Saturday, April 18, 2026
Most Voters Blame Trump For The Rising Gas Prices
The chart above reflects the results of the Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between April 9th and 13th of a nationwide sample of 1,028 registered voters, with a 3.8 point margin of error.
Voters Are Very Angry About Prices And Inflation
The charts above are from the Change Research Poll -- done between April 3rd and 7th of a nationwide sample of 2,702 registered voters, with a 2.0 point margin of error.
Term Limits Is NOT The Answer To The Problems With Congress
Thom Hartmann (at The Hartmann Report) explains why term limits would be a very bad idea, and I agree with him. He writes:
Yesterday, I came home from the studio and turned on the TV to see an MSNOW host and her guest agree on how important it is that Democrats “unite around the issue of term limits” for members of Congress. Last week, the Democratic governor of a swing state said on my program that he was pushing for term limits.
In just the past 48 hours I’ve heard three different commentators on MSNOW and CNN speak of them as if term limits are the “solution” to “elderly” legislators or to the naked corruption that’s so rampant in DC.
This is the wrong issue for Democrats to be promoting now: term limits actually do more damage than good, which is why Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have been pushing them for decades.
For example, they’d get rid of good, effective, high-quality legislators like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Pramila Jayapal, among others.
But the problem with term limits goes far deeper than that.
Unfortunately, term limits are popular because they seem like an easy fix to the corruption crisis in American politics (over 70 percent of Americans favor them) but in reality they simply hand more power over to giant corporations and the morbidly rich. Here’s how:
First, term limits shift the balance of power in a legislature from the legislators themselves to lobbyists, which is why corporate-friendly Republicans so often speak fondly of them.
Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will hook up with an old-timer who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation.
With term limits, this institutional knowledge is largely stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.
Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, we have an actual experiment we can look to. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota all have term limits.
Research has shown, repeatedly and unambiguously, that in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers, and thus have outsized power and influence, far greater than they had before the term limits were instituted.
Of course, lobbyists — and the billionaires and corporations that pay them — love this. It dramatically increases lobbyists’ power and influence, giving them an early and easy entrée into the personal and political lives of the individual legislators who, in those states with term limits, are forced to lean on them for guidance.
This simple reality is not lost on the GOP, which has been pushing these restrictions on service at the federal and state legislature level for years: term limits are law in 16 states, all as the result of heavy Republican PR efforts and lobbying during the George HW Bush presidency. . . .
In addition to strengthening the hand of lobbyists, term limits also prevent good people who aren’t independently wealthy from entering politics in the first place.
What rational person, particularly if they have kids, would take the risk of a job they know will end in six years when instead they could build a career in a field that guarantees them security and a decent retirement?
Also because of this dynamic, term limits encourage legislators to focus on their post-politics career while serving.
Many busily legislate favors for particular industries in the hope of being rewarded with a job when they leave office. This is just one of several ways term limits increase the level of and incentives for corruption.
Because term limits encourage independently wealthy people to enter politics and push out middle-class would-be career politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they always shift the Overton window of legislatures — regardless of the party in power — to the right.
Probably the strongest argument against term limits, though, is that they’re fundamentally anti-democratic. In fact, we already have term limits: they’re called elections.
The decision about who represents the interests of a particular state or legislative district shouldn’t be held by some abstract law: it should be in the hands of the voters, and term limits deny voters this.
And, because term limits weaken the power of the legislative branch by producing a constant churn, they strengthen the power of the executive branch, a violation of the vital concept of checks-and-balances.
Even where governors or presidents are term-limited by law or constitution, the concentration of power in a single executive is inherently problematic, requiring a robust legislative branch to balance it. Term limits thus neuter a legislature’s ability to mount a muscular challenge to a governor or president grasping for excess power. . . .
For people who’ve never worked in politics or held elective office — which is most of us — term limits sound like a quick and easy answer for the complex problems of corruption and congressional dysfunction. But the only truly reasonable place for term limits to be applied are to the presidency (which we’ve already done) and the unelected members of the Supreme Court (18 years is generally suggested as an appropriate limit to their terms).
So, the next time you hear some politician or TV pundit proclaiming that term limits are the “best solution” to the “problem” of corruption or congressional dysfunction, consider their real agenda.
Unless they’re simply naïve or cynical, it’ll almost always be that they are or once were (before Trump) a Republican and just can’t help themselves.
Friday, April 17, 2026
Most Americans Don't Believe Trump Is A Good Negotiator
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll - done between April 10th and 13th of a nationwide sample of 1,748 adults (including 1,573 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.1 points for adults and 3.0 points for registered voters.
The Affordability Issue Remains Strong - And It Favors Democrats
The charts above are from the Navigator Poll -- done between April 2nd and 6th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.
The Myths Republicans Use To Help Billionaires Instead Of Workers
Robert Reich exposes the three myths Republicans use to tilt the economic playing field to favor the super-rich instead of helping workers:
It’s important to remind ourselves that a record share of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the nation’s billionaires, who are also paying a lower tax rate than the average American.
How do the ultra-wealthy justify their wealth and their low tax rates? By using three myths — all of which are utter rubbish.
The first is trickle-down economics.
Billionaires (and their apologists) claim that their wealth trickles down to everyone else as they invest it and create jobs.
Rubbish. For more than 40 years, as wealth at the top has soared, almost nothing has trickled down. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage today is barely higher than it was four decades ago.
Trump provided a giant tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, promising it would generate $4,000 in increased income for everyone else. Did you receive it?
In reality, the super-wealthy don’t create jobs or raise wages. Jobs are created when average working people earn enough money to buy all the goods and services they produce, pushing companies to hire more people and pay them higher wages.
The second myth is the “free market.”
The ultra-rich claim they’re being rewarded by the impersonal market for creating and doing what people are willing to pay them for.
The wages of other Americans have stagnated, they say, because most Americans are worth less in the market now that new technologies and globalization have made their jobs redundant.
Baloney. Even if they’re being rewarded, there’s no reason why the “free market” would reward vast multiples of what the rich were rewarded with decades ago.
The market can induce great feats of invention and entrepreneurship with lures of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars — not billions.
As to the rest of us succumbing to labor-replacing globalization and labor-saving technologies, no other advanced nation has nearly the degree of inequality found in the United States, yet all these nations have been exposed to the same forces of globalization and technological change.
In reality, the ultra-wealthy have rigged the so-called “free market” in the U.S. for their own benefit. Billionaires’ campaign contributions have soared from a relatively modest $31 million in the 2010 elections to $1.2 billion in the 2024 presidential cycle — a nearly 40-fold increase.
What have they gotten for their money? Tax cuts, freedom to bash unions and monopolize markets, and government bailouts. Their pockets have been further lined by privatization and deregulation.
The third myth is that they’re superior human beings.
They portray themselves as “self-made” rugged individuals who “did it on their own” and therefore deserve their billions.
Bupkis. Six of the 10 wealthiest Americans alive today are heirs to fortunes passed on to them by wealthy ancestors.
Others had the advantages that come with wealthy parents.
Jeff Bezos’s garage-based start was funded by a quarter-million-dollar investment from his parents. Bill Gates’s mother used her business connections to help land a software deal with IBM that made Microsoft. Elon Musk came from a family that reportedly owned shares of an emerald mine in southern Africa.
Don’t fall for these three myths.
Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.
The so-called free market has been distorted by huge campaign contributions from the ultra-rich.
Don’t lionize the ultra-rich as superior “self-made” human beings who deserve their billions. They were lucky and had connections.
In reality, there is no justification for today’s extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top. It’s distorting our politics, rigging our markets, and granting unprecedented power to a handful of people.
The last time America faced anything comparable was at the start of the 20th century.
In 1910, former president Theodore Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy American democracy.
Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was enacted in 1916 and the capital gains tax in 1922.
Since that time, both have eroded. As the rich have accumulated greater wealth, they have also amassed more political power — and have used that political power to reduce their taxes.
Teddy Roosevelt understood something about the American economy and the ultra-rich that has now reemerged, even more extreme and more dangerous. We must understand it, too — and act.
For our economy and democracy, we must tax the wealth of the wealthiest.
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