National perspective. Local focus. Research-backed insight.
Evidence-led explanations of the forces shaping public life.
Before the Iran war sent U.S. diesel to a record, official consumer-spending books showed fuel oil as a rounding error nationally and a real line item in Vermont and Maine.
Read the research →
Hurricane Lowell cut power on Kauai and closed Lanai’s only cargo harbor. Official GDP and payrolls show how large Hawaii’s visitor economy already is — and how much of it was still missing after 2020.
Read the research →
A $5,000 adult-citizen check is a moderate slice of today’s average incomes, a larger slice in lower-income states, and a $1.2 trillion budget event — measured against BEA incomes and transfers, private wages, and IMF revenue.
Read the research →
Kentucky's motor-vehicle factories are already a $10.7 billion slice of the state. The new Louisville paint shop is a modernization bet, not a founding.
Read the research →
A new survey finds most insured Americans fear a major medical bill. Official consumer-spending books show household health consumption already tops $4 trillion, hospitals take the largest slice, and care has outrun groceries, gasoline and pay since 1997.
Read the research →
Iowa is borrowing federal money to restart Duane Arnold mainly for a Google data center. Official GDP, payrolls and household electricity bills show how large that bet is next to the utilities industry Iowa already has.
Read the research →
Official spending books show a country that records owner-occupied housing at three times tenant rent, while Austin, Denver and Portland already price housing well above the national average.
Read the research →
Florida’s latest citrus inventory shows another 21 percent of grove acres gone. Official farm GDP cannot isolate oranges, but it already shows a farm sector that has shrunk while the rest of Florida — and U.S. farms — grew.
Read the research →
August hiring blew past forecasts and traders priced a Fed hike. Official payrolls through July show a much thinner story: real hourly pay had already slipped after the Iran war began, and private education and health services had added more jobs than the entire net gain in the U.S. labor market.
Read the research →
Official payrolls show Atlantic City casino-hotel jobs at 19,600 in July 2026, down 60 percent from 1990, even as New Jersey households spent $7.6 billion on gambling in 2024.
Read the research →
Energy Secretary Chris Wright says a U.S. blockade will change Iran’s regime or its policies. IMF World Economic Outlook figures, pinned before this weekend’s tanker strikes, show an economy already a fraction of America’s, with inflation near 51 percent and a dollar GDP that peaked in 2011.
Read the research →
Oregon’s economist called the labor market “low-hire, low-fire,” with semiconductors at a 30-year low and health care cooling. Official payrolls through July 2026 show something sharper: 17 straight months below year-ago levels, a computer-and-electronics workforce back near 1990, and health-care jobs still rising even as the rest of the state shrinks.
Read the research →
Record U.S. diesel will land first on freight. Official payrolls show trucking jobs have been drifting down since 2022, were flat in the first five months of the Iran war, and still pay less per hour than the private-sector average.
Read the research →
Tyson is shutting a Utah beef plant and a larger one in Illinois after a 75-year low in cattle. Official state jobs and GDP show food manufacturing in those states and in packing peers still larger than a decade ago, even as 2026 monthly payrolls have slipped from recent peaks.
Read the research →
August’s jobs report said women accounted for almost every new payroll job. The official books through July already show a 50–50 workforce, health care doing the hiring, and factories and government shrinking.
Read the research →
Official payrolls show California recovered the pandemic trough, then stalled into a healthcare-only expansion that has lagged Texas, Florida and the United States.
Read the research →
After pandemic aid expired, hundreds of thousands of eligible children sat on childcare-assistance waitlists. Official payrolls show the U.S. childcare workforce had already recrossed its pre-pandemic size — and then stalled — while hourly pay still tracks restaurants, not nursing homes.
Read the research →
Official payrolls show Virginia lost about 48,000 jobs over the year to July 2026 even as real GDP was still a little higher than a year earlier. The split is already on the books: consulting and federal jobs fell, health care and local government kept hiring, and information output nearly doubled without an information payroll boom.
Read the research →
As July job openings ticked up and $4 gasoline returned with the Iran war, official payrolls, hours and temporary-help jobs show a market that stopped collapsing — and also stopped adding workers in any volume. Health care is carrying the net gain. Federal jobs are not.
Read the research →
Illinois hospitals say coming Medicaid payment caps could force staff cuts or closures. Official output, payroll and household-spending data show how large that industry already is — and how little slack it has.
Read the research →
Trump is huddling with refiners and pitching Venezuelan crude as a way to refill pumps. Official payrolls show petroleum refineries have shed more than two-fifths of their jobs since 1990, even as real refining output held up and gasoline-station employment grew.
Read the research →
Texas hospitals say extra Medicaid funding of $27 million a day is being withheld. Official transfer receipts show Texas already collects far less Medicaid money per person than other large states, and a $9.8 billion hole is a large slice of both that book and hospital value added.
Read the research →
The Pentagon wants to triple Patriot and quadruple THAAD output. Official payrolls show missile-plant jobs have risen since Russia invaded Ukraine, but they remain a third smaller than in 1990 and barely moved in the first months of the Iran war.
Read the research →
August’s Dallas Fed factory survey jumped. Official books through July still show Texas manufacturing jobs slightly down over the year — even as real factory output is far above 2019.
Read the research →
Washington sold a Venezuelan oil pact as energy insurance and a recovery for Caracas. Official GDP, industry, jobs and gasoline-spending books show a shrunken partner next to an American oil industry that already exists.
Read the research →
An 86-year-old Pennsylvania farmer turned down a reported data-center bid to keep 261 acres in crops. Official GDP shows why that bargain is so lopsided: farms are a rounding error on the state’s economy, real farm output has barely moved since 2000, and data processing is larger — but still tiny next to construction. West Virginia’s income-tax bet on hyperscale campuses is not yet visible in the accounts.
Read the research →
Trump called a Venezuelan oil pact the biggest deal in world history. Official GDP, payroll and state-industry accounts show how small the remaining Venezuelan economy is next to that promise — and how large America’s existing oil industry already is.
Read the research →
Lincoln Hospital will stop delivering babies by year’s end. Official spending, output and payrolls show Maine households already pay more than the typical American for hospital and health-care services — while the hospital industry itself has gotten smaller in real terms.
Read the research →
A $96 billion Nvidia quarter and a $4 billion Indiana HBM groundbreaking make it sound as if the United States is filling chip plants. Official factory payrolls say otherwise.
Read the research →
Statewide, Florida’s net household-insurance cost per resident is the highest in this comparison set — and still a rounding error next to the state income tax New York, New Jersey and California collect. Housing consumption is the larger offset.
Read the research →
The Army is paying for tiny nuclear machines so five bases can keep the lights on if the commercial grid fails, and the White House has declared a national emergency over foreign transformers. Official generation and payrolls show America’s nuclear fleet is huge, almost unchanged, and still smaller than gas — while the factories that make grid kit never got back to 1990.
Read the research →
SpaceX pledged $100 billion and more than 3,000 direct jobs for a Louisiana launch complex. Official GDP, income and payrolls show how large that bet is next to a Gulf Coast economy that has grown slowly, still runs on plants and pipelines, and already employs two million people.
Read the research →
Realtor.com’s “affordability refugees” are shopping outside their own metros. Official housing price parities show why the West’s old bargains no longer look cheap — and why Utah’s real incomes have not kept up.
Read the research →
SpaceX pitched a $100 billion Gulf Coast campus. Official GDP and job numbers show a slow-growing state whose oil jobs already halved — and 3,000 promised hires that would barely move Acadiana’s existing payroll.
Read the research →
Washington wants a six-figure surcharge on new H-1B petitions. Official payrolls show the computer-systems workforce already shrinking even as pay in those industries keeps rising — and the fee would equal most of a year of average wages.
Read the research →
Visit Florida reported a second straight quarterly drop in arrivals, led by Canadians. Official jobs and GDP show a still-large visitor economy that has slowed, not shrunk.
Read the research →
Official payrolls and state GDP show a U.S. auto-factory economy of about 965,000 jobs and $186 billion in output, concentrated in Michigan and the industrial Midwest and South — with parts plants already shrinking.
Read the research →
A Reno wildfire and a Las Vegas water lawsuit landed on the same Monday. Official payrolls and GDP show why southern Nevada’s argument is not just about farms: no other basin state still runs so much of its economy through hotels, casinos and restaurants.
Read the research →
Ottawa called the new 50% tariffs an attack. Official GDP, current-account, auto-output and factory-payroll series show how lopsided the two economies are — and that U.S. auto jobs have slipped only modestly while some Great Lakes payrolls have risen.
Read the research →
Iowa farmers told reporters this week that diesel, tariffs, and a stalled farm bill have them in a squeeze that could flip a Senate seat. Bureau of Economic Analysis farm proprietors’ income and farm GDP show a different sequence: a historic 2022 peak, a 2023–24 hangover that halved Iowa’s farm-proprietor dollars, and a partial rebound by early 2026 — with real farm output barely down.
Read the research →
Ottawa walked away over steel, aluminum, autos and lumber, then named dairy, appliances, farm equipment, paper and electronics for retaliation. Official U.S. payrolls show those industries still employ about 3.3 million people — and most of them have been getting smaller for a generation. Canada's economy is about one-thirteenth the size of America's.
Read the research →
Arizona, Nevada and California take the Colorado River cuts. Officials say household taps will keep running. Construction output, construction jobs and household water bills show how large the urban growth machine already is.
Read the research →
Official BEA accounts show SNAP transfers falling from a 2021 high well before 2026 enrollment reports, while grocery spending kept rising and some states still receive several hundred dollars per resident.
Read the research →
The Interior Department assigned the first two-year Colorado River cuts to Arizona, California and Nevada. Official farm output, farm income and population show those states hold most of the basin’s farm personal income — and Arizona already farms less than it did in 2000.
Read the research →
The U.S. federal debt crossed $40 trillion. IMF World Economic Outlook accounts show general-government debt already near 124 percent of GDP in 2025, a deficit still near 7 percent of GDP, and a wider ongoing gap than several more-indebted peers.
Read the research →
HelloFresh is closing a South Jersey warehouse into a year of more than 11,500 announced New Jersey job cuts. Official payrolls through July 2026 already show a modest statewide decline, concentrated more in manufacturing than in warehousing, while Illinois set a new high.
Read the research →
Treasury just crossed $40 trillion in gross federal debt. On the IMF’s comparable measure of general-government debt, the United States is already a high-debt, high-deficit economy — and the interest wedge in that budget is still widening.
Read the research →
LG Energy Solution has started production in Lansing. Official payrolls and real-output accounts show Michigan manufacturing still smaller than in 2019, while electrical-equipment GDP in the state has fallen even as Kentucky’s has risen.
Read the research →
July housing starts fell 12.4 percent as 30-year yields hit a 19-year high. Official job counts through the same month show residential building and residential specialty trades already shrinking, while nonresidential work, heavy civil construction and a still-rising total construction payroll keep the broader industry from looking like a bust.
Read the research →
Lawmakers in Sacramento are pushing balcony solar and virtual power plants after a decade of soaring electricity rates. Official spending and price data show California households really did see an unusually sharp jump — and still spend less per person than Texans, Floridians or Louisianans, because high prices and high kilowatt-hours are not the same map.
Read the research →
Tyson is closing beef plants as the U.S. cattle herd hits a 75-year low. Official payrolls through June 2026 show packing employment near a record, with the stall concentrated in animal-except-poultry slaughtering while poultry processing and food manufacturing kept adding jobs.
Read the research →
Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio are cutting staff and raising property taxes. Official payrolls show local-government jobs — cities, counties, and school districts — have lagged population and private hiring since 2010, while housing costs took a larger bite of Texans’ incomes.
Read the research →
Since January 2025, official U.S. payrolls have added jobs in construction and leisure while manufacturing and transportation have shrunk. Average hourly earnings in those industries have risen a little faster than the private-sector average; inflation-adjusted private pay is essentially flat.
Read the research →
A November wealth tax would land on a state that still produces about one-seventh of U.S. income and GDP. Population growth has lagged Texas and Florida, but real per capita incomes among remaining residents have risen faster than the national pace.
Read the research →
Saturday's $4.08 gasoline and still-rising grocery staples sit on a 2024 baseline in which Americans already spent about $4,350 a person on groceries and $1,295 on motor fuel. Shares of spending were not historically high; dollar bills were.
Read the research →
Texas is auditing hundreds of mostly data-center projects that claim more future power than the ERCOT grid has ever delivered. State GDP and payrolls show a real boom in data processing and hosting—and a much smaller jobs footprint than the politics imply.
Read the research →