the tech sector, and on Wall Street.  So what Stanford students and grads think matters a lot. 

According to a recent survey by FIRE, Stanford students have little tolerance for those with views other than their own. 

Last year Stanford students shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School.  Instead of defending the Judge, Law School Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach criticized the Judge for appearing and sided with the students disrupting his speech.  Oh the irony!

Turley writes of the findings of FIRE’s 2024 survey of the views of Stanford students regarding free speech:  

FIRE released “The Judge Duncan Shoutdown: What Stanford Students Think,” including 54% of Stanford students said that Judge Duncan’s visit should have been canceled by the administration. Another 36% stated that using physical violence to shutdown a campus speaker is “always,” “sometimes,” or “rarely” acceptable. 75% said the same about shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking. Not surprising, only six percent of conservative students now feel comfortable disagreeing with professors. The survey is consistent with other surveys and polling in higher education.

The early years of adulthood play a critical role in the formation of our attitudes toward ourselves, others and society at large.  That so many young Americans have closed themselves off to other opinions is disturbing.  That such intolerance is especially widespread among the elites bodes ill for the future of America.

Though framed in terms of consideration of those with different view on political questions, the intolerance displayed by Stanford students is unlikely to be contained to the political realm.

As rising generations today assume leadership roles in American institutions, intolerance of others is also likely to be reflected in the nature of business dealings, in the administration of government, in medical treatment, in foreign policy and in personal and marital relations.  The result: more failures of business judgement, more wasteful public expenditure, more medical errors, more war and regional conflict, and more unhappy marriages and personal relationships.         

John Stuart Mill wrote about the role of free thought and speech in human progress:

It is hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those which they are familiar. …  Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.  (Principles of Political Economy, 1848) 

Higher education has traditionally been viewed as a means for the advancement of human progress.  Today, in many ways, it is the reverse.  The intolerant attitudes acquired and reinforced through one’s time on the campuses of Stanford and other elite universities are a barrier to human progress.  A barrier to progress created by the universities themselves and the faculty and administrators that run them.    

The US House of Representatives voted 273-147 last week to extend the many tenacles of the surveillance state by forcing businesses as mundane as fitness centers or hardware stores to assist the NSA in warrantless searches of US citizens.

The founders would be aghast. 

The framers of the United States Constitution were so concerned that the government would intrude on the private lives of citizens that they wrote a prohibition on warrantless searches of persons and property into Article 4 the Constitution.  Article 4 states:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

GOUSA believes in the right of Americans to privacy and protection from unjust intrusion into our homes, papers and electronic communications. Privacy protections are included in the Personal Opportunity portion of the Five Points of Opportunity.

Yet warrantless searches of the electronic communications of US citizens is exactly what this bill allows. 

Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center explained in a series of posts on Twitter/X

Ron Paul explains how the National Security Agency and other elements of the surveillance states have used loopholes in Section 702 to conduct surveillance of US citizens.

I’ll explain how this new power works. Under current law, the government can compel “electronic communications service providers” that have direct access to communications to assist the NSA in conducting Section 702 surveillance.

In practice, that means companies like Verizon and Google must turn over the communications of the targets of Section 702 surveillance. (The targets must be foreigners overseas, although the communications can—and do—include communications with Americans.)

Through a seemingly innocuous change to the definition of “electronic communications surveillance provider,” an amendment offered by House intel committee (HPSCI) leaders and passed by the House vastly expands the universe of entities that can be compelled to assist the NSA.

If the bill becomes law, any company or individual that provides ANY service whatsoever may be forced to assist in NSA surveillance, as long as they have access to equipment on which communications are transmitted or stored—such as routers, servers, cell towers, etc. That sweeps in an enormous range of U.S. businesses that provide wifi to their customers and therefore have access to equipment on which communications transit. Barber shops, laundromats, fitness centers, hardware stores, dentist’s offices… the list goes on and on. 

It also includes commercial landlords that rent out the office space where tens of millions of Americans go to work every day—offices of journalists, lawyers, nonprofits, financial advisors, health care providers, and more.

Ron Paul explains how the National Security Agency and other elements of the surveillance states have used loopholes in Section 702 to conduct surveillance of US citizens.

Section 702 authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign citizens. When the FISA Act was passed, surveillance state boosters promised that 702 warrantless surveillances would never be used against American citizens. However, intelligence agencies have used a loophole in 702, allowing them to subject to warrantless surveillance any American who communicated with a non-US citizen who was a 702 target. Intelligence agencies could then also conduct warrantless surveillance on any Americans who communicated with the new American target. This Section 702 loophole has been used so often to subject Americans to warrantless wiretapping that it has been referred to as the surveillance state’s crown jewel.“

Section 702 has already been widely abused by the NSA, FBI and other spying agencies.  Just last year court documents revealed that the FBI had improperly searched for information on US citizens 278,000 times including searches for information on January 6 defendants and the killing of George Floyd. 

Young Americans should be particularly concerned.  It’s no fun to be watched by the government all the time.  Just ask Chinese dissidents like When Chen. 

“When Chen picked up his phone to vent his anger at getting a parking ticket, his message on WeChat was a drop in the ocean of daily posts on China’s biggest social network.  But soon after his tirade against “simple-minded” traffic cops in June, he found himself in the tentacles of the communist country’s omniscient surveillance apparatus.  Chen quickly deleted the post, but officers tracked him down and detained him within hours, accusing him of “insulting the police”.  He was locked up for five days for “inappropriate speech”.”

George Orwell wrote of the dangers of mass surveillance in Nineteen Eighty Four.  His 1949 novel was intended as a warning of how the surveillance state would crush the individual and free thought.  Unfortunately, in modern Washington, Orwell’s novel is more like a “how-to” manual.   

Joe Biden’s policies have brought back something not seen since the 1970s.  No, not disco.  I’m talking about stagflation—stagnant economic activity coupled with rising prices. 

Biden’s high tax and oppressive regulatory policies have throttled economic activity. 

At the same time, his massive spending programs and deficits have showered special interests with cash. 

The result: negligible economic growth, diminished employment opportunities, rising prices and high interest rates. 

Here’s five pieces of evidence that demonstrate that Joe Biden’s economic policies have hurt Americans 

1. Small business confidence at lowest level in 11 years.

The National Federation of Independent Business survey shows that small business owners are more pessimistic than at any time since 2013.  That includes the pandemic years where many small businesses failed during the shutdowns.  Also note how small business confidence soared during the Trump years. 

2. No full-time jobs have been created in the past 14 months

The number of full-time jobs in the United States is same as 14 months ago and the number of full-time jobs has crashed in the last six months according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

3. No sign of a Federal Reserve rate cut

Just like the 1970s, interest rates are high.  The average rate on a 30-year home mortgage is over 7.5 percent.  Expectations for a rate cut in 2024 have evaporated as investors no longer view the federal Reserve as able to bring inflation under control.  According to Reuters:

“Expectations for how deeply and how soon the Fed will cut rates have shifted rapidly over the last few months, as investors grow increasingly doubtful that policymakers will be able to lower borrowing costs without sparking an inflationary rebound in a strong economy. The Fed has projected it will cut rates by 75 basis points this year.”

4. Food prices have risen by almost 40 percent since 2019.

Food is a larger share of total spending by lower income and younger households.  The increase in food prices has far outstripped wage growth.  Have your earnings increased by 40 percent since 2019?

5. A majority of Americans see their financial situation as worse off than last year

For the first time since the Federal Reserve began collecting data in 2014, a majority of Americans see their personal financial situation as worse than the previous year.  This again is a stark contrast to the Trump years in which Americans saw their situation getting better each year. 

Bonus: the 2020s are so bad that Americans now long for the 1970s!

The 2024 election looks to be very close.  Just a few electoral votes are up for grabs.  Census Bureau “errors” in the 2020 population counts give the Democrats a big head start in the race to 270 electoral votes. 

Most of the 538 votes in the electoral college are in states that are solidly red or blue.  According to the website 270toWin, there are only 77 of the 528 electoral votes in the six states that are up for grabs. 

The small number of votes in the battleground states means that every electoral vote matters a lot. 

Census Bureau “errors” in the 2020 count—which massively favored the Democrats—could give Biden the winning edge in the 2024 election.

The figure below from 270toWin has the electoral votes held by each state.  Swing states are in tan. 

A bit on Census “errors” and then we’ll look at some scenarios where Census errors prove decisive. 

Census Errors and Congressional Reapportionment

The Constitution requires that seats in the House of Representatives be apportioned among the states based on population.  The population of each state is determined by the decennial census count.  The more people that live in a state, the more seats in the house of Representative. 

The number of electoral votes that each state has in Presidential elections is the sum of the number of Senators (2) plus the number of members of the House of Representatives.  The more seats in the House of Representatives, the more electoral votes. 

In 2022, the Census Bureau announced that it had made major mistakes in the 2020 census count. 

The mistakes provided Democrats an electoral vote and Congressional representation windfall. 

Interestingly, the announcement of the errors in the 2020 count was made after seats had been reapportioned.  As a result, the errors are baked into Congressional apportionments through 2032 and the 2024 and 2028 Presidential elections. 

A very convenient “error” indeed by the Democrat-controlled Census Bureau. 

The Wall Street Journal charged that the Census Bureau rigged the 2020 census in favor of the Democrats.  The Census Bureau’s refusal to provide an explanation of the source of the errors also suggests that there was something nefarious underfoot.    

The figure below shows the effect of Census “errors” on Congressional representation and the number of electoral votes from each state.   

Census Tips the Scale for Biden

The figure below from the American Redistricting Project shows the effect of Census “errors” on the number of electoral votes assigned to each state. 

Had the 2020 Census count been accurate four reliably red states would have gained seats: Texas and Florida would each have gained 3 and Montana and North Carolina gained 1 each for a total of 8.

However, two red states—Ohio and West Virginia—would have lost one seat. 

The net result is that the Republican candidate would have had six more electoral votes—and the Democrats six less–heading in to the 2024 election. 

Now consider how pivotal those six electoral votes are in a close election. 

Assume that Trump wins all of the red and pink states in the figure at the top.  That gives Trump 235 electoral votes.  Then add in the toss-up states in the West and South: Georgia (+16), Arizona (+11) and Nevada (+6). 

If Trump wins Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, that gives Trump an additional 33 electoral votes or a total of 268.  Two short of victory.  Result: Biden wins by 2.

To win, Trump would have to pick off one of the “blue wall” states in the North—Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania.   

Now assume that the Census Bureau hadn’t made such fortuitous (for the Democrats) mistakes with the 2020 census count.  With the six additional electoral votes that should have been allocated to the solidly red states, Trump would win with 274 electoral votes.

Or consider what would happen if Trump lost Arizona and Nevada but wins Georgia and Michigan—both states with a large population of working class voters.  The result: Trump gets 266 electoral votes, Biden gets 272.  Biden wins again. 

But if the Census had not made such a fortuitous mistake (from the Democrat point of view) with the 2020 census, Trump would have 5 additional electoral votes in his column (Michigan would have lost 1) which would give Trump the election with 271. 

A Pattern of Election Interference?

Had this been an isolated incident it may well have been dismissed as an isolated administrative mistake.  However, in recent decades, the Census, like everything in America, has become heavily politicized.

Both Republicans and Democrats recognize that how the count is conducted and the “errors” made have a significant impact on the outcome of Presidential elections and Control of Congress.

Had the “errors” not been made, Donald Trump would have a far easier path to the White House.

 Had the “errors” not been made, Republicans would have had a much larger majority in the House of representative to work with. 

There’s a pattern to the “errors” made in Washington—they all favor the Democrats. 

It’s not just the census.  Consider the treatment of Hunter Biden, or the loss of evidence that would exonerate Trump in the January 6 hearings, or the claim by Treasury and the Fed that inflation is merely transitory, or the claim that Ukraine is winning, and so on and so on and so on. 

Republicans are right to be suspicious of the veracity of the 2020 Census count and outraged by the one-sided nature of Census errors. 

If Census “errors” provide Joe Biden the advantage in the 2024 election, the outcome will reinforce doubts regarding the fairness of U.S. election processes and further divide an already heavily divided nation. 

Two in five Gen Zs and Millennials are doom spending according to a survey of 1000 consumers by Credit Karma.  Doom spending is defined as spending money as way to cope with stress about the economy and war.  It’s evidence of a lack of hope in the future.    

Jake Peirce, 25, told the Chicago Sun-Times that the reason he is doom spending is that “with inflation and the cost of living increasing, it makes me wonder where our world is heading. I know it won’t get better, and I would rather live it up and spend money as opposed to saving.”

There are a lot of factors leading young Americans to give up hope for the future.

Soaring housing costs and lack of availability are causing a lot of young people to give up on ever being able to own a home.  House prices have doubled since 2010 far outstripping the growth in wages.  

High home prices make it more difficult for young people to live on their own.  For the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s a majority of young Americans now live with their parents.   

Inflation and falling real wages are another concern especially among Gen Zs.  Employment services find that young Americans are more concerned about salary and wages when looking for a job than any other generation.  

War is also am concern.  Over the last two years the United States has been the primary weapons supplier and financial supporter of Ukraine in its war with Russia, a country with over 6,000 nuclear weapons.  According to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the world is closer to a nuclear war today than at any time in history.

Young people are also concerned about the prospects of war.  Half of Americans between 18 and 29 think that it’s very or somewhat likely that there will be another world war within the next 5 to 10 years and more than half think that a future world war would involve nuclear weapons.  

There are also other signs that young Americans are losing hope in the future.  Young Americans are increasing depressed, unhappy and lonely.  

All of these signs point to a difficult future for young people and for America.  Our lives are path dependent.  The early years of adulthood are the time in which we form our vision of ourselves and for the world around us.  That vision stays with us the rest of our lives.

Without serious course correction, unhappiness and hopelessness among the young will permanent change the character of America.  Gen Zs and Millennials will be less entrepreneurial and optimistic, as well as crankier and less trusting of others, when they reach middle age when it is they, not the Baby Boomer and Gen Xers, that are in charge of the institutions of American political and economic life.   

Here at GOUSA, we believe in making America the Land of Opportunity again. We believe that Americans of all ages, and especially young Americans, should be hopeful and optimistic about the future.

And we are working on policies to make sure that the future of our country is bright. That includes economic opportunity. It also included ending our endless wars and making sure that our borders are secure and Americans safe at home and at work.

It also means making sure that all Americans have educational opportunities and the ability to live their lives and express themselves in the way that they choose.

If you believe as we do, join us. Help us with our ratings project. Come to a GOUSA event, Or chip in at the donations tab. It’s for America. Opportunity benefits all of us, both those here today and future generations of Americans that are yet to come.

High housing costs and low inventory are creating generations of perpetual renters.  The culprit: government policy.  The answer: an opportunity agenda for residential housing. 

A big part of the American Dream is being able to own your own home.  That dream is fading fast for younger Americans due to government policy.  The result: Millennials and Gen Zers are facing a future where they are renters for life. 

Over the last decade the average age of renters has soared from 29 to 33 as young people are forced out of real estate markets. 

Here are some of the ways that government makes it more difficult for young people to own homes:

Zoning and construction regulation limit the amount of land available for development and drive up the costs of building.  Zoning benefits existing homeowners by limiting development and thereby creating scarcity rents. 

Consider how zoning limits development in the Northeast.  Though Massachusetts is one of the most densely populated states, it also has among the largest average lot size.  The average single family home n in Massachusetts is on a lot of just under half an acre–19,166 square feet.  That’s double the average 9,540 square feet in Texas and a third more than in Wyoming, the most sparsely populated of the lower 48. 

Connecticut is even worse than Massachusetts.  The average home in Connecticut is on a lot of three quarters of an acre (30,928 sq ft). 

The result is that there is a shortage of affordable homes within commuting distance of jobs in large metropolitan areas.  Zoning requirements that entail large lot sizes not only limits home ownership opportunities, it limits job opportunities for young Americans.

Federal Reserve policy has also made it more difficult for young people to buy into the housing market. 

The Federal Reserve’s low interest rates policies of the last fifteen years caused home prices to soar.  That was the plan.  Negative real (after inflation) rates on safe assets like savings accounts, CDs and bonds forced money into risk assets like residential real estate.  

Access to free money from the Fed caused buyers to bid up home prices to stratospheric levels.  That benefitted existing homeowners who are mostly older.  They could sell or take out reverse mortgages on their properties and have a party. 

High prices drained the wealth of younger home buyers such as Millennials and Gen Zers looking to start families.  In essence, the Fed’s quantitative easing policies amounted to a huge wealth transfer via the housing market from Millennials and Gen Z to the baby Boomers. 

The third part of the pincer movement against younger home buyers came in the form of tax policy.  The past decade has seen the rise of institutional home buyers—large financial institutions like BlackRock that are amassing large portfolios of residential housing.  This takes homes out of the single-family owner-occupied market and turns them into rentals. 

They can do this because they have three big advantages over individual home buyers.  First, institutions can deduct from taxable income the interest cost of all of the debt they use to buy these homes.  Individuals are limited in the amount of mortgage interest that is deductible from their taxable income. 

Second, institutions have access to huge amounts of low interest rate debt courtesy of the Federal Reserve and can get funding directly from the GSEs.  Individuals have to go through banks or other middlemen to obtain a mortgage. 

Third, large institutions are always the first in line for government bailouts should the housing market tank.  The lack of downside risk makes institutions a far better risk for suppliers of capital than individual homeowners.

Getting young people into homes of their own is going to require a change in government policies.  A start is recognizing how governments have failed young people.  Though federal, state and local governments talk a good game when it comes to housing, their policies have made the situation worse. 

We are now at the point at which despite being one of the least densely populated of the advanced countries in the world, Americans has one of the lowest rates of home ownership.  That’s government failure on a truly massive scale. 

The American economy has been transformed over the last three years through centralized economic planning and big government spending.  Americans have less freedom to make economic choices today than any time in the past 25 years. 

The result.  Not prosperity.  Most Americans believe that the inflationary economic policies of the Biden Administration have been harmful to them.  Inflation has eaten away at their paychecks.  Now there’s increasing evidence that the U.S. economy is sliding into or already in a recession. 

Here are five signs that the American economy is already in a recession:

Falling Economic Indicators: The Conference Board’s leading economic indicators are deep in recession territory.  Consumers are struggling to pay bills.  Consumer confidence is down.  Even demand for cardboard boxes, which are used to ship most everything, is down. 

Rising Business Bankruptcies: S&P reports that the number of business bankruptcies in 2023 was 72 percent higher than 2022 and the highest in the last thirteen years.  2023 has been described as a mass extinction year for startup companies.  Pitchbook estimates that over 3,000 venture-backed startups failed in 2023.  2023 was a dismal year for companies going public.  Only 154 companies went public in 2023, half the annual rate of initial public offerings during the four years of the Trump Administration. 

Falling tax collections:  federal tax collections in 3Q 2023 are down 11 percent from 3Q 2022.  Tax collections are a good sign of the amount of private sector economic activity because the federal government takes a share of all private sector earnings and profits. 

Manufacturing Contracting: The Institute for Supply Management reports that the manufacturing sector has been contracting for the last 14 months.  S&P’s Chief Business Economist Chris Williamson says about manufacturing that “an increasing sense of gloom about the near-term outlook has meanwhile hit hiring and led to a further major pull-back in purchasing activity.”  So much for blue collar Joe.

Declines in Temporary Employment: Temporary employees are easier to lay off than permanent employees.  As a result, temporary employment falls more rapidly than permanent employment as the economy enters a recession.  According to the BLS, employment in temporary services has fallen for 15 straight months. 

Jonathan Turley has compiled a handy lists of state governments that oppose free speech. Scroll down for the complete list.

In Missouri v. Biden, the Fifth Circuit found that the federal government engaged in acts of coerced censorship by pressuring social media platforms to “remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites.” In this instance, Big Brother wasn’t doing the censorship itself. Rather, it was leaning on Big Tech to do it for them.

The Fifth Circuit found that coerced speech violated the First Amendment rights of individuals on that platform in a decision handed down on September 8.

Given the obvious importance and the constitutional questions raised in this matter, the Supreme Court decided to take up the matter on appeal.

Predictably, 24 Democratic Attorneys General filed on a brief asking the court to overturn the Fifth Circuit’s decision. That is, these states believe that it is OK for the federal government to pressure Facebook, Instagram, X and other social media sites to take down content posted by people like you and I that the government doesn’t like.

Somewhere up in heaven, George Orwell is thinking to himself “man, did I call this or what!”

Turley’s list of anti-free speech states appears below:

Arizona

Colorado

Connecticut

Delaware

Hawaii

Illinois

Maine

Maryland

Massachusetts

Michigan

Minnesota

Nevada

New Jersey

New Mexico,

New York

Oregon

Pennsylvania

Rhode Island

Vermont

Washington

Wisconsin

District of Columbia

Record numbers of members are leaving Congress.  That means that there’s a more pressing need for information on where politicians stand than in 2022 or past cycles. 

GOUSA’s rating system is unique in that we are the only organization that rates based on a comprehensive assessment of where politicians stand on multiple dimensions of opportunity.  That’s powerful information for anyone who wants an America where everyone can thrive; where everyone can live the life that they wish to lead. 

Here are some stats on retirements

As of mid-December of 2023, 40 of the 535 members of Congress have announced that they are leaving. 

At this same point in 2022, there were 30 that announced that they were leaving.  At this time in 2020 and 2018 there were 32.

The more open seats, the more rating work we have to do because we have limited prior voting records to use in researching candidates. 

In short, GOUSA needs your help.  If you haven’t joined our ratings team, hit the volunteer button on our home page. 

And please don’t be intimidated.  This is a true group effort.  We’ll have training, team activities and help sessions all throughout 2024.  Like you, we are concerned, motivated individuals like yourself that want to make America the Land of Opportunity again.

Young Americans are turning thumbs down to the statist policies of the Democrats.  Polls show Trump leading Biden among 18-35 year olds.  But it’s not just the USA.  Young people are rejecting socialism and the parties of the left throughout the world.

The most recent NBC poll shows Donald Trump beating Joe Biden by four points among 18 to 35 year olds.  Trump also has a four point margin over Biden among all voters.

This is a seismic shift in the views of young voters.  In the 2020 election, Biden had a 26 point lead among voters between the ages of 18 and 35 reports the Daily Mail 

But its not just the United States. 

Young people are rallying to candidates with a conservative and free market message throughout the world.

Young voters were the key to libertarian Javier Milei’s victory in the Argentine presidential election. 

Milei promised to stop inflation through a sound money policy; cut public spending by 15 percent; and stop rampant corruption.

Milei got 56 percent of the vote in the November 19 election.

In his victory speech, Milei said that his victory marks the beginning of the reconstruction of Argentina. 

“Today we retake the path that made this country great.  Today we embrace the ideas of libertarianism.  The model of decadence has come to an end.”

Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world.  Today, more than half of all Argentines are poor or destitute.  Inflation is 143 percent a year.  The

And it doesn’t stop there.

North of the border, in Canada, Pierre Poilievre’s free market message is winning over young voters. 

Poilievre’s stock speeches address issues like inflation and loose monetary policy; Canada’s housing shortage, free speech and cutting Canada’s bloated and oppressive government bureaucracy.  He’s an eco-modernist backing technological solutions, not taxes, to the climate change question. 

And importantly, Poilievre’s upbeat and making it fun to be a conservative again. 

Young people throughout the world are rejecting socialism and the bureaucratic, high tax parties of the left.  This includes Joe Biden and the Democrats. 

Young people are increasingly aware that freedom and free markets are the key to a better future. Our research and rating system shows exactly which politicians have a pro-freedom, pro-opportunity agenda and which ones don’t.

The percentage of young adults that live with their parents is higher now than at any time since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Almost one in two now live with parents.

The inability of young people to form their own households is a long-term negative for American society.

Moving out of one’s parent’s home is an important marker on the road to independent adulthood.

But today, young people are finding it difficult to strike out on their own. 

Young people were harder hit than older Americans from job and income losses from the COVID lockdowns.  Now they’re facing an unstable job market, the hangover from the high cost of college and student debt, and falling income in real terms.

However, the biggest barrier to independent living is probably sky-high rental and housing prices.

Marriage and family are for most people a source of personal happiness and a fulfilling life.

The inability of young people to form their own households will inhibit marriage and birth rates.  Married couples want their own space and to live their lives outside of parental authority.  Unaffordable rents and home prices are causing young people to delay getting married and having children.

Though marriage rates and average family size have declined over the past fifty years, Americans still want the joys of family life. 

In fact, the percentage of Americans that view three or more children as ideal in 2023 is higher than at any time since the start of the 1970s.  According to Gallup, almost 50 percent of Americans view three or more children as ideal.  Only 2 percent of Americans view zero children as ideal.

The early years of adulthood are a critical time in our lives.  Until now, it is the stage of life in which so many important life decisions are made.

High housing costs and a bad economy limit the flexibility of young Americans to explore life’s possibilities including those concerning marriage and family and to make those choices that produce the greatest happiness and fulfilment in the long-run.

There’s plenty of evidence of rigged elections and vote fraud in Democratic Party primary elections.  Why is it so hard for the media to acknowledge that the same thing goes on in general elections? 

These days if a Republican complains about vote fraud and rigged elections, the media thumbs its collective nose and the Department of Justice hands down indictments … against the Republican. 

To avoid getting into trouble, in this post I’ll highlight election rigging and voter fraud in cases where both candidates are members of a protected group–Democrats. 

Evidence abounds that Democrats are rigging and committing voter fraud in their own elections. 

This is true of national elections.  Just look at the ever-shifting rules of the Democratic party’s presidential nominating process.

Since 1972 The first two contests of the presidential primary season have been the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.  For the Dems, no more. 

To protect an unpopular Joe Biden, who was shellacked in both states in 2020, the Democrats have suddenly changed their primary schedule to the benefit of … Joe Biden. 

Coincidence?  Hardly.  As Robert F. Kennedy (who is both a Democrat and a Kennedy, two protected classes) is clear on that.  He outlines how the party has rigged the election in a WSJ piece titled The Democratic Party Rigs the Primaries. 

Or consider the use of superdelegates.  In 2016, the Democratic Party’s superdelegates arguably kept Bernie Sanders from having a shot at the nomination.  Sanders himself claimed that the election was rigged. 

The rules changed in 2020.  Now the superdelegates are back for 2024. 

When rules change with every election that pretty strong evidence that they are being rigged to someone’s benefit. 

There’s also plenty of evidence of voter fraud in Democrat v. Democrat contests.  Yet the media would have us believe that there’s absolutely no funny business going on in Democrat v. Republican contests. 

One such case involves the Democratic Party primary in the mayor’s race in Bridgeport, CT.  The loser in the race has produced video evidence of an operative of his opponent stuffing the ballot box with illegal absentee ballots. 

There’s also evidence that the incumbent’s operatives strong armed and intimidated voters and of felons voting in the election. 

The corporate media would have us believe that some geniuses in Bridgeport just thought up the idea of stuffing the ballot box with “absentee” votes or invented the idea of strong-arming voters. 

A more reasonable explanation is that this is learned behavior.  Behavior learned from other Democratic Party operatives and corrupt election officials. 

The USA Today’s “fact check” claims that there’s no evidence of fraud in mail-in balloting.  So, what are you going to believe—the USA Today or what you see in the video from Bridgeport?  

In another case in Mississippi, the losing candidate in a Hinds County, MS supervisor’s election claims that operatives for his opponent tampered with voting machines to ensure his loss. 

To their credit the local media—Jackson lies in Hinds county–has covered this story.  I was unable to find any mention of it in the left-leaning corporate media. 

This brings us full circle to our original question. 

If there’s ample evidence of election rigging and voter fraud in Democratic Party primary elections, there’s no reason to believe that the same operatives and election officials are not doing the exact same thing in the general election as well. 

If someone asked you what you thought of Joe Biden, what would you say? 

The Associated Press asked Americans what word or phrase came to mind when you think of Joe Biden.

The results of the survey appear below.

26 percent had some variation of too old.  Another 15 percent had some variant of confused or idiot.  Only 24 percent had any type of positive association with Biden.

My answer would be “demented fool.”

Here’s Biden claiming on Monday that he literally (yes, his own words) talked Senator Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

There are a couple of problems with Biden’s story. First, Biden wasn’t in Washington at the time. He was a 22 year old college student in Delaware. Second, Thurmond voted against the Act. 

The founders saw energy as an essential attribute for the Presidency.

Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No 70 that “a feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government.  A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.  Taking it for granted, therefore, that all men of sense will agree in the necessity of an energetic Executive.”

The last superpower to be run by a leader as infirm as Biden was the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union had a string of aging and ailing authoritarian leaders–Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko—in the decade preceding its collapse. 

Will our aging and feeble political class and their enablers in the media cause the United States to have the same fate?  Only time will tell. 

Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North of Richmond could be the anthem of our times. 

Anthony sings of the corruption in Washington, deep state spying, inflation and the rotten economy.  Most Americans can identify.

Rich Men North of Richmond is at the top of iTunes chart.  In number two place is Anthony’s Ain’t Got a Dollar. 

The anthem of millions of forgotten Americans

Have a listen.  Check out his other stuff too. 

Best of all, Anthony is just an ordinary guy. 

Joe Biden wants us to think that the economy is doing great.  In fact, the Biden economy has large numbers of Americans living on the edge. 

Morning Consult survey found that only 32 percent of Gen Z report that they could pay for an unanticipated emergency expense with cash.  Just two quarters ago, 39 percent of Gen Z could handle a $400 emergency expense. 

The normal pattern of saving over one’s lifetime is that as one ages holdings of financial assets should grow as one saves for retirement. 

However, the Morning Consult survey shows that Millennials and Gen X are making very little progress in building wealth.  

The survey found that only 36 percent of Millennials and 41 percent of Gen X said that they could handle an unanticipated $400 expense.  These percentages are not materially different from Gen Z. 

Seen differently, Gen Xers are now more than twenty years into their adult lives and their finances are not much more stable than the finances of new college graduates. 

The survey also asked whether the $400 expense would require putting off payment of other bills.  38 percent of Gen Z and 39 percent of Millennials and Gen X would have to put off payment of other bills. 

It’s not just Americans.  A video posed by TikTok user Simone (@simonesdays) shows how after paying taxes and bills, the paycheck from her CAD75,000 corporate job leaves her with exactly in $80 spending money for the next two weeks. 

Her TikTok video has been viewed 2.7 million times and has 184,000 likes as of Friday the 4th. 

Here are some of the comments on her TikTok page from other young people struggling to get by. 

At the core of the financial struggles of young Americans is a lack of economic opportunity.  The inability of the Millennials and Gen X to improve their finances so that they are closer to the Baby Boomers than Gen Z is particularly concerning.

Fitch ratings announced that it has downgraded the credit rating of the U.S. government from AAA to AA+  Every American is going to pay for Washington’s irresponsibility though higher taxes and higher interest rates. 

Fitch’s announcement of their rating change highlights the massive amount of borrowing by the Biden Administration in addition to the decades of fiscal irresponsibility and governance failures in Washington and many state capitals: 

“In Fitch’s view, there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years, including on fiscal and debt matters, notwithstanding the June bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt limit until January 2025. The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management. In addition, the government lacks a medium-term fiscal framework, unlike most peers, and has a complex budgeting process. These factors, along with several economic shocks as well as tax cuts and new spending initiatives, have contributed to successive debt increases over the last decade. Additionally, there has been only limited progress in tackling medium-term challenges related to rising social security and Medicare costs due to an aging population.“

Fitch projects that Biden’s spending will blow the top off U.S. debt levels.  Interest on the debt will consume 10 percent of all government spending by 2025.  Interest rates are going to be higher making it even more difficult on young Americans afford a home. 

“Fitch forecasts a [general government] deficit of 6.6% of GDP in 2024 and a further widening to 6.9% of GDP in 2025. The larger deficits will be driven by weak 2024 GDP growth, a higher interest burden and wider state and local government deficits of 1.2% of GDP in 2024-2025 (in line with the historical 20-year average). The interest-to-revenue ratio is expected to reach 10% by 2025 (compared to 2.8% for the ‘AA’ median and 1% for the ‘AAA’ median) due to the higher debt level as well as sustained higher interest rates compared with pre-pandemic levels.“

The response from the Biden administration has been predictable.  Hit the snooze alarm and spend, spend, spend. 

S&P downgraded the U.S. in 2011 and China’s Chengxin International Credit Rating service downgraded the U.S. in May of this year. 

The Republican party lags far behind the Democrats in attracting young voters.  What is the Canadian Conservative Party doing right and the Republican Party doing wrong? 

Polling data from Canada shows that the Conservative Party has a significant lead among Gen Zs and Millennials over Justin Trudeau’s ruling Liberal Party. 

A June 2023 Ipsos poll puts Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives at 37 percent overall compared top 32 percent for the Liberal Party. 

Importantly, Conservatives are ahead among Canadians of every generation. 

Conservatives have an 18 point lead over the Liberal Party among Gen Z and a 1 point lead among Millennials. 

This is enough for a huge swing in Canadian politics.  Like the United States, Canada has a first past-the-post electoral system control requires only winning the most seats, not a majority of the overall vote since Canada has a multiparty system.  Trudeau’s ruling Liberals only got 33 percent in the last Canadian federal election.  Yet they control the national government. 

Contrast that with the United States.  Sixty-five percent of voters 30 and younger voted for the Democrats in 2022, up from 62 percent in 2020. 

Young voters were the key to the Democrats maintaining control of the U.S. Senate in 2022.  Were it not for younger voters, Republicans would now control both houses of Congress. 

Young people are fed up with Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the relics governing our country.  A New York Times survey found that only one percent of 18 to 29 year-olds strongly approve of the job that Joe Biden’s been doing.  That’s one percent. 

Yet the Republican Party badly trails among younger voters and has no identifiable plans or strategy for outreach to twenty- and thirty-somethings. 

For a glimpse at what Canadian Conservatives are doing right, here’s Jordan Peterson’s interview with Pierre Poilievre.

Lesson 1: Communicate.  Notice how clearly and calmly Poilievre speaks.  Contrast that with Joe Biden’s mumblings or Kamala Harris’s word salads.  Bureaucratic speak and empty talking point won’t do it.  Younger voters want leaders that express themselves in terms the average person can understand. 

Lesson 2: Have principles.  Poilievre’s statement on the importance of the free market is more forthright than anything that’s come from an American Republican politician since Ronald Reagan.  The Republican Party needs politicians that can speak to free market economics or other conservative ideals with the same passion as Mr. Poilievre. 

Lesson 3: Be for change.  Poilievre clearly contrasts the Conservative agenda with the of the ruling Liberals.  Young Americans are looking for change too.  Surveys show that more than 90 percent of young Americans are either angry or frustrated with the federal government. 

Lesson 4: Have an agenda for younger voters.  Notice how Poilievre talks about housing costs and opportunities—two issues of core concern for younger voters.  being against won’t do it.  The Republican Party needs an agenda that speaks specifically to the concerns of twenty- and thirty-year-old Americans. 

Republican politicians and operatives should look to Canada as a model on how to broaden the base by brining younger voters into the coalition.  If not, Republicans will find itself in the political wilderness, unable to win elections or influence the future direction of the United States. 

Karl Marx wrote that communism would solve the unemployment problem created by capitalism.  Evidence from China shows he had it backwards.

In 1847 Marx wrote: 

“Big industry constantly requires a reserve army of unemployed workers for times of overproduction. The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it, i.e., when the overpopulation is the greatest.”

But does his critique of capitalism hold? 

China provides a natural experiment.  Were Marx correct that socialism solves the unemployment problem then we’d expect to see little or no unemployment in China. 

China is the world largest communist regime.  The Chinese Communist Party has been in power for 74 years.  Surely they must have gotten it right by now. 

Well, not so much.

The figure below contains the unemployment rate for young Chinese (between 16 and 24).  Their reported unemployment rate is almost 20 percent.  And since the Chinese government often fudges its figures, the actual youth unemployment rate may well be far higher. 

Compare that to the United States.  Youth unemployment in the United States never got above 20 percent.

This comparison show that socialism, even when practiced in its most extreme form (communism), doesn’t solve the unemployment problem.  In fact, it makes it worse.

The figure below from my forthcoming book contains average unemployment rates among young people between the ages of 20 and 34 for the advanced countries of the world (OECD member countries) over the past ten years.

The chart clearly shows that unemployment rates are lower in countries with economies that are closer to the capitalist economic model (more economic freedom) than those with larger public sectors and more regulation (less economic freedom).

Bottom line: socialism fails young people wherever its been tried.  And that’s a fact.   

Gallup recently asked about pride in America.  The results show a large gap between the parties with Republicans having much more pride in America than Democrats.  So isn’t it a problem that the people with the least pride in the USA control all of our major institutions?  You bet it is. 

The fundamental rule of management is that you want the people at the top to be dedicated and enthusiastic about the organization and its mission.  If you are in business, you want the CEO to be a relentless optimist, a cheerleader for the company.  How confident or dedicated would you be in your work if the CEO of your company were constantly running down the organization?  Not too much I suspect.

Or consider your house of worship.  You wouldn’t want your parish priest, rabbi or pastor to be a non-believer or atheist.  Unless it’s clear that the leader passionately believes, followers won’t believe or follow either.  The pews will be empty. 

However, when it comes to America’s major institutions, the fundamental rule of management is turned on its head.

The people that control all the major institutions of American life are the people that have the least pride in the United States of America. 

Below are the results from Gallup regarding pride in America.  Barely half of all Democrats are very or extremely proud to be American versus 84 percent of Republicans.

Or looked at it another way, 48 percent of Democrats are just so-so on the country we live in.  They say “meh” about the USA.  

Yet the Democrats that control all our major institutions: Hollywood, the media, higher education, primary education, the arts, administrative government and in the last few years the military and big business too. 

Ponder this: In the 2020 presidential election, Democrats received 92 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia.  That percentage is far higher than in any state (next was Vermont at 66 percent).  If DC Democrats are like Democrats nationally (if anything, DC Democrats are more liberal) then it’s likely the case the bureaucrats that run our national government have less pride in the country than any comparably sized group anywhere in the United States.  How messed up is that?

The reason that most Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track is that the wrong people, the people with the least pride in the USA, are the ones running every major institution in America. 

We need to get back to management rule number one; have people that believe in and take pride in America be the ones in control of our major institutions if America is ever to be a great country again.   

The media and Democrats portray young Americans as firmly behind affirmative action.  This isn’t true.  Young Americans are ready to put racial discrimination behind us. 

Don’t believe the media and Democrats on the Supreme Court decision to end racial discrimination in college admissions.   

Democrats and the media portray Gen Z and Millennials as fully behind the use of race in college admissions.  The truth is much different. 

A plurality of Americans oppose the use of race in college admissions.  A survey by the Pew Foundation found that 50 percent of all Americans opposed the use of race versus only 33 percent that approved.  Hispanics were equally divided, 39 percent to 39 percent.  Less than half of blacks (47 percent) approve of affirmative action.

Still, universities cling to the use of race.  This demonstrates how out of touch higher ed has become with middle America. 

Young people are at best split on the issue of affirmative action.  Just as many young people disapprove of using race for college admissions and hiring as do. 

Harvard University’s Youth Poll regularly asks Americans between the ages of 18 to 29 whether “qualified minorities should be given special preferences in hiring and education.”

In the most recent poll, only 30 percent agreed with affirmative action.  33 percent disagreed.  This that held strong opinions were more unfavorable toward affirmative action.  Only 12 percent strongly agreed with affirmative action while 18 percent were strongly opposed. 

Given that young people are at most evenly divided on the issue, the predominance of young backers in the media reflects not reality but instead the media’s preferred narrative. 

Instead of attacking the ruling, President Biden should stop dividing Americans based on race.  His own record on racial matters is a dismal one.    

Polling by Harvard shows that most young people don’t like the way Biden is handling race relations.  58 percent of 18–29-year-olds disapprove of Biden’s handling of race relations, only 38 percent approve. 

55 percent of blacks and 38 percent of Democrats between 18 and 29 disapprove of how Biden’s handling race relations.

The Daily Mail asked voters for their one-word descriptions of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.   The responses of Democrats and Republicans on the leading candidate of their own party is telling.

Most Republicans see Donald Trump in a positive light.  The words that Republicans most associated with Trump were “leader”, “patriot”, “businessman”, “awesome”.   All good stuff. 

The word cloud below is from the Daily Mail site.

Now contrast that to how Democrats see Biden in the word cloud below.

“Old” came through in huge bold letters.  Democrats themselves see Joe Biden as a relic, not up to the job.  “Incompetent” also came through pretty strongly among Democrats. 

Most Americans have had enough of Biden and his far-left policies.  Biden’s approval has been underwater for almost two full years. 

A majority of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. 

And that’s especially true of young people.  A New York Times poll just last year found that 94 percent of young Americans don’t want Joe Biden to be the Democratic party’s nominee in 2024. 

The Democratic Party isn’t listening to the voices of young people or even their own voters.  

Instead, they shut down fresh, new ideas like those of Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard. 

Here at GOUSA, we offer new ideas for making America the land of opportunity.

Ideas like rating politicians on whether they support and vote for greater opportunity for all Americans. 

And we hold them accountable with our OppScore opportunity scoring system.

Democrats and most of the legacy media are elated at the indictment of Donald Trump on charges relating to the possession of classified material.  They should moderate their glee.  Politically motivated prosecutions often don’t go as intended. 

The indictment of former president Donald Trump on charges relating to the possession of classified documents was met with glee by the media and Democrats.

Democrats didn’t bother to even maintain the pretense that the prosecution had nothing to do with their political objectives.  Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) celebrated saying the indictment is “one of many steps” toward eliminating Trump.  Cori Bush (D-MO) tweeted out a canned clip of women furiously applauding.

MSNBC expressed their “excitement” at the indictment and as upfront in their hopes that the indictment would serve the political goal of taking Trump out of the 2024 race. 

However, Americans see the charges as politically motivated.  According to an ABC New/Ipsos poll, 47 percent of American adults see the charges as politically motivated.  Only 37 percent think that the Biden DOJ is operating on the level. 

Democrats and the media should temper their glee.  Political prosecutions often don’t go the way that their backers hope that they do.

The most notable case of politically motivated prosecutions was the 1936-1938 show trials in the Soviet Union.  The trials were directed at members of the regime accused of being Trotskyists and members of the Right Opposition.

Those put on trial included Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamanev.  Zinoviev and Kamenev, along with Stalin, were the leaders of the Soviet Union following the debilitation and death of Lenin.  Zinoviev and Kamenev were on the wrong side of a power struggle with Stalin over the policy of Socialism in One County.

Defendants in the Moscow trials were accused of trying to assassinate Stalin and restore capitalism in the Soviet Union.  As documented by Stephen Kotkin and other scholars, the charges were preposterous.   

All defendants were found guilty and shot by the NKVD. 

Despite the obviously political nature of the trials, many left-wing “intellectuals” in the United States approved of the trials and their outcome.   In 1938, 150 Americans leftist supporters of the Soviet Union issued “A Statement by American Progressives” in support of the Moscow Show Trials. Among the signers were playwright Lillian Hellman and poet Langston Hughes.  Hellman never recounted her support for the trials. 

However, there was considerable blowback in the West.  The New York Times wrote: “It is as if twenty years after Yorktown somebody in power at Washington found it necessary for the safety of the State to send to the scaffold Thomas Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Hamilton, Jay and most of their associates. The charge against them would be that they conspired to hand over the United States to George III.”  

The trials also fractured support for the Soviet Union in the west.  Communist party leaders in most western countries denounced the Moscow show trials and led many to break with Stalinism.

Politically motivated prosecutions are problematic.  There are a lot of unknowns as to how a trial involving former president Trump would go.  The case may satisfy the Democrat’s political goals, variously defied as keeping Trump off the ballot or, the opposite, ensuring that Republican anger will increase support for the former president. 

Th indictment sets in motion a process the outcome of which is hard to predict.

The run up to the trial and courtroom proceedings would provide Mr. Trump with a platform to make his case.

The clear disparities between the treatment of Donald Trump on one hand and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden regarding similar acts calls into question the integrity of the Justice Department. 

Finally, the indictment make America look like a banana republic in the eyes of the world.  It opens up America to criticism by foreign leaders, such as Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who previously labeled Alvin Bragg’s charged against Trump as political. 

One wonders whether they still teach Orwell in schools these days.  Almost one in three members of Gen Z says that they would accept government surveillance cameras in their home.    

A new survey from the Cato Institute asked Americans about their view on government surveillance and central bank digital currencies. 

The survey found that large numbers of young Americans would be happy having Big Brother watching them. 

Almost one third of 18- to 29-year-olds said that they would favor having the government install surveillance cameras in their home to monitor them for illegal activity.    Only 6 percent of Baby Boomers would allow Big Brother into their homes.   

It’s not just their homes.  Gen Z also is happy having Big Brother in their pockets.  32 percent of Gen Zers support CBDCs.

In fact, 24 percent of Gen Z would support CBDC even if it meant that government could freeze the bank accounts of political protestors. 

That’s exactly what happened in the Canadian trucker protests in which the government ordered banks to freeze the accounts o truckers and other protesting the government’s authoritarian (and unnecessary) COVID lockdown. 

History shows that when governments have the ability to squelch dissent they will do it. 

Whether it is the East German Stasi, the Chinese Communist Party’s social credit system or the National Security Agency’s domestic bulk data collection program (for which they lied to Congress about its existence), the tools of government surveillance are the tools of totalitarianism. 

It’s not just woke ideologies infecting college campuses these days.  Here’s a roundup of news stories of violent, fraudulent and just plain stupid things that college professors are doing.

Professors gone wild!

A friend who, like many GOUSA members and followers has spent a lot of time in academics, told me that there are two kinds of professors on college faculties today: one type consists of faculty that are truly insane.  The other type are faculty that merely act like they are insane to keep their jobs.

Without trying to separate the flotsam from the jetsam, here’s a quick roundup of some of the crazier items in just the month of May concerning those highly credentialed individuals that are molding young minds (snicker, snicker).

Hunter College (New York) professor threatens reporter with machete.  Amazingly she was fired for threatening to decapitate the reporter.  In higher ed, it’s OK to have lost your mind, but chopping off someone else’s head is still a no-no (at least for now).      

Michigan State University professor sued for forcing students to fund “progressive’ group.   According to the plaintiffs “Wisner allegedly forced her roughly 600 students to pay a $99 membership fee to “The Rebellion Community” as part of her class requirements during the spring 2023 semester.  Barbieri and Radomski soon discovered that Wisner was the creator and controller of The Rebellion Community and alleged she used the estimated $60,000 collected from them and their peers to fund groups like Planned Parenthood that go against their anti-abortion beliefs, according to the 88-page complaint filed last week.”  Donations still being accepted to the Human Fund. 

Northern Idaho College professor assaults college board member.  “According to NIC, the assistant professor, Zackary Shallbetter reportedly went to Banducci’s office, walked past reception and verbally threatened him.  That’s before he then reportedly threw a bucket of liquid over Banducci, his desk, computer and other office equipment.”    

University of Albany (New York) professor arrested for disrupting a pro-life event, struggling with police

University of Michigan professor claims boycott of target is ‘literal terrorism’.  None of the 3,000 dead Americans on 9/11 could be reached for comment.    

Stanford University professor claims aliens live on earth.  Call the men in Black.  We’’ll accept that maybe visitors from other worlds inhabit faculty lounges, but aliens (from space) in society large, no.  Well maybe Cambridge. 

And here’s one that show that it’s not just professors at American universities that are nuts:

Delhi University professor arrested for impersonating Indian state Lieutenant Governor.  “According to the officials, Singh had called the Vice Chancellor of the IP University twice over the landline phone impersonating the LG.  In the first instance, Singh got his leave sanctioned and in the second instance on September 30, 2022, he tried to get his sister appointed as faculty in the English Department of the GGSIPU.”  

The U.S. military used to be held in the highest esteem by the public.  No more.  Public confidence in the military has plummeted.  The military has gone woke and is increasingly becoming a joke. 

Contrast the way that the Navy used to recruit sailors with today.

Here’s how the Navy used to do it:

Here’s how the Navy does it today:

Despite a military budget close to $1 trillion a year, the Navy and the other services are facing a recruitment crisis.

That shouldn’t be a surprise.  Why go through all the trouble of joining the Navy for drag shows when you can find than at your local public library or elementary school?

The problem is not with the ordinary soldier.  Rather, it’s with the top brass that have become overly politicized. 

A 2022 poll showed that 62 percent of Americans say that they have lost some or a lot of confidence in the military because it has become overly politicized. 

In that same poll, only 48 percent of Americans said that they had a great deal of confidence in the military.  In 2019, the last time that the poll was taken during the Trump Administration, 63 percent of Americans said that they had a great deal of confidence in the military.

It’s not just that the values of General Milley and company don’t reflect those of middle America.  It’s that they insist on rubbing our noses in it.  They treat small town and middle-class Americans—the demographics most likely to join the services—as the deplorables they think we are.

We can laugh at this one episode.  You can be sure that the late night shows will.  But this is not an isolated case.  Consider the set of military recruitment ads in the video below. 

Russia, China, Italy, Brazil and even Germany portray military service as filled with adventure, action, travel and being around cool stuff like tanks, planes and ships.  

And the U.S. military: progressive politics. 

It’s no wonder few want to join.

With Joe Biden likely to announce a run for a second term, a Granite State Poll shows Biden overwhelmingly rejected by NH Dems, especially younger ones.

A Granite State Poll released on April 20 shows that Joe Biden has almost no support whatsoever among young Democrats in New Hampshire and tepid support at best among all New Hampshire Dems.   

With Biden’s numbers in rock bottom among young voters, will the GOP finally come up with an agenda and candidate that’s attractive to Americans under the age of 45?  Time will tell. 

When asked who they would like to see as the Democratic party’s 2024 nominee, only nine percent of likely Democratic voters between the ages of 18 and 34 chose Joe Biden.  Just. Nine. Percent.

50 percent of young New Hampshire Democrats state that they definitely do not want Biden to run.  Another 23 percent say that they probably would want to see Biden run again.  That 73 percent of young New Hampshire Democrats that are thumbs down on Biden 2024.    

And 49 percent of young New Hampshire Democrats have an unfavorable view of Joe Biden.

Biden’s numbers among all New Hampshire Democrats are also awful.

23 percent of all likely Democratic primary voters have an unfavorable impression of Biden.  Scranton Joe is particularly disliked among working class Democrats.  44 percent of likely Democratic voters that make less than $45,000 and 40 percent with a high school degree or less have an unfavorable impression of Biden.  

Joe Biden’s numbers are better than one national Democratic politician—his own Vice President.  44 percent of likely Democratic voters that make less than $45,000 and 53 percent with a high school degree or less have an unfavorable impression of Kamala Harris.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who just announced his candidacy has 27 percent favorable/17 percent unfavorable among young New Hampshire democrats.  Kennedy’s opposition to the deep state, corporatism, and endless wars contrasts with the authoritarianism, cronyism and militarism of the Biden Administration.

Kennedy’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show is well worth watching. 

GOUSA hasn’t yet published a rating for Robert Kennedy.  A rating will be available once more information becomes available about his positions.  

To quote Forrest Gump: Stupid is as stupid does.  The Biden Administration now wants homebuyers with good credit to subsidize homebuyers with bad credit.  You’d think that Washington politicians would have learned something from the 2008 financial crisis.  No.  Stupid is as stupid does.   

The Biden Administration is making chumps out of every hard-working American that carefully saved up for a down payment on a new home.  New pricing rules that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac plan to implement will force home buyers with good credit that put a lot of money down to subsidize those with bad credit. 

Here are the details from the New York Post:

“Loan level price adjustments (LLPAs) are upfront fees based on factors such as a borrower’s credit score and the size of their down payment. The fees are typically converted into percentage points that alter the buyer’s mortgage rate.

Under the revised LLPA pricing structure, a home buyer with a 740 FICO credit score and a 15% to 20% down payment will face a 1% surcharge – an increase of 0.750% compared to the old fee of just 0.250%.  When absorbed into a long-term mortgage rate, the increase is the equivalent of slightly less than a quarter percentage point in mortgage rate. On a $400,000 loan with a 6% mortgage rate, that buyer could expect their monthly payment to rise by about $40, according to calculations by Stevens.

Meanwhile, buyers with credit scores of 679 or lower will have their fees slashed, resulting in more favorable mortgage rates. For example, a buyer with a 620 FICO credit score with a down payment of 5% or less gets a 1.75% fee discount – a decrease from the old fee rate of 3.50% for that bracket.”

The result, according to industry pros: pricier monthly mortgage payments for most homebuyers — an ugly surprise for those who worked for years to build their credit, only to face higher costs than they expected as part of a housing affordability push by the US Federal Housing Finance Agency.

“It’s going to be a challenge trying to explain to somebody that says, ‘I worked my whole life for high credit and I’ve put a lot of money down and you’re telling me that’s a negative now?’ That’s a hard conversation to have,” one worried Arizona-based mortgage loan originator told The Post.

Subsidizing bad credit is exactly what led to the 2008 financial crisis.   Making those that carefully managed their finances pay an extra $500 a year (more if you have a larger mortgage) is unjust.  It punishes saving and thrift and rewards irresponsible behavior.   

What makes this worse is that Fannie and Freddie have a near monopoly on the mortgage market.  Sixty percent of all mortgages are held by these two quasi-government agencies.  So chances are when you get a mortgage from your bank or lender, you are going to have to pay a lot more if you have good credit.

The Biden administration is doing to the housing market exactly what they are doing for student loans.  Making those that behaved responsibly bail out the irresponsible.

The new rules also demonstrate how deeply politicized the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has become.  The FHFA’s mission is to regulate Fannie and Freddie.  These toxic twins of the mortgage market have been in bankruptcy for the past fifteen years.  Ostensibly the reason that they are still being overseen by the FHFA  is to restore them to a sound and solvent condition.  So how does giving loans to people with bad credit in a housing market with inflated valuations (courtesy of the Federal Reserve) restore these massive government entities to solvency.  It doesn’t. 

However, if you view Fannie and Freddie as honeypots for Washington politicians it all makes sense.    

Feel like your government is taking you for a chump?  You are not alone.

GOUSA believes that responsible behavior be rewarded, irresponsible behavior discouraged.  Government does exactly the opposite.  These new rules should be an affront to every responsible homeowner that carefully built up their credit and put money away to buy the home of their dreams.   

So make your voice heard.  Join with us.  Or kick in a few bucks on our donations page.  You will be glad that you did. 

A new CNBC survey finds that three in four Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are under stress because of their personal finances.

Just over two years into the Biden and Americans are under a huge degree of financial stress.  Seventy percent of Americans report being stressed about their personal finances.  Stress levels are highest among young Americans, a voting group that supported Biden by a 2-1 margin. 

37 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are very stressed over their finances.

Two in three 18- to 34-year-olds told CNBC that they are living paycheck to paycheck (versus 58 percent of all Americans). 

Americans are poorer since Biden took office.  Inflation has eaten into wages.  Real wages (wages after accounting for inflation) have declined by 4 percent.  Prices are up by 14 percent, wages up by only 10 percent.   

Stock market values are also down after accounting for inflation.  The S&P 500 closed today (April 14) at 4137.  After inflation, that’s a 5 percent loss in value since Biden took office. 

The average rate on a 30-year mortgage is now 6.3 percent, more than twice the 2.77 percent rate when Biden took office. Housing affordability is at a record low.

Inflation, economic instability and high interest rates are the primary sources of stress.  All of these are a direct result of the Biden Administrations reckless spending and borrowing policies.

Interestingly, student loans hardly enter American’s stress levels.  Less than one in four 18- to 34-year-olds (and one in seven Americans overall) report being stressed over student loan debt.   Only 27 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds told CNBC that they have any type of student debt.  The fact of the matter is the student loans are an elite concern and that Biden’s forgiveness plan amounts to welfare for the well off.

Biden’s economic policies are making Washington insiders richer and everyday Americans poorer.

The RESTRICT Act, which would ban TikTok, is far worse than that.  It’s largest assault on our First Amendment rights to speech and expression since the Patriot Act.  are behind it.

A group of establishment Republicans and Democrats are pushing the aptly-named RESTRICT Act, ostensibly to ban TikTok, but really to further clamp down on freedom of speech and expression in the United States. 

The bill would actually give the federal government the power to shut down any internet source from any foreign country or a company that operates in the United States that the government claims is affiliated with a foreign country. 

We all know where this is going.  Like Patriot Act 1.0, this Patriot Act 2.0 is ripe for abuse.  Trump supporters know all too well how the FBI used the Clinton dossier to trick FISA courts in to allowing them to spy on Americans.  The RESTRICT Act provides the deep state the power to shut down your access to information on their wars and other misdeeds.  You can be sure that they’ll use the RESTRICT Act to restrict your liberty in ways you can’t even imagine today.         

Here’s what Congressman Ron Paul had to say about the RESTRICT Act.

“Like the PATRIOT Act, the RESTRICT Act plays on people’s fears to make them silent while Congress takes away more of their liberty. This bill is a blatant violation of the First Amendment that the Founders intended to protect our right to engage in political speech and share political information and opinions with others. We should stop Congress from violating our right to discuss and share ideas on TikTok and elsewhere that challenge the political class.”

Banning TikTok is a bad idea on its face.  First, the content on TikTok and other social media sites is generated by Americans for the purpose of communicating with other Americans.  What the RESTRICT Act would do is stop Americans from freely communicating with other Americans.

If China wants to put propaganda on the site, so what?  After seeing tens of thousands of ad messages in our lifetime, Americans are pretty good at spotting lies.

Second, banning TikTok is anti-competitive. No surprise that Big Tech companies, and especially Meta, are the ones pushing for this legislation.  The reason is that TikTok is eating Instagram’s lunch.  Big Tech seeks to do with TikTok and ByteDance exactly what they did with Parler—use their political influence to run a competitor out of business.      

The RESTRICT Act cosponsors include ethe usual list of authoritarians from the Republican and Democratic establishments.  Here’s the list of original cosponsors:

Democratic Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Republican Sens. John Thune of South Dakota, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah. 

Bonus: Here’s a clip of the hapless Lindsay Graham (R-Endless War) claiming on Fox News that he doesn’t support the RESTRICT Act.  Actually, he’s a cosponsor:

And 14 more voted “present”

A total of 100 Democrats either voted against or voted present on a House resolution denouncing the horrors of socialism and opposing the implementation of socialist policies in America.

The list appears below—sorted by state and including vote position.  Since many GOUSA team members are from New England, I have highlighted the members from this six-state region. 

Every Republican member voted for the resolution.  Three were absent.    

Every Connecticut member voted against the resolution.  No word yet on when Connecticut plans to change its nickname from “The Constitution State” to “Workers of the World Unite!”

Three Massachusetts members – McGovern, Neal and Pressley voted against the resolution.  Surprisingly Katherine Clark (D-Cambridge) voted for the resolution.  One wonders if the Democratics Socialists of America are going to take back their endorsement of Clark.

Also voting against were Maine’s Pingree, Vermont’s Balint and Rhode Island’s Cicilline.

Both New Hampshire Democrats voted for the resolution.

Polls show that Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the future of the country and their personal economic situation. For too many Biden’s America is no longer land of opportunity.  GOUSA wants to change that.     

The March 2023 Wall Street Journal/National Opinion Research Center survey of Americans provides evidence of a growing pessimism about the economy and the future of our country.

By a 4 to 1 margin, most Americans think that the current state of the economy is either poor or not so good.  And a plurality of Americans – 47 percent – think that the economy is going to get worse in the last three quarters of this year. 

The primary concern among Americans is inflation.  65 percent of Americans view inflation as a major problem and 30 percent view inflation as a minor concern.  Only 4 percent of Americans are not concerned about inflation. 

The Biden economic agenda is clearly not working.  His spending programs are not the source of prosperity.  Rather, the massive increase in government spending and borrowing during the first two years of the Biden presidency are the cause of inflation and the loss of economic confidence in both the short- and long-term.    

According to the survey, only 21 percent of Americas are confident that their children will be better off than they are versus 78 percent that are not.  The Wall Street Journal reports that the percentage of Americans that have little or no confidence that life will be better for the next generation is the highest it’s been since they began to ask the question in 1990. 

Belief in economic mobility is also low.  The survey found that 44 percent of Americans thought that they did not have a good chance to improve their standard of living in the future. Only 28 thought they have opportunities for a better life. 

The survey also found that a majority of Americans—56 percent—no longer viewed a college education as worth the cost.

Here at GOUSA we are working to make America the land of opportunity again. 

Our research program identified 25 separate dimension of opportunity that are part of the five cardinal opportunity types—personal, economic, social, national and educational opportunity. 

Our OppScore system provides voters and the public with an indication of which politicians support and opportunity agenda and which do not.

If you’d like to learn more or become part of our opportunity research agenda, send us a note from the contact button below.  We are looking for volunteers that want to help restore the promise of opportunity to all Americans.   

This week Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is likely to indict Donald Trump on a case that would never, ever have been brought against a Democrat or anyone else for that matter.  Ever wondered what it’s like to live in a banana republic?  You are living in one now.

For a party that claims to care about “democracy” the Democrats are sure working hard to destroy your faith in every democratic institution.  This week George Soros-funded Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg may indict Donald Trump for the non-crime of paying hush money to stripped Stormy Daniels.

First, some facts.  It is not illegal to pay hush money.  Trump did absolutely nothing wrong.  Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz explains:

“The president is entitled to pay hush money to anyone he wants during a campaign. There are no restrictions on what a candidate can contribute to his own campaign.“

As constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley puts it, Bragg has no case:

It should be remembered that Donald Trump paid this money out of his own pocket.  Far worse are the many, many cases in which politicians had the government pay hush money n their behalf. 

The use of hush money and non-disclosure agreements negotiated and paid for by the government is quite common.  In fact, in Massachusetts, the use of hush money and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) is coming to the fore thanks to the work of State Auditor Diane DiZoglio. 

Auditor DiZoglio is looking into the use of NDAs in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, and the Democrats are having a fit.  Auditor DiZoglio herself was subject to such a gag order.  

Repeat: unlike Trump’s case which involved his own funds and his own attorney, when Massachusetts and other governments pay out settlements and then seal the case, this is taxpayer money and NDAs negotiated by government attorneys on the public payroll.

It’s no wonder that Mark Twain called politicians America’s only native criminal class.

There’s more.  It’s not just states.  The federal government that routinely pays hush money to make troublesome cases go away for members of Congress: $17 million dollars in all.   Want to find out who this money was paid to?  Good luck.  They ain’t telling.  All the victims have NDAs.

To the ordinary citizen, this stuff shows how corrupt the legal system has become.  Prosecutors should bring cases for which they have reasonable legal grounds, not to get headlines or pursue vendettas against those with whom they have political differences.

A majority of Americans no longer trust state courts to deliver justice.  According to the National Center for State Courts, 49 percent of Americans now say that state courts, like the one the Mr. Bragg practices in, do not deliver equal justice compared to 43 percent of Americans that do.

Politicized prosecutions like that of Mr. Trump are a toxin on the legal system.

When those who, like DA Bragg, are supposed to treat the law with respect instead bastardize the system because they have a political ax to grind, they shred the constitution and whatever respect remains among the general public for the institutions of American life.

Biden’s Medicare plans look like they came straight out of the playbook of the AARP.  His plans demonstrate that the Democratic Party doesn’t care about young Americans. 

On Tuesday (March 7) President Biden announced his plan to save Medicare.  His plan disinherits the young: it sacrifices the interests of young Americans to benefit the old.  That may be good politics.  Young people have little political power in America.  But it’s bad for the future of our country.

Here’s a quick roundup of three ways that Biden’s plans harm young Americans:

First, Medicare is going bankrupt because it provides the elderly with benefits that cost far more than the amount of taxes that they out into the system.  But Biden wants to make Medicare even more generous and thus more costly to younger taxpayers.

Biden wants to reduce the age of eligibility from 65 to 60.  That means that millions more will become eligible for government benefits.  That costs the system in two ways.  First, more people will be part of the program which means benefit costs go up.  Second, Medicare and Social Security payroll tax revenues are going to go down since people will take advantage of the benefits by retiring earlier. 

The responsible thing is to raise the age of eligibility from 65 to 70.  The average life expectancy of Americans has increase by 9 years since Medicare started in 1966 so retirees in America are already collecting benefits far longer than originally intended.  Reducing the age to 60 means that the average retiree would get 25 years of taxpayer subsidized health care.

Second, Biden wants to hike taxes on Americans earning more than $400,000 a year.  Currently, Americans in this range already pay an extra 3.8 percent on top of the existing federal income tax rate of 37 percent.  Biden wants to increase the rate to 5 percent which means that the top federal rate is now 42 percent.  Then add state taxes on top of that.  So high earners in California are going to be taxed at the astounding rate of 55 percent (47 percent in Massachusetts, 50 percent in Wisconsin).

High taxes reduce economic activity.  Hiking taxes on the most productive, hard working and entrepreneurial Americans will only these people to do three things: (a) become less productive; (ii) not work as hard; and (iii) be less entrepreneurial.  The result: slower growth and fewer career opportunities for young Americans in a stagnant economy.     

Third, Biden wants to force down process for prescription drugs.  That sounds good in the present.  But lower prices mean less incentive for the development of new drug treatments.   Economists Tomas Philipson and Troy Durie of the University of Chicago estimate that price controls for prescription drugs would lead to a 29 to 60 percent decline in the number of new drug treatments brought to market by 2039.  As a result Millennials and Gen Z will have fewer treatments available when they need them in later life.

It true that Medicare is going bankrupt.  But is it doing so because of political myopia and the craven desire of Washington politicians to channel benefits to the politically influential (the elderly) while stock the costs to the politically weak (the young).

What America needs is statemen that think of the next generation, not politicians like Biden that only think of the next election.

A statesman would acknowledge that life expectancy has increased dramatically since the program began.  Therefore, rather than lowering the age of eligibility to 60, a statesman would raise it to 70.

A statesman would recognize that Medicare is a very good deal for current retirees.  Economists C. Eugene Steuerle and Karen Smith estimate the even high earning individuals are getting more out of the program in terms of benefits than they paid in in taxes.  It shouldn’t be too much to ask for them to pay a little more in premiums to support the program.

Unfortunately for young Americans, statesmen are in short supply.  Washington is full of politicians.  And that’s why you are routinely fleeced by the likes of Joe Biden. 

Good news is coming out from lots of places.  The push back against wokeness is finally working.  Here’s a quick roundup of some evidence.

K-12 Education

Campus Reform reports that school districts a dumping the woke curricula that college education programs have been pushing.  The reason: horrible reading scores from the use of work curricula materials.  They write:

“The nationwide low reading proficiency for K-12 students is attributed, in part, to these curricula. Though Campus Reform has identified teachers colleges as sites of social justice and anti-racism, a popular approach to reading sold by teachers colleges failed to close achievement gaps.”

Higher Education

It looks like we’ve started to see some light in the long dark tunnel that is American higher education.  Florida is taking a string stand for academic freedom and freedom of expression on college campuses and cutting spending on divisive DEI programs   So are some elite universities.   

It’s also looking like college presidents themselves aren’t as enamored of the whole DEI thing as they make out. 

Government Employment

Hiring on the basis of merit and capabilities is making a comeback in state government—well at least state governments in red states.  Texas Governor Abbott issued a memorandum directing state agencies to hire the best candidate for the job.  Radical stuff!

Big Business 

Wokesters have been hit especially hard in the business world.  Investment giant Vanguard is getting out of investing on the basis of politics.  Their own investment research showed that claims of higher returns from ESG investments is a bunch of bunk.  The Wall Street Journal summarizes what Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley told them in an interview:

“Fewer than 1 in 7 active equity managers outperform the broad market in any five-year period. Over the past five years, not one relied exclusively on a net-zero investment methodology.  Betting his clients’ money on politicians and regulators consistently doing the “right” thing would be irresponsible.  There is a receding chance the globe will be at net zero by 2050. No one should promise to base his entire investment strategy on such odds.”

Moreover, DEI layoffs have skyrocketed in the tech sector as companies see tougher economic times ahead.   

Looking Ahead

Wokeness is still the prevailing ideology—some would say religion—in America’s elite institutions.  There’s a long way to go to put this divisive, dehumanizing ideology to bed.  That’s going to take a long term struggle by those of us who believe in individualism and in judging others on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.  But there are hopeful signs that we’re getting past peak woke. 

The Wall Street Journal documents how inflation, rising home prices, and fallout from COVID are driving young Americans deeper into debt.  One wonders how long they’ll keep voting for the politicians that are impoverishing them.

The Wall Street Journal reports that debt levels and credit card delinquencies are rising more rapidly among young Americans than any other demographic group.

The article cites three factors, all of which have their basis in government policies. 

First, there is inflation, a creation of frenzied Federal Reserve money creation.  The Journal writes:

“Now, rapid inflation is forcing many to spend more on gas, groceries and rent, eating into pandemic savings. The last round of stimulus checks went out in 2021. Families are back to commuting, traveling and eating out again. The Federal Reserve’s campaign to curb inflation has pushed up interest rates on credit cards and other types of loans.”

Then there’s COVID.  The Journal points out that families had to spend a lot more on child care when schools were closed—and teachers given paid vacations—during the pandemic.  The Journal writes:

“Some changes are hurting millennials in particular. Many spent unplanned thousands of dollars on child care or tutoring when schools closed. Some relied heavily on a pandemic-era program, the government’s monthly child tax credit payment, but that has lapsed.”

And third, we have skyrocketing home prices.  The Journal writes:

“Many 30-somethings are trying to buy their first homes and have been squeezed by higher rates and home prices. The median price for an existing home was $359,000 in January, more than $90,000 higher compared with three years earlier. In recent years, prices rose the most in lower-cost neighborhoods that are more likely to be in millennials’ budget range.”

The factors that lead to home price inflation can all be traced back to government policy in some form.

 The Federal Reserve’s free money policies of the last fifteen years did nothing for home buyers.  Sure, you could get a mortgage on the cheap.  But that also meant that there was a lot of competition among buyers so sellers could get a high price. 

On balance, low rates did nothing for home buyers.  Home ownership rates for young people didn’t go up during Bernanke, Yellen and Powell’s decade and a half of monetary madness.     

Couple that with NIMBYism and zoning restrictions that make it very difficult to build new homes because that’s no land.  As Mark Twain said about land: “they ain’t making any more of it” and as long as local governments won’t allow greater density, they ain’t making more homes either.

Unfortunately, the Baby Boomers and Gen Z have proven slow to learn that government is the source of, not the antidote, to their problems.

As long as young people keep voting for more government, they’ll continue to get the shaft, and go deeper into debt to make ends meet.

Polling shows Biden continues to tank with young voters and little difference in approval among young voters between the Democratic and Republican parties.  Will the GOP finally reach out to young voters?  We can only hope.

Some things are a near certainty: a long cold winter in New England, that the Detroit Lions won’t win the Superbowl, and the Republican Party will somehow find a way to blow it with younger voters.  So this essay is a lot like what Oscar Wilde said about a second marriage—a triumph of hope over experience.  But here goes.

Polling results from Quinnipiac show that Joe Biden continues to tank among young voters. 

Here are Biden’s numbers by age.  According to Quinnipiac a mere 7 percent of 18-34 year olds strongly approve of Biden’s job performance.  In fact, younger voters are less likely to strongly approve of Biden’s performance than any other age group.  The only group where Biden cracks 40 percent approval is 65 plus.   

Now take a look at how Americans view the two parties. 

Here’s how Americans answer the question ”does the Republican Party care about people like you?”

Notice that there’s no difference in the response by age.   Republicans do just as well with 18-34 year-olds as among older age groups.

Now compare with how Americans answer the same question “does the Democratic party care about people like you?”

Yes, young people are somewhat more likely to view the Democratic Party as caring about them.  But the difference is nowhere close to the two-to-one margin by which Democrats routinely carry younger voters in presidential and off-year elections. 

And the poll results also show that Republicans are way behind among the 65 plus crowd, the group that Republican candidates traditionally cater to.

Young people are the great growth opportunity for the Republican Party.

But will the GOP fail to realize that opportunity? 

Well … the national GOP just reelected a chairwoman that presides over three disastrous election cycles.  Looks to us like the consultant class that controls the Republican National Committee is setting course for a fourth drubbing.

Karoline Leavett, 25, who ran for Congress in New Hampshire in 2022 points to the Republican establishment as the problem: ”The establishment and the leadership needs to get on board,” Leavitt said. “If we want to win elections, we don’t have a choice.”

Karoline is right.  The Republican establishment is about as with it as the Simpson’s C. Montgomery Burns.

Here at GOUSA we believe in opportunity.  That’s exactly what young people want and need.  Young Americans opportunity to live life the way they see fit.  And that means having opportunity in each of the five domains of life: education, personal, national, economic, and social opportunity.

The failure of government schools to provide poor kids with a basic education is a handicap that few are ever able overcome.  Rather than a social leveler, government schools are the driving force for inequality in America.

In Baltimore there are 23 elementary schools in which not a single student is proficient in math.  No one student in the entire school.  In the entire city, only seven percent—one in fourteen students—is proficient in math.

In one Baltimore school, a GPA of 0.13 places a student in the top half of the class. 

To call Baltimore schools a public school is a misnomer.  They don’t serve the public.  Instead, they serve the teachers unions, administrators with lifetime appointments, and the craven politicians who benefit from a captive voting block of government dependents. 

Here’s a story from the Baltimore Fox affiliate on the failure of government schools in that city.

If the Fox Project Baltimore story doesn’t make you mad, check your pulse to make sure that your heart is still beating.

The same story plays out in government schools throughout the United States. 

In Chicago, there are 33 schools where not a single student is proficient in math and a total of 53 schools where not a single student is proficient in math in the state of Illinois.

In Milwaukee, just 11 percent of fourth graders are proficient in math.

In California statewide, only 27 percent of eleventh graders met or exceeded statewide standards for math.   

Just 30 percent of Boston public school students—less than one in three–are proficient in math. 

The primary reason for inequality in America is not racism or the police.  It is the government school system. 

Consider what life is like for the students in these 23 Baltimore schools.  They’ve been robbed of the opportunity to have an education, to develop their minds.  And when you don’t have educational opportunity, you don’t have life opportunity either.

It’s not just that they’ve been victimized by the Baltimore school system today.  They’ll continue to be victims for the rest of their lives. 

So many important decisions in life require quantitative reasoning skills.  Managing your finances requires quantitative reasoning skills.  Weighing risk against reward requires quantitative reasoning skills.  Running a business requires quantitative reasoning skills. 

Those who can manage their finances, understand risk, and run a business get ahead in life.  Those who can’t find themselves falling victim to scammers, loan sharks and flim-flam artists throughout their lifetime. 

GOUSA stands for educational opportunity for all Americans.  That includes school choice, school vouchers, charter schools and more parental involvement in the classroom.  It also means teaching factual American history, US politics and civics in schools – and not political indoctrination.   

Our rating system identifies those politicians that support greater educational opportunity versus those that stand with the entrenched interests that have made government schools the engine of inequality in American society. 

Martin Gurri discusses the possibility for the development of a right/populist agenda in the most recent issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.  Great stuff.  Read the whole thing. 

Martin Gurri is a very smart fellow and a keen observer of the modern political scene.  In Gurri’s view, American politics today is a conflict between the elites who control all the major institutions and the rest of us that are seeking change. 

The elites know what they want: control.  The problem for those of us challenging the elite establishment in Gurri’s mind is that the populist movement on the right has a varied agenda.  Thus, Gurri casts the conflict as between the “politics of control” (i.e., the elites) and the “politics of incoherence”.

If you’ll allow me to skip ahead, there is a right populist agenda out there.  It’s the one that we offer here at GOUSA.  But first, back to Gurri.

Gurri’s view is that the establishment and leftwing populists have an alliance, albeit an uneasy one. 

“A vast apparatus of control—an octopus-like conglomerate of institutions that includes the federal bureaucracy, the news media, and the digital platforms—has been deployed to stop the populist wolf from crashing through the door. The panic evoked by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter betrays an unhappy suspicion that the beast will break in anyway. The system is as nakedly rank-based as Marie Antoinette’s France. Having assumed guardianship over the complexities of twenty-first-century life, the elites must govern because they are who they are.

Ostensibly, the center seeks power to preserve the establishment. Left populists seek power to destroy it. The Left views current social structures as the end product of a history of subjugation and annihilation. Except for a small band of heroic rebels, only two classes remain: oppressors and victims. Oppressors must be hounded without mercy. Most belong in prison. To ensure perfect equity, the state must intervene in every outcome. To protect victims from harm, hatred must be interpreted as broadly as possible and criminalized. To save the earth, capitalism and industry must be suffocated.

…

The politics of control unite the extreme center and left populism: at present, the two factions share an uneasy alliance. This is only partly a contradiction. The center is ideologically exhausted and requires justification for control. In identity and environmentalism, the Left supplies that justification. The center is also aware that institutional power has decayed and verges on collapse. By its ability to summon the digital mob, the Left can offer social control over a restless public. At any rate, left populism today is not revolutionary but performative: it needs the media to build a proper stage on which to strut. The young rebels are often the children of the elites, getting credentialed in moral drama before they ascend to leadership.“

It’s hard to argue with his conclusion.  The left-wing crazies are clearly in control of the Biden Administration including agencies and department that ostensibly should be neutral like the FBI and the Defense Department.  As Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it in her rebuttal to the Biden State of the Union Address, “the dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.”  Agreed.   

So where is a right populist agenda that opposes the establishment and seek to empowers the American people?  It’s right here. 

Gurri argues that a right populist agenda should be formed around the concepts of Sovereignty, Equality and Obligation to each other.  That’s not much different from the GIUSA agenda of Unity, Liberty and Opportunity.

Moreover, GOUSA has been working on our pro-unity, pro-liberty, pro-opportunity agenda for years.  We even have a rating system in place to determine which politicians are pursuing the politics of control (as Gurri put it) and which politicians are pursuing the politics of individual empowerment and opportunity.

Gallup poll out this week shows that Americans view their own government as the nation’s number one problem.

In 1838 Abraham Lincoln gave a speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois.  The speech concerned America’s institution.  In his speech, Lincoln said that if America ever fell, it would not be from an external enemy, but from within.   

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

How prescient Lincoln was.

This week Gallup released a poll in which they asked Americans to name the nation’s top problem.  The most frequently mentioned top problem: Government.

Both Democrats and Republicans choose Government as America’s #1 problem.

The frequency by which American’s cited Government as our #1 problem increased by 6 points from the last time that Gallup asked the question.

The results should be little surprise to anyone.

The federal bureaucracy and politicians in Washington have been out of touch with the average American for a very long time. 

That’s true for both parties.

The Republican Party just reelected Ronna McDaniel to a fourth term as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. 

A mere 6 percent of rank-and-file Republican voters thought that McDaniel deserved another term.  Seventy-three percent wanted someone else.  The GOP just told three quarters of its supporters to go to hell.

You can count on the national GOP to keep the stupid in the stupid party. 

The Democratic Party is no different.   

Democrat-run cities are crumbling.  The failed public school system is the primary engine of inequality in American society. In Chicago, almost half of all public students are chronically absent. Yet nothing will change because Democratic politicians are in bed with the teachers unions. 

Solid majorities disapprove of Biden’s immigration policies.  Refugee policies are a farce. Yet nothing will change.

It’s no wonder that Americans view the government as the country’s number one problem.  It is.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland.  This is an annual affair in which the elites of the Western world show how shockingly out of touch they are with the concerns of the people that they govern.

Yes, these are the people who are bringing you the Great Reset.  Not that they are interested in changing their ways.  Rather, they want to make your life more miserable.

This gathering is headed by Klaus Schwab who looks like the villain in a James Bond movie but is really much more evil.

Take climate change.  Schwab and company think that’s for the little people.  As is the case for every climate conference, nobody flies coach. Instead, the Davos the attendees arrived in at least 1,040 private jets.   Fox News quoted Greenpeace’s Klara Maria Schenk on the private planes: 

“the rich and powerful flock to Davos in ultra-polluting, socially inequitable private jets to discuss climate and inequality behind closed doors.  … Davos has a perfectly adequate railway station, still these people can’t even be bothered to take the train for a trip as short as 21 [kilometers] … Do we really believe that these are the people to solve the problems the world faces?”

So what big ideas are these worthies interested in?  One speaker wanted to make it illegal to own a car.  Presumably he was not laughed off the stage.  Yes, the same people that arrived in Davos in massive motorcades want to ban the private automobile. 

Of course, saving humanity by telling people to eat bugs is hard work so there comes a time when even the most benighted need to let their hair down (figuratively in Dr Schwab’s case).  So prostitutes are flooding into Davos to pleasure attendees and their entourage.  Lest there be any confusion, the prostitutes to which I refer as sex workers, not bankers or politicians. 

These ladies and gentlemen of the evening are earning top dollar for their services, around $700 an hour.

Worst of all, this convention of the world’s preeminent douchebags is financed by you O’ lowly U.S. taxpayer.   The United States government has given the WEF $60 million over the last eight years to fund this soiree.  Not that the attendees are pressed for cash.  634 corporate CEOs are at Davos including the CEOs of Amazon, Citigroup and Blackrock. 

So big dollars for privileged, elitist grifters while you can’t own a car and have to eat bugs.  Maybe the Great Reset ain’t so great after all.     

The legacy predictably characterized the vote for the election of the new speaker in the most negative light.  However, the conditions that the Republican holdouts sought for their votes were very reasonable. 

Zero Hedge has a roundup of what Kevin McCarthy had to agree to win the speakership on the 15^th ballot:

• It will only take a single congressperson, acting in what is known as a Jeffersonian Motion, to move to remove the Speaker if he or she goes back on their word or policy agenda.
• A “Church” style committee will be convened to look into the weaponization of the FBI and other government organizations against the American people
• Term limits will be put up for a vote.
• Bills presented to Congress will be single subject, not omnibus with all the attendant earmarks, and there will be a 72-hour minimum period to read them.
• The Texas Border Plan will be put before Congress.
• COVID mandates will be ended as will all funding for them, including so-called “emergency funding.”
• Budget bills would stop the endless increases in the debt ceiling and hold the Senate accountable for the same.

Every one of these items is very popular with the American people.  These are the 60-70 percent approval items that the Republican party should be addressing.     

For instance, 63 percent of Americans want Congress to investigate collusion between big tech and the FBI.

82 percent of Americans think it would be a good idea to place term limits on members of Congress.

75 percent of Americans are worried about the national debt and federal spending.

By a margin on 53 to 18, Americans believe that our country is experiencing an invasion at our southern border. 

The American people strongly back everything that the hold out stood for.

Indeed, the members that held out against McCarthy are already seeing positive results from their actions.

Here at GOUSA we advocate for real solutions to America’s problems.  We believe that there’s no challenge that America can’t overcome. 

Like the House holdouts, we seek to identify and advocate for solution that have 60 percent or more approval among the American people.  Our OppScore system identifies those politicians that are working to expand opportunity and prosperity in America and those that don’t.   

A new survey of the financial condition of Americans shows that nearly one in two Millennials and Gen Zers report that they regularly run out of money.  And this is before the likely recession in 2023.

Janet Yellen might not see signs that Americans are hurting but a new survey of personal financial conditions tells a different story. 

Prudential Financial’s most recent Pulse Survey found that 49 percent of Millennials and 40 percent of Gen Zers report that they regularly run out of money and have to rely on credit cards or parents for financial support. 

The survey also found that 46 percent of Gen Z and 42 percent of Millennials say that they would not be able to support their current lifestyle without parental support.

Financial difficulties are a major source of stress for young Americans. Half of the Millennials surveyed reported that they had trouble sleeping during the past year because of financial stress. 

The financial difficulties facing the Millennial generation are particularly concerning because most Millennials should be well into their careers at this point.

The Millennial generation is typically defined to include those born in 1981 through 1996.  The youngest Millennials are 26 and the oldest 43. 

That so many young Americans are struggling financially underscores the weakness of the Biden economy.

And this is before the much-anticipated recession of 2023.

GOUSA is working for greater opportunity for all Americans. Our economic policy agenda and rating system for politicians allows us to pinpoint which elected leaders support greater opportunity for Americans and those that don’t.

If you believe as we do—that economic opportunity is best achieved through the free enterprise system and smaller government rather than central planning and government control—then won’t you join our team or send us a donation?  You’ll be glad that you did.