"Owning a home has long been seen as a pillar of the American dream. But a new report highlights just how far many Americans remain from achieving it.

"Middle-income households, or those with annual earnings of up to $75,000, can afford only 23% of the homes listed for sale in the U.S., according to recent data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). In a more balanced market, almost half of listings should be affordable to buyers of average income, the group said.

"In fact, the housing market has a deficit of about 320,000 affordable homes, NAR found, which for moderate-income families ranges up to about $256,000. The median price for all homes is $388,000."

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"There he goes again, again! The 'he' is President Joe Biden. At 1 pm today, the Wall Street Journal posted a new Biden op-ed piece on the economy, and it's chock-full of Pinocchios and other related untruths, as per usual.

"The one I want to tackle, first and really foremost, is his assertion that, since he took office, our economy has somehow created more than 13 million jobs. This is a gigantic cherry-picked exaggeration. The vast bulk of those jobs were COVID replacement, not new jobs. That's point number one.

"Point number two: If you look at the broadest measure of employment, which is total civilian employment, the household survey, adjusted for population changes, that number through May is 160.7 million jobs. Now, pre-pandemic in January 2020, that number was 159.6 million. So, actually, the household employment gain is a grand total of 1.1 million from the pre-COVID baseline, which means, in effect, Mr. Biden hadn't created any new jobs at all."

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"The exodus from high-tax states continues.

"A growing number of Americans are migrating from predominantly blue states with steep taxes like California and New York to red states with lower taxes like Florida and Texas, according to a Bank of America analyst note that is based on aggregated and anonymous internal customer data.

"'We constructed near real-time estimates of domestic migration flows and found that pandemic migration trends are not reversing,' the analysis said. Since the first quarter of 2023, the data 'suggests that cities that saw a large influx of people during the pandemic have still been growing faster than other cities in recent quarters.' ...

"'This population shift paints a clear picture,' said Janelle Fritts, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. 'People left high-tax, high-cost states for lower-tax, lower-cost alternatives.'"

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"By now, much of the country has heard or read about the City University of New York law school graduate who was allowed to unspool a spiteful tirade as the school's commencement speaker. She made a number of vile statements, but her call to 'fight against capitalism' stood out to us. She and her fellow travelers know what few casual observers are aware of, that is, an attack on capitalism is an attack on liberty.

"Condemning capitalism is nothing new in this country. We've heard the angry criticisms all of our lives, and they weren't novel when we were young. It's tragic, really, that so many in the West see the tension between 'capitalists' and their ideological opponents as merely a conflict between ideas about which economic system we should have.

"But it's more than that. It's a battle between freedom and subjugation."

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"While left-wing attacks on the Supreme Court continue, the justices demonstrated again last week that simple partisan categories cannot explain their work. In Tyler v. Hennepin County, the court unanimously agreed that the right to property continues even when the government seizes land to recover a tax debt.

"Even with a court sharply divided over questions of race, religion and government power, the justices came together to re-affirm the most basic of constitutional freedoms.

"Tyler was another case that pitted an individual property owner against a government Leviathan."

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"The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday dealt another setback to organized labor by making it easier for employers to sue over strikes that cause property destruction in a ruling siding with a concrete business in Washington state that sued the union representing its truck drivers after a work stoppage.

"The 8-1 decision overturned a lower court's ruling that said the lawsuit filed by Glacier Northwest Inc, which sells and delivers ready-mix concrete, against a local affiliate of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was preempted by a U.S. law called the National Labor Relations Act. Glacier Northwest is a unit of Japan-based Taiheiyo Cement Corp.

"Glacier Northwest filed a lawsuit in Washington state court accusing the union of intentional property destruction during a 2017 strike.

"A group of drivers went on strike while their mixing trucks were filled with concrete. Although the drivers kept their mixing drums rotating to delay the concrete from hardening and damaging the vehicles, the company was forced to discard the unused product at a financial loss."

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"After a confidential human source claimed then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions, FBI agents used what's called an FD-1023 form to record the allegation. Now FBI Director Christopher Wray is defying a May 3 congressional subpoena to provide this form. On Tuesday, in response to Wray's refusal to hand over the documents, Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer announced the House will move to hold the FBI director in contempt of Congress.

"It isn't that announcement -- or even the other explosive ones released over the past year by Comer's Senate colleague, Chuck Grassley -- that prove the most telling, however. Rather, it is the combination of all the details, big and small, that suggests the scandal set to unfold over the coming weeks will be bigger than anyone imagined."

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"West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) is leading incumbent Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) by 22 points in a hypothetical U.S. Senate matchup in 2024, according to a poll released Tuesday.

"Justice leads Manchin 54 percent to 32 percent, with 13 percent of respondents saying they are undecided, according to an East Carolina University Center for Survey Research poll of registered voters in West Virginia.

"The same survey found that Justice has a job-approval rating of 57 percent and a 29-percent disapproval rating. Manchin's job-approval rating sits at 33 percent, with a 59-percent disapproval rating."

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"The debt ceiling deal reached by the Republican leadership and the administration is far from perfect in the eyes of anyone who cares about runaway government spending (which is the only government spending we know of). But it appears House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was able to block, at least for a year, the hiring of a field army of IRS soldiers. Like a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it's a good start, though there's still a long way to go.

"Among the hundreds of sections in the 99-page bill, No. 251 is 'Rescission of certain balances made available to the Internal Revenue Service.' More specifically, the legislation, if passed and signed as is, cuts almost $1.4 billion 'of the unobligated balances of amounts appropriated or otherwise made available for activities of the Internal Revenue Service' through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022."

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"The Supreme Court scaled back the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers to regulate 'waters of the United States' broadly under the Clean Water Act, a win for landowners and business groups that argued the agencies have been overregulating small bodies of water such as wetlands.

"In a technically unanimous ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the court said the 1972 Clean Water Act's reference to 'waters' that can be regulated are limited to "geographic[al] features that are described in ordinary parlance as 'streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes"' and to 'adjacent wetlands that are "indistinguishable" from those bodies of water due to a continuous surface connection.'

"While the ruling was unanimous, the justices were divided in their reasoning, issuing four separate concurrences. They ultimately contended the landowners lacked enough connection to a nearby lake, meaning they're not required to get a permit under the CWA."

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