Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Are Republicans Finally Admitting They Broke The Middle Class?
JD Vance went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said something his party’s donors won’t like. He said decades of Republican economics let Wall Street buy up every asset of modern life and turn it into a line that only goes up. He said that’s why young people are drawn to socialism. He’s not alone. Josh Hawley called gutting Medicaid politically suicidal. Marco Rubio admitted unfettered free trade shrank the middle class. But here’s the trap. Elon Musk, the biggest single cycle donor in American history, wants an AI future where work is optional and the treasury mails you a check while he owns the machines. And voters aren’t buying the golden age. Trump’s approval sits at 39%, and just 30% like how he handles inflation. Gas is above $4. Well…confession isn’t a policy, and the fat donors still write the checks mostly to the GOP
Did The White House Just Fake The Crime Numbers?
Last month the White House said Trump’s National Guard deployments drove the biggest homicide drops in the country. It named Washington, Los Angeles, Memphis and New Orleans. Four cities where he sent troops after, quote, Democrat leaders failed to act. There’s a problem. The Council on Criminal Justice report they cited says something else. The biggest drops were in Lincoln, Nebraska, Rochester, New York, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Washington ranked sixth. Los Angeles ranked seventeenth. Memphis and New Orleans weren’t in the report at all. The White House pointed to a separate article, and that author told NOTUS the claim was incorrect. Homicides have been falling nationally since 2022, and researchers credit community violence programs. Trump cut more than half the federal money for gun violence prevention. You have to wonder why a government fudges numbers to justify troops in American cities. Perhaps the numbers aren’t the point. The troops are.
Three Billion Dollars A Day, Just In Interest
The Congressional Budget Office says interest on the national debt now costs the Treasury more than $3 billion a day. Net interest hit $963 billion in the first ten months of this fiscal year. That’s up 14% from last year. The deficit for those ten months came in at $1.8 trillion, and CBO now projects $2.1 trillion for the year. Meanwhile Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spent up to $10 billion of your money propping up the Japanese yen, because Japan holds $1.4 trillion of our debt and nobody wants to find out what happens if they sell. Republicans passed a tax cut for billionaires and handed you the bill. Every dollar going to bondholders is a dollar not going to schools, roads, or healthcare.
What Happens When Eight Million Borrowers Lose Their Plan?
The Biden era SAVE plan is dead, and nearly eight million borrowers are being dumped out of it all at once. That’s about a fourth of the entire federal student loan portfolio. Constance Jordan is 70 years old. She borrowed a $186,000, paid since 1998, and now owes $435,000. Her payment jumped from $800 a month to $3,900. Others got quoted $50, then zero, then $745. One woman found five years of her payments simply vanished from her servicer’s records. Over the first weekend of August, borrowers who thought they were in forbearance woke up to emails saying they were in default. One in five borrowers is already in default. This is a wrecking ball aimed at working people.
Do Fossils Just Blow Up The Greening Myth?
Trump officials keep telling us carbon dioxide is plant food and pollution greens the planet. A new study in the journal Science says the opposite. Researchers led by Regan Dunn at the La Brea Tar Pits looked at fossilized leaf cells from Wyoming, from a period 56 million years ago when carbon flooded the atmosphere fast. At first the forests thickened. Then they collapsed. Canopy cover dropped sixty one percent within a few thousand years and stayed 35% below where it started for tens of thousands of years. Dunn says about 60% of the standing vegetation was gone. It took roughly 100,000 years to come back. Earth already stopped greening and started browning. The fossil record is a warning written in stone, and the people who profit from burning things are ignoring it.
Geeky Science Alert, Want A Better Marriage? Take A Walk
Researchers at Brigham Young University looked at 1,693 young married couples in a nationally representative survey. Couples who exercised reported better communication, better conflict resolution, and fewer serious fights than couples who didn’t. Couples who worked out together scored a little higher still, though that edge wasn’t statistically significant, so it could be chance. And the study can’t prove which came first. Maybe happy couples are just more likely to lace up together. Here’s the good part. The most common shared activity was walking. No gym, no equipment, no membership fee. One couple listed carrying two 30 pound children for five hours as exercise, which honestly counts. In an economy squeezing everybody, the cheapest thing you can do for your marriage is still free.
And that’s the way it is, Today Friday, August 14, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
