Most Voters Say The U.S. Is Spending Too Much On Aid To Israel

 

The chart above is from the Emerson College Poll -- done on July 19th and 20th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 likely voters, with a 2.9 point margin of error.

Trump Has Trashed The United States Reputation Internationally

 

From the Pew Research Center.

Most In U.S. Say No To Declaring This As A Christian Nation - Want Separation Of Church/State

The charts above are from a Winthrop University Poll -- done between June 18th and 23rd of a nationwide sample of 2,150 adults, with a 2.11 point margin of error.

 

Ukrainians Don't Consider Trump A Friend And Don't Trust His Negotiators

 

These charts are from The Conversation, using information from a survey done by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology of 1,801 Ukranians in late June of 2026.

Median Wealth In The U.S. Falls (As Too Much Goes To The Rich)

 

The following is part of an article from Daniel Orton at Newsweek:

The typical American has suffered a major decline in wealth since the start of the decade, even as the United States has continued to create millionaires at a remarkable pace, according to UBS’ Global Wealth Report 2026.

UBS found that inflation-adjusted median wealth per adult in the U.S. fell significantly between 2020 and 2025, while average wealth per adult increased, underscoring a growing divide between households in the middle and those at the top of the wealth ladder.

The distinction is crucial. Median wealth reflects the assets held by people in the middle of the wealth distribution and is often viewed as a better measure of the financial position of a typical household. Average wealth, by contrast, can be heavily influenced by gains among the wealthiest Americans.

Despite the decline for the median American, the U.S. remains one of the wealthiest countries in the world. UBS estimates average wealth per adult at $696,277, the second-highest level among the markets surveyed. Yet median wealth stands at only $68,998, highlighting the extent to which wealth is concentrated among a relatively small share of households. . . .

For middle-class Americans, the findings suggest that the benefits of rising asset prices have not been evenly distributed. While stock markets and other financial assets have helped boost overall wealth figures, many households have not experienced comparable gains after accounting for inflation. The result is a situation in which the country is becoming wealthier on paper while the financial position of the median American has deteriorated.

The divide is reflected in the report’s measure of wealth inequality. The U.S. recorded a wealth Gini coefficient of 0.77, the sixth-highest among the 56 markets analyzed. The measure, which tracks how concentrated wealth is within a population, indicates that a relatively small share of households holds a disproportionate share of the country’s assets.

UBS also found that the U.S. ranks second in average wealth but only 28th in median wealth, one of the clearest indications in the report that gains have been concentrated among wealthier households.

83% Say U.S. Has Moved Away From The Principles/Ideals On Which It Was Founded

 The chart above is from the NPR / PBS News / Marist Poll -- done between June 8th and 11th of a nationwide sample of 1,340 adults, with a 3 point margin of error.

Mayor Mamdani's Speech On America's 250th Birthday

This is a transcript of Mayor Mamdani's speech:

Good morning, my fellow Americans. Season after season, year after year, the tides have come in and out of New York Harbor. Long before the name “New York” had ever been spoken, Lenape dugouts crossed these currents. It was on these waters that tall masts crested the horizon, captained by explorers like Verrazzano and Hudson after whom we’ve named our bridges and rivers. And ever since, ships full of travelers weary from long journeys have passed through the Narrows, the winds of the Atlantic at their backs.

  

When those passengers lifted their heads to glimpse what lies just beyond the waves, what did they see? They saw land, lush and teeming with life. They saw men waiting at the docks to take them into bondage. They saw tenements rife with squalor. They saw industry rumbling with activity, steam and smoke rising, a city on the move. They saw a towering monument to freedom, her torch glowing world-wide welcome. They saw New York City. They saw America.

  

Tomorrow, our nation marks 250 years since we declared our independence. Two hundred and fifty years of a grand experiment in self-governance — an experiment so audacious that some in 1776 doubted it would last more than a few years, let alone a quarter of a millennium. From Lexington to Los Angeles, Selma to Seneca Falls, Morrisania to Midwood, Americans will come together for a day, just as we do each year. Families will gather around the grill. Fireworks will fill the night sky. This will be no ordinary day of celebration. Two hundred and fifty years presents a rare opportunity for more than 340 million people to turn together — both towards one another and towards ourselves, to take measure of who we are as a nation. When we look at America, what do we see?

  

Here at City Hall, as I sit behind George Washington’s desk, alongside new Americans who came to this country, I cannot see all of America. But like so many who came before, I can see New York City. 

 

The city I see today looks very different than the one that greeted George Washington. In July of 1776, our city simmered under the yoke of oppression. The British had imposed a colonial rule so repressive that 250 years ago, 80 miles south, a small group of newspaper editors, farmers, and soldiers signed their names on a document declaring truths that feel self-evident now but were revolutionary then, establishing the ideals our nation still strives to fulfill.

  

The British did not take it well. War broke out. And that August, as the largest battle of the Revolutionary War unfolded in Brooklyn, batteries on Governors Island took aim at British ships anchored just offshore. We were outgunned, we were outmanned and we were soundly defeated. After only a few months, it appeared our fledgling attempt at democracy was on the precipice of collapse.

  

But that night, with the moon overhead, thousands of our soldiers silently climbed into ferries and flat-bottomed boats and escaped to Manhattan. The Continental Army survived to fight another day. Independence may have been declared in Philadelphia, but it was rescued in New York City. George Washington was the last to leave Brooklyn. As he waited at the river’s edge, the sun beginning its rise, he would have looked out over New York City’s waters and seen what so many have seen in the 250 years since — an opportunity to begin anew. Those opportunities — like everything in New York City — are not given. They are won. 

 

In 1838, 11 years after New York outlawed slavery, a recently emancipated Black man by the name of James Weeks sought to begin anew as well — and to help hundreds of others do the same. He bought property in Brooklyn, won himself the right to vote, and sold lots to others newly freed. When they landed in New York Harbor, they knew they had something waiting for them that they had never had before: a home. Weeksville still stands today — a living, breathing testament to what we know America to be: a place each of us has the power to make.

  

The Harbor was busy those years, as ships poured in from around the world. Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty. Chinese sailors settled in what is today, Chinatown. Millions more traveled under the Statue of Liberty and through Ellis Island — Jewish people escaping pogroms, Italians fleeing poverty, Syrians seeking economic opportunity.

  

Each of these new arrivals peered through portholes onto a city that was changing as fast as the nation. They saw merchants peddling their wares on the docks, streets being laid out on a grid, buildings rising into the clouds. They could not yet see the nativism they would face — the jobs they would be refused, the landlords who would not rent to them, and the abject labor and living conditions they would withstand. But no matter how much smog hung over the harbor, they still saw an opportunity to begin anew. 

 

Over the years that followed, despite laws enacted by the federal government to bar their entry, despite sweatshop fires that killed hundreds of women, despite riots aimed at their very existence, immigrants made homes here in New York City, and they helped to make New York City. That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness extends to them, too, is no relic of the past. It carried millions of Black Americans north during the Great Migration; it drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the Second World War; it invited countless others from the West Indies, and South Asia, and West Africa, and across the world. And it is what brought my family to this city when I was seven years old. 

 

My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane. Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America — the promise of the beautiful, patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals. There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it: American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West, is why children in faraway lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here. 

 

And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional. For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had. We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. 

 

The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all. It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel — the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too. You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means. 

 

The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.

  

How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again — including 250 years ago — those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress. As Thomas Paine once wrote, “this new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty [...] hither have they fled.” And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted — but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum. As we mark 250 years, what do we see?

  

We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world — one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands — those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone — and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.

  

Yes, we see America in a health insurance industry that exploits the sick, but that is not all I see when we look for America. We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on an ailing neighbor. 

 

Yes, we see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work and still believes his country can do better by his family. 

 

Yes, we see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder. Yet we see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people.

  

We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors — without asking how long they have lived here, or what papers they have — as ICE invades our neighborhoods.

  

We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling heat to cast their ballots.

  

We see America each time working people demand more — not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans. 

 

There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain: “Love it or leave it,” they say. But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent, it is every march led under the heavy sun, it is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free? 

   

Today, I think not only of the Fourth of July — I think too of the ninth of July. Five days after the Declaration of Independence was signed, it arrived here in New York City. Redcoats had disembarked on Staten Island. More than a hundred British ships loomed just offshore. Across this city, the Continental Army prepared for an invasion. George Washington commanded his brigades to assemble just a few feet from this building. It was known then as the Commons — today, we call it City Hall Park.

  

There, within range of British guns, Washington ordered his generals to read the Declaration aloud. And with the world’s mightiest empire poised to attack, Washington told the people of New York City what we will celebrate tomorrow — that we had declared our independence. That freedom was within reach. That evening, danger loomed. Conflict was not a question but a certainty. And yet when those early New Yorkers marched toward the statue of King George III that stood in Bowling Green, a statue they would melt down into bullets for their young army, they walked in unison — grounded not in the pursuit of plunder, but in ideals that for the first time had a name: America. 

 

Those ideals upon which our nation was built — they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them. Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived. A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America — the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection.

  

What a privilege each of us has, to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape. What a responsibility each of us possesses, to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. What power each of us holds, to bring America ever-closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores — the greatness that, for 250 years, has been America.

  

Thank you. God Bless America, God Bless New York City, and happy Fourth of July.  

Unemployment Went Down To 4.2% In June (In Spite Of Poor Job Creation)

Because of the holiday this weekend, the Labor Department released the June unemployment report a day early. The report showed the economy produced an anemic 57,000 jobs in June. That was not good, but the unemployed rate dropped from 4.3% to 4.2% anyway - mainly because the civilian workforce had 720,000 fewer workers (also not good).

Here are the relevant statistics for the month of June:

SIZE OF THE CIVILIAN WORK FORCE:

169,358,000

OFFICIAL NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS:

7,094,000

OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:

4.2%

DEMOGRAPHIC BREAKDOWN OF OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT:

Adult men...............3.9%

Adult women...............3.7%

Teens (16-19)...............14.6%

Whites...............3.6%

Blacks...............6.6%

Asians...............3.9%

Hispanics...............5.2%

NO HS diploma...............5.5%

HS graduate...............4.2%

Some college...............3.6%

Bachelor's deg. or more...............2.7%

NUMBER OF MARGINALLY-ATTACHED WORKERS (unemployed but no longer counted):

1,761,000

MORE REALISTIC NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED (marginal-attached + official):

8,855,000

MORE REALISTIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:

5.2%

America at 250 - Some Interesting Bits From The Navigator Poll

 

From Navigatorresearch.org.

The Most (And Least) Popular U.S. Politicians

The chart above is from the Strength in Numbers / Verasight Poll -- done between June 17th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 2,087 adults, with a 2.2 point margin of error.

 

Five Charts From Ipsos Polling Regarding The Nation's 250th Birthday

 

From Ipsos.com.

The Country's 250th Birthday - A Time To Celebrate Or Mourn?

 

Robert Reich comments on the country's impending 250th birthday:

For the next seven days, most of America will be engaged in celebrating the birth of our nation 250 years ago.

 

Trump wants to use this occasion for his insatiable ego by putting his name and face everywhere he can. His grandiosity is boundless; his narcissism, loathsome.

Others may use the anniversary to celebrate the good things America has accomplished over two and a half centuries. Fine.

 

But a true understanding of where America has come at this point in our history would see the current danger to the ideals we’ve striven for — the wanton attacks on democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and equal opportunity, by people asserting white Christian nationalism.

 

That attack has been spearheaded by Trump and abetted by spineless Republicans in the House and Senate, a small-minded Supreme Court majority, and a blight of billionaires who are bankrolling much of this for personal gain. They are all traitors to those ideals.

 

America’s ideals have never been fully achieved, of course, but the effort to achieve them has been noble; it has inspired much of the world. That effort had been our nation’s purpose, the core of our moral authority. 

Those ideals haven’t died, but the effort to achieve them is on life support. 

I wish I could feel celebratory, but I don’t. To me, the darkness that has befallen our country doesn’t call for celebration or self-congratulation — not this week, nor as long as the darkness prevails. It calls for a clear-eyed determination to renew the effort to achieve our ideals — our moral rudder — and thereby take America back.

Instead of celebrating the 250th anniversary of America, I for one will be mourning the loss of our national purpose. I’ll be wearing a black armband to signify my sorrow.

Half Of Americans Say The Best Days Are In The Future For The U.S.

 

The chart above reflects the results of the Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between May 14th and 18th of a nationwide sample of 1,316 adults, with a 3.4 point margin of error.

Trump Uses The World Cup To Embarrass The United States

The United States is hosting the World Cup. Most nations use that opportunity to show off their country to the world. They treat every team (and their fans) with dignity, fairness, common decency, and a welcoming attitude. Unfortunately, those are not attributes that can be found in the Trump administration. Trump has decided to put restrictions on the team from Iran that no other team must endure.

Here is how Axios.com describes it:

The U.S.-Iran war is forcing FIFA to navigate a diplomatic and logistical mess before the World Cup even kicks off Thursday.

Why it matters: Iranians are largely banned from traveling to the U.S. right now, while Iran's national team will face an exhausting itinerary each time it plays on U.S. soil.

Zoom in: Iran has three guaranteed matches on U.S. soil in the group stage after FIFA declined the nation's request to move its games to stadiums in Canada or Mexico after the war started.

• Without overnight stays, the Iranian team will have to fly in from Mexico, clear customs, play a match and then fly back to Mexico the same day for each U.S.-based match.
• 
  
• "Everything has to go by schedule. There's a lot of preparations. The last thing you want to deal with is a TSA issue, and that's going to reflect very badly on the U.S. if anything like that happens," said Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute, a foreign policy think tank.
• 
  
• State of play: Iran's training camp was moved from Arizona to Mexico just weeks before the starting whistle.

• Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that the request to move camps came through FIFA but originated with the U.S. government, which didn't want the Iranians staying overnight in the country. 
• 
  
• "While on the surface they may be complaining and pointing out that this is not the way the U.S. should be acting as a host, it doesn't mean that they're not happy that they don't have to be in the U.S.," said Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute, a foreign policy think tank.
• 
  

Zoom out: Iran is on the travel ban list. While Iranian players, coaches, staff and immediate family are supposed to be exempt, members of the support staff and the head of the country's football federation were denied visas, according the New York Times. 

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said in April that anyone affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist organization, will be denied a visa. 
• 
  
• There is required national military service in Iran, which could include the IRGC. The head of the federation, Mehdi Taj, was a former commander in the IRGC.
• 
  

Iran's fans won't be allowed to travel to the U.S. at all. Iranian nationals living in Iran or any other country won't be allowed to travel to the U.S. matches.

• The State Department declined to answer questions about the visa and consular processing.
•  
• An administration official said in a statement, "We will not allow the Iranian team to abuse this system to sneak terrorists into the United States under false pretenses."
• 
  

Between the lines: Likely demonstrations are another security risk to the tournament during Iran's matches. As in France's 1998 and Qatar's 2022 tournament, Iran's football team has been the target of anti-government protests during games.

• Los Angeles has a significant Iranian-American population, with a share who support the overthrown Shah, raising the risk of rule-breaking activity in the stands.