Glenn Beck EXPOSES the economic stats used to destroy your hope



If you only read the headlines, you’d think the American dream is officially out of reach. Starter homes cost more than $1 million. Summer electric bills are approaching $800. Families are struggling to keep up.

But Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck argues that the story being sold to Americans is incomplete.

“As of today, there are 242 cities in this country where the typical starter home, the first rung, the one that’s supposed to be for the beginners, costs a million or more dollars,” Glenn explains.

“By the way, before the pandemic, that number was not 242. It was 80. So in five years, it nearly tripled,” he adds.

California has the most cities with these high-priced “starter” homes, while New York and New Jersey aren’t far behind.


But it’s not just housing costs that are up — utilities are too.

“Americans are projected to spend almost $800 on electricity just getting through this summer, June through September. That’s up more than 10% from last year,” Glenn says.

“Now, the pros at the National Energy Assistance Directors Association will tell you it’s a stack of things all landing at once — hotter summers, more air conditioning, an aging grid that needs hundreds of billions in upgrades, the new AI data centers that everybody loves to point at, and inflation,” he explains.

“Monthly bills are up 23% since 2019. And right now, 1 in 6 Americans, 1 in 6 households, is behind on the utility bill. Arizona is getting hit the hardest. Then it’s Connecticut, Washington state. North Dakota has it the easiest,” he continues.

However, Glenn points out that these are just headlines — and as per usual, the mainstream media is not telling the whole story.

“If you lose the truth, the next thing you lose is hope. ... A lot of Americans have lost both. So, let me give you the truth under the headline because the truth is where you’re going to find hope,” Glenn says.

“Let’s start with a million-dollar house. That number is real. It’s not your number. Because buried in the same report is the figure that nobody put in the story or the headline: The typical starter home in America is worth 198,649,” he continues.

“Now, that is still a lot of money, but it’s not $1 million. It’s under $200,000. Those 242 terrifying cities are all clustered where? On the expensive coastlines,” he adds.

As for the electricity bill, Glenn says, “if you are one of the 1 in 6, the why is not warming or cooling your house. Knowing the AI data centers are only part of the problem doesn’t lower the number on that envelope that you’re avoiding now because you can’t pay it.”

He points out that “every bit of wire” in our electric grid “was built by a past generation.”

“The same generation, one generation, electrified a continent that had been dark since the beginning of time. One generation. Abundance was a choice that we made. ... And that means we can make that choice again,” he says.

“You’re not in checkmate. You’re not. You’re being told in stories like this about averages,” he continues, adding, “and you don’t live in an average.”

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Blame Government Overspending For America’s Affordability Crisis

Democrats will spend the midterms trying to equate 'affordability' with more government spending programs. Conservatives should make the opposite case.

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Jeff Bezos blames government policy — not billionaires — for America’s economic problems



In a recent interview, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pushed back against claims that taxing billionaires more would meaningfully improve life for working Americans, arguing that even dramatically increasing his tax burden would do little to solve inflation or lower costs for families.

“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. That’s not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes ... if people want me to pay more billions, then let’s have that debate, but don’t pretend that that’s going to solve the problem,” Bezos said.

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you. You can’t connect those two things. Not logically,” he added.

BlazeTV host Pat Gray couldn’t agree with Bezos more, pointing out that he also “bleeds terribly” during tax season — but the government largely just wastes his money.


“And so, what happens is you could double that, or you could triple it, or you could quadruple it. It’s still going to the government, and they’re still wasting it on crap,” he adds.

But Bezos wasn’t done, taking on high rent costs as well.

“I recently saw somebody blame it on Airbnb. OK, Airbnb is not the cause of expensive rent ... it’s already been outlawed in New York City and rents are still very high. So we know Airbnb isn’t causing high rents,” he said.

“What’s really causing high rent is government intervention. We subsidize demand with things like tax policy, which is fine, but at the same time, we constrain supply. We constrain supply with things like zoning and permitting. Why does it take so long to get something permitted to build?” he continued.

“If you want rents to come down, econ 101, really simple,” he said, explaining that you can’t subsidize demand and constrain supply.

“If you do, prices are going to skyrocket. But this is not anybody’s fault other than government policy. And this is fixable. Again, this is a skills issue,” he added.

“We should put together an economic commission. Featuring Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, you probably want to avoid Bill Gates,” Gray comments.

“But you know, get these guys together who know how to be successful and understand economics and help us craft a makes-sense tax policy in this country where you’re not just pounding people who are successful,” he adds.

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Republicans should fight affordability battles locally



As the Trump administration and congressional Republicans work to lower Americans’ cost of living this year, they should be guided by a simple principle: All affordability is local.

Democrats and too many establishment Republicans still think they create jobs, economic growth, and opportunity. Whenever high prices pinch consumers, lawmakers huddle up with K Street lobbyists to see what big business, big tech, and big banks want ... and give it to them.

Yet they scratch their heads as corporate profits surge while working families’ monthly bills only climb higher.

Corporate consolidation makes life easier for lawyers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians. But it makes life much more expensive for everyone else.

We’ve seen this pattern again and again. Obamacare. Federal student loans. Subsidized mortgages. The Build Back Better inflation bomb. These policies doled out billions to insiders and middlemen but left everyday Americans holding the bag.

Instead of writing more checks this time, congressional Republicans should focus on rewriting the rules that are contributing to our affordability crisis. Federal regulations — mostly imposed by deep-state bureaucrats, not elected legislators — cost the U.S. economy more than $2 trillion per year. That’s five times the size of last year’s Working Families Tax Cuts legislation.

Reforming these regulations would lower prices, spur job-creating investment, and produce the broadly shared prosperity Republicans promised on the campaign trail.

Their first priority should be to reform the federal permitting process, an issue the White House and Congress have been working on together. However, despite real progress to improve efficiency and remove unnecessary red tape, the response has yet to match the urgency of the moment.

The permitting process has become a punchline — it’s wasteful, corrupt, and self-defeating. Federal agencies are blocking massive, urgent infrastructure investments in energy, mining, defense, transportation, AI computing, and manufacturing. Sometimes it seems like the U.S. economy’s greatest rival is not China, but our own government.

Our energy needs alone warrant wholesale regulatory reform. The United States today has neither the energy production nor transmission capacity we need to keep up with AI-driven electricity demand. New rules should be streamlined, transparent, and, most of all, fair. Our economic competitiveness and national security depend on these investments. A more prosperous, more secure future is not going to build itself.

The second priority, related to the first, is housing. President Trump has already signed executive orders to reform regulations that are holding back new home construction. Congress needs to follow his lead. The inability of working families to afford homes today has metastasized into more than an economic drag — it’s becoming a social crisis.

Current housing regulations seem intentionally designed to drive up home prices. This is great for well-off Boomers who see their homes primarily as 401(k)s with finished basements. But it’s catastrophic for young couples hoping to get married and start families.

By some estimates, the U.S. housing shortage is already more than 4 million units. Federal regulations should not stand in the way of new home building — nor should Washington subsidize state and local governments’ regulatory obstruction.

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Michal Fludra/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Federal rules drive up costs in every sector of our economy. Health care, education, business, and occupational licensure all present golden opportunities to reform-minded policy entrepreneurs in the House and Senate.

And while they’re fixing regulations in those industries, Congress should also key in on the industry that ties them all together: banking. Right now, federal banking regulations are tilted in favor of the big banks, unfairly hamstringing some community banks and forcing many others to merge or close.

Industries dominated by huge corporations always seem robust. But as we saw during the financial crisis — and as we see every time an artificial bubble bursts — healthy, consumer-friendly markets are diverse and decentralized.

While outright bank failures have remained relatively limited in recent years, community banks are steadily disappearing through mergers, consolidations, and voluntary closures. In 1990, there were around 12,000 community banks scattered across the U.S. Today, only around 4,000 remain.

According to the FDIC, the number of community banks continues to decline each quarter, with 44 of them either closing or being absorbed by larger institutions in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone. That trend matters because community banks are not interchangeable with Wall Street giants.

Corporate consolidation makes life easier for lawyers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians. But it makes life much more expensive for everyone else.

Too many federal regulations treat all banks the same, putting compliance burdens on small lenders that only megabanks can afford.

These regulations squeeze resources out of the local financial institutions that growing communities rely on. Especially in the AI era, the real-world human economy will depend more than ever on personal relationships, community solidarity, and interpersonal trust. Right now, Washington disadvantages those things and the community banks defined by them.

The American people are ready to make our economy affordable again — as soon as Washington lets them. Streamlining federal rules will allow Americans to build, drill, mine, invest and lend, and compute and compete as never before.

Lawmakers must remember that a more affordable economy is a more local, more cooperative, and more human economy. Regulatory reform — from national infrastructure to community banking — is an investment in America’s most powerful and undervalued resource: our people.

Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at The American Mind.

Jerome Powell is out — for good reason. Here are 4 of his top blunders.



Kevin Warsh, the primary intermediary between the Federal Reserve and Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis, was confirmed on Tuesday to a 14-year term as Federal Reserve governor and confirmed on Wednesday as Jerome Powell's successor as chairman of the U.S. central bank.

Powell, who was first nominated to the Federal Board of Governors by former President Barack Obama and whose term as chair ends on Friday, wished Warsh well. However, he also provided his replacement with something more valuable than a nice sentiment: examples of what not to do, or at least, what to avoid doing.

Powell has, after all, dropped the ball on numerous occasions — sometimes with catastrophic consequences for the country. Here are just four examples.

1. Don't worry, it's 'transitory.'

Powell stated on March 4, 2021, in the second year of the pandemic, that inflation might increase but that it would likely be "transitory" and not enough for the central bank to raise record-low interest rates — a decision some suspect was geared toward pleasing then-President Joe Biden and thereby securing Powell's reappointment.

'Most of the expected GDP slowdown — from over 3% to 1.5% — was due to Powell's blunder.'

MarketWatch's Greg Robb noted that Powell's wrong-headed "transitory" view of inflation — one that would define his eight years as Fed chair — precluded the Fed from raising interest rates until 2022 while the Fed was also buying up bonds "and swelling its balance sheet."

Thanks to Powell's mistake — which economist Mohamed El-Erian, former PIMCO chief executive, said was "probably the worst inflation call in the history of the Federal Reserve" — the Fed was consistently on the back foot.

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Elif Acar/Anadolu/Getty Images

Facing the highest inflation Americans had seen in 40 years — inflation that no longer appeared to be "transitory" — Powell ended up raising interest rates 11 times between March 2022 and July 2023, when its benchmark rate reached a range of 5.25% to 5.5%.

Powell told "60 Minutes" in a Feb. 1, 2024, interview:

In hindsight, it would've been better to have tightened policy earlier. I'm happy to say that. Really, it was this. We saw what we thought was that this inflation, which seemed to be mostly limited to the goods sector and to the supply chain story. We thought that the economy was so dynamic that it would fix itself fairly quickly. And we thought that inflation would go away fairly quickly without an intervention by us. That it would be transitory.

Powell leaves office with inflation well above the Fed's 2% target for five consecutive years.

2. Betting against Trump's tariffs, tax cuts

While reluctant initially to raise interest rates when Biden was in office, Powell previously demonstrated an eagerness to raise rates in 2018 when President Donald Trump was in office and the economy was booming.

"Every time we do something great, he raises the interest rates," Trump said at the time. Powell "almost looks like he's happy raising interest rates."

The repeated hikes, which Trump blamed for coinciding stock market turmoil, were supposedly prompted by concerns that the Republican president's tariffs and tax cuts, the latter of which were framed as a $1.5 trillion fiscal stimulus, might together contribute to inflation.

Powell stated that "fiscal policy is becoming more stimulative. In this environment, we anticipate that inflation ... will move up this year."

Economist Donald Luskin, chief investment officer for Trand Macrolytics LLC, recently noted that "there is no evidence that Mr. Trump’s tariffs in 2018 and 2019 led to any inflation at all."

Economist and Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote last year, "Powell's audition for 'worst Fed chair' began shortly after his February 2018 appointment. Promising President Trump in the Oval Office a supportive posture to secure his nomination, Powell instead aggressively raised rates into the low-inflation, high-growth Trump economy. Powell wrongly believed Trump's tax cuts and tariffs would spark inflation — they didn't."

Powell's bet against Trump's tariffs and tax cuts proved consequential.

"As Powell's Fed hiked interest rates four times in 2018 — despite muted inflation and strong labor market gains — economic momentum slowed sharply," wrote Navarro. "According to the Fed's own September Tealbook, most of the expected GDP slowdown — from over 3% to 1.5% — was due to Powell's blunder."

"It would cost the American economy hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in lost economic output and tax revenues," added the trade adviser.

3. Fed renovation scandal

Powell reportedly greenlit luxury renovations to the Fed's Washington, D.C, headquarters that exceeded the original budget by roughly $700 million and is set to cost around $2.5 billion.

Controversy over the renovations — which include a rooftop terrace with gardens, VIP dining rooms, "premium" marble, and water features — came to a head in January, several months after U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte called for an investigation into Powell and his removal as Fed chair.

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Sophie Park/Getty Images

Powell said in a Jan. 11 statement that "the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June. That testimony concerned in part a multiyear project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings."

An activist Biden-appointed judge quashed the grand jury subpoenas in March.

"Jerome Powell today is now bathed in immunity, preventing my office from investigating the Federal Reserve," Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, said in response to U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg's rulings. "This is wrong, and it is without legal authority."

Last month, the Trump administration dropped the criminal investigation into Powell over his luxury renovation project.

While apparently off the hook, the controversy nevertheless hangs over Powell as another example of costly mismanagement.

4. Bank failures

Powell and his underlings also failed to prevent the March 2023 collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — the third- and fourth-largest bank failures in American history, respectively.

Powell acknowledged weeks after the bank failures that the Fed's efforts to intervene were too little, too late.

"It does kind of suggest there's a need for ... regulatory and supervisory changes, just because supervision and regulation need to keep up with what's happening," said Powell. "My only interest is that we identify what went wrong here ... make an assessment of what are the right policies to put in place so that doesn't happen again, and then implement those policies."

One of Powell's lieutenants, then-Vice Chair Michael Barr, admitted that the "Federal Reserve supervisors failed to take forceful enough action."

A damning April 28, 2023, report on the Fed's bungled supervision and regulation of Silicon Valley Bank — the conclusions of which Powell ultimately accepted — said that:

  • "Federal Reserve supervisors did not fully appreciate the extent of the vulnerabilities as Silicon Valley Bank grew in size and complexity";
  • "When supervisors did identify vulnerabilities, they did not take sufficient steps to ensure that Silicon Valley Bank fixed those problems quickly enough"; and
  • "The Board's tailoring approach in response to the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act and a shift in the stance of supervisory policy impeded effective supervision by reducing standards, increasing complexity, and promoting a less assertive supervisory approach."
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Trump Tells Americans He Doesn’t ‘Think About’ Americans’ Finances In Waging Iran War

'I don't think about Americans’ financial situation'

Inflation hits milestone not seen since 2023



As the United States navigates a fragile ceasefire in its conflict with Iran, the price of oil has remained volatile and high. Brent crude, the international benchmark, was trading at $104.21 per barrel at market close on Monday, nearly 57% higher than its pre-conflict price. Inflation has risen as a result and is in a territory it hasn’t been since 2023, according to an analysis by NBC News.

On Tuesday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly Consumer Price Index update for April. It reported that inflation in April was 3.8%.

A vast majority of Americans don’t trust either party to fix the economy.

The bureau stated in a press release that the rise in energy costs is responsible “for over 40% of the monthly all-items increase.”

In its report on the April inflation numbers, NBC News noted that in Friday’s April jobs report, average hourly earnings rose by 3.6% over the past year. This marks the first time since 2023, during the Biden administration, that wages have not kept pace with inflation.

Despite the runaway inflation of the Biden years, Democrat congressional leaders pounced on the inflation news. House Budget Committee Ranking Member Brendan Boyle (D-Penn.) said in a statement, “From his tariff taxes to his disastrous war in Iran, President Trump is making life even harder for American families. Today’s inflation data confirms what everyone can see: Costs are out of control.”

Republicans, on the other hand, are focused on the growth in jobs and the economy in general and reminding voters of the Biden-era inflation. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) said, “While inflation has come down substantially since the 21% spike in prices seen when Democrats controlled all of Washington, American families are still looking for additional relief, and that is why Republicans acted to deliver the largest tax cuts in American history.”

Smith further highlighted the growth in GDP and hope that the new chairman of the Federal Reserve would be “a leader over monetary policy who understands that high interest rates have held back the true economic potential of our country.”

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A consensus seems to be brewing among investment experts that unlike the broad-based inflation of the early part of the Biden presidency, this inflation could truly be transitory if energy prices come down.

“The report still showed only limited evidence of fully broad-based second-round inflation effects,” said Arielle Ingrassia, an investment specialist at Evelyn Partners, according to IFA magazine.

“That leaves the overall picture closer to an energy and transport shock than a full inflation spiral — at least for now.”

The inflation release Tuesday coincides with findings from a new CNN/SSRS poll that shows "roughly two-thirds of Americans say that Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country. And Trump’s approval rating stands at 30% on the economy, a career low,” according to CNN.

But Democrats do not fare well in this new polling either. A vast majority of Americans don’t trust either party to fix the economy.

As the nation heads into a midterm election being shaped by redistricting battles, Americans' perceived economic outlook will continue to be a determining factor for the control of both the House and Senate in November.

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