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Two-thirds of small business owners expecting higher revenue despite inflation concerns

Two-thirds of small businesses expect to increase their revenue over the next year and 43 percent percent plan to hire more staff, the highest figures in two years, according to a survey from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and MetLife. 

The report found that small businesses are the most optimistic they’ve been since the start of the pandemic, despite growing concerns about the impact of red-hot inflation. Forty-four percent of small businesses cite inflation as the biggest challenge, up from 33 percent last quarter, according to the survey, which was conducted from April 29 to May 17.

“Historic inflation is top-of-mind and deeply troubling to small businesses right now,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president of small business policy Tom Sullivan said in a statement, noting that consumer demand remains strong despite rising costs. 

Consumer prices soared 8.6 percent in the last 12 months ending in May, the fastest rate of increase in four decades, and prices rose 1 percent from April to May, according to Labor Department data. Consumers are getting hammered by sky-high gas and food prices. 

Economists say that consumers are likely to spend less as higher costs eat away at their earnings. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates to fight inflation is already slowing down the U.S. economy, which shrank 1.6 percent in the first quarter, and raising borrowing costs for businesses.

The Chamber survey found that 28 percent of small businesses cited supply chain snags as their top challenge, while 15 percent pointed to rising interest rates, up from 7 percent in the first quarter. 

Nearly seven in 10 small business owners said they had to raise consumer prices to cope with higher costs, while 46 percent responded to inflation by taking out a loan and 35 percent decreased staff.

Source: TEST FEED1

Cruz knocks 'Sesame Street' for having Elmo 'aggressively advocate' for young kids' COVID vaccines

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) slammed “Sesame Street” on Wednesday after the popular children’s show promoted COVID-19 vaccines in a recent episode, accusing it of “aggressively” advocating for the inoculations for young kids despite citing “zero scientific evidence.”

The Texas lawmaker shared a recent clip from the show’s Twitter account in which Elmo’s father, Louie, tells his son he was “super-duper” for getting vaccinated before telling the audience the vaccines are safe and effective.

“Thanks sesame street for saying parents are allowed to have questions!” Cruz tweeted. “You then have Elmo aggressively advocate for vaccinating children UNDER 5. But you cite ZERO scientific evidence for this.”

This is the second time in the past year Cruz has called out “Sesame Street,” the longest-running children’s show in the U.S. In November, the senator called a pro-vaccination tweet from the Twitter account for Big Bird “propaganda.”

In the U.S., anyone aged six months and older can now get vaccinated after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna this month.

After a review, the FDA ruled the vaccines for children aged six months and older are both safe and effective. Parents can now get their children vaccinated at doctor’s offices or local pharmacies.

Cruz, however, has taken aim at the FDA over vaccines for the young. The senator, who is vaccinated against COVID-19, penned a letter with other Republican congressional colleagues to the FDA this month questioning if the vaccines were needed and claiming the FDA has a lower efficacy bar for children.

In a statement at the time, Cruz said the “virus poses minimal risk for children” and called on the FDA to require parents be shown data that children are less likely to have serious complications from COVID-19.

The FDA has said young children are still at risk even if they don’t get sick as often and that 442 children younger than five had died from COVID-19 as of the end of May.

“Sesame Street” encouraged families at the end of the episode to get information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to make an informed decision.

Source: TEST FEED1

Chris Pratt: 'Wackos' on right and left make US look more partisan than it is

Chris Pratt says tiny bands of vocal “wackos” on both the right and the left are fueling the political division across the country.

“There’s an illusion of that we’ve gotten more partisan, but the truth, if you’re looking at it from my understanding, is there’s a very small group of wackos on the right and a very small group of wackos on the left,” the “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Jurassic World: Dominion” star told ITK in a recent interview.

“Each of them are sort of echoed through mainstream media — whether it be Fox or whether it be CNN — and a lot of times there’s political posturing, to try to get onto Fox, or try to get onto MSNBC or CNN,” the 43-year-old actor said.

Pratt said there’s a “big group in the middle” politically that “instead of moving right or left, is kind of moving up and down” and “becoming disenfranchised and disengaged from the political process.”

Nonpartisans, he said, “feel like no one’s really representing them.”

Pratt said he and the team behind his latest project veered it “a little bit away” from politics, refocusing the Prime Video series “The Terminal List” into more of a psychological nail-biter compared to the best-selling 2018 political thriller of the same name that it’s based on, authored by former Navy SEAL Jack Carr.

In the Amazon original show, premiering on Friday, Pratt plays James Reece, a Navy SEAL who has to deal with his psychological trauma, the national security fallout and the apparent still-present threat from enemies after his platoon is ambushed during a covert international mission.

“Ultimately, this is a story about a guy who’s become a little disenfranchised with the complex and uses some of these insurgent tactics that he learns overseas and exacts revenge on the folks who make decisions from air-conditioned offices,” said Pratt, who also served as “The Terminal List’s” executive producer alongside Carr.

The series also stars Taylor Kitsch, of “Friday Night Lights” fame, as Reece’s best friend, as well as Constance Wu, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Patrick Schwarzenegger and Riley Keough, among others.

Pratt, who just welcomed his second daughter last month with wife Katherine Schwarzenegger, said while the eight-episode series is fictional, there’s a real-life threat that’s fracturing the United States.

“I think we just find ways to connect with one another, to understand that a lot of the division that’s being sown in this country is actually the result of foreign adversaries who are angry with us, who dislike us,” the Minnesota-born performer said, slamming Russian “troll farms” that are “on Twitter trying to help divide us as a nation.”

“Ultimately, the way that we could bridge this divide — because culture is upstream of politics — it’s just to kind of create a culture of unity that lives upstream of politics that gets so popular that the politicians innately are going to just f—— grab hold of it,” Pratt said.

Americans are capable of coming together, he insisted.

“I think we understand that we have a lot more in common than we think, that we go back to common sense, kind of come back to the middle and realize that we can engage some of these folks and not everything is politics,” he said.

“I think then we can kind of create a cultural wave that politicians are going to grab on because it’ll become popular.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Redistricting battle further positions DeSantis for 2024 presidential bid

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a political enigma. The Harvard and Yale-educated attorney has accomplished what numerous conservative politicians — among them Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and fellow-Floridian Marco Rubio — have tried and failed to do in the wake of Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party: position himself as the ultimate insider with the outsider cred to consolidate the MAGA base. 

DeSantis burst onto the national scene during his 2018 bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination with a campaign ad that featured him quoting from “The Apprentice,” reading “The Art of the Deal” to his infant son and encouraging his toddlers to “build the wall” out of toy blocks. Four years later, as he cruises towards reelection, the latest manufactured controversy between DeSantis and the GOP establishment features his brazen veto of the state legislature’s congressional redistricting plan, and subsequent commandeering of the redistricting process. 

Republican gerrymanders are nothing new in Florida politics. A decade ago, flouting the voter-approved state constitutional amendments that prohibited politicians from drawing the lines in a way that benefited any political party or incumbent, Rick Scott and the GOP majority forced through a plan that cemented the party’s control over the state’s senate and congressional districts. Their gerrymander set in motion a protracted legal battle that culminated in the state courts declaring the maps unconstitutional. 

Those cases saw Florida’s 5^th congressional district, a serpentine seat stretching all the way from Jacksonville to Orlando represented at the time by now-convicted felon Corrine Brown, struck down and replaced with a new district combining African American populations in Jacksonville, Tallahassee, and the rural counties in between.

But DeSantis’s approach this time around has taken redistricting hardball to a whole new level.  

In rejecting the congressional maps, DeSantis became the only governor in modern American history to veto a redistricting proposal enacted by a legislature controlled by their own party.  

The governor’s alternate plan, a 20-8 GOP gerrymander rammed through in a special session, is also of highly dubious legality, at least under current law, since it erases not only African American Democrat Rep. Al Lawson’s 5^th District but also the Orlando seat currently held by African American Democrat Val Demings, who is seeking to challenge Rubio in the 2022 Senate contest. Lawsuits have already been filed alleging improper use of race and partisanship in the redistricting process, but the recent ruling by the Florida Supreme Court seems likely to preserve the “DeSantimander” — at least through the 2022 elections. 

Just a few months ago, Democrats seemed to be on track for their most successful national redistricting cycle in decades. Then the crown jewel of their gerrymandering agenda, the heavily biased 22-4 New York congressional map, was struck down by the state courts. Additional legal setbacks have followed in places like Kansas, Ohio, and Maryland, to the point where things now seem likely to end in a wash. 

But those early Democratic successes saw the GOP base clamoring for greater aggression from the party’s leadership, and DeSantis was the first to answer the call. The governor seems to believe that he can use the redistricting process as a cudgel to break down the few remaining legal barriers that prevent his party from gerrymandering itself into permanent control. One of these, as DeSantis himself has already admitted, is the Florida constitution’s Fair Districts amendments, which outlaw both partisan gerrymandering and the use of redistricting to “deny racial or language minorities the equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice.” 

“I think our dispute very well may lead to saying that Florida’s redistricting amendments are not consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause,” DeSantis told reporters at a March 15 press conference. His administration has argued that the amendments, as interpreted by the Florida Supreme Court, run afoul of the Equal Protection Clause standard established in the 1993 case of Shaw v. Reno, and its subsequent precedents. These cases have held that race may not be the “predominant factor” in the drawing of districts, but courts have permitted race to be used in a way that’s narrowly tailored to further the compelling interest of compliance with the Voting Rights Act. 

The Supreme Court’s decision in February to allow an Alabama congressional redistricting plan to remain in effect despite a lower court ruling that it diluted the votes of the state’s African American population, in violation of Section 2 of the VRA, signaled renewed skepticism from the justices towards the legislation that has been foundational to the expansion of minority federal and state officeholding over the past five decades. Now, the DeSantis gerrymander may place the constitutionality of both the Fair Districts Amendments and the VRA itself squarely within the crosshairs of the judiciary. 

Under current law, the Florida legislature was required to take the race of voters into account during redistricting, both to avoid illegal vote dilution under Section 2, and to prevent diminishment of their opportunity to elect representatives of their choice under the Florida constitution. DeSantis’s position is that districts must instead be drawn based solely on colorblind and race-neutral criteria, a radical approach that would gut the legal protections currently afforded to minority voters. It may find a receptive audience on a Supreme Court that has become increasingly skeptical of racial classifications in all areas of government policy. At the state level, the judicial deck is similarly stacked in his favor, as the Florida Supreme Court has a 7-0 Republican majority, including 3 justices appointed by DeSantis himself. 

What better way to position himself for a 2024 presidential bid — not only in the minds of base voters but also among GOP leaders and wealthy donors — than by becoming the posterchild of the case that either strikes down or guts not only the key thorn in the side of the Florida GOP but also one of the last remaining bastions of affirmative action in voting that remains in the United States?  

While the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause to no longer permit challenges to partisan gerrymandering to be litigated in federal court was a major setback for the cause of redistricting reform, far worse decisions could soon be on the horizon. 

DeSantis may have ridden the Trump Train to national prominence, but since the former-president’s 2020 defeat, no one has done more to build their profile as a firebrand conservative alternative to Trump — first with his opposition to COVID-mitigation measures, then with his more recent capitalization on the anti-woke and Critical Race Theory controversies — than the Sunshine State’s governor. Now, he seems to be trying to establish himself as the hero of the Republican Party’s new redistricting agenda.  

DeSantis may appear to be shooting from the hip, but his actions are finely calculated to both rile up the base by generating maximal liberal outrage while simultaneously being couched in enough common-sense reasonableness so as not to alienate the middle. His fellow GOP presidential hopefuls may soon be getting taught the lesson that Florida Democrats have learned the hard way: You underestimate Ron DeSantis at your peril. 

Nick Seabrook is a professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Florida. His latest book is “One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America.” Follow him on Twitter @DrSeabrook

Source: TEST FEED1

Two-thirds back prosecuting Trump over effort to overturn election: survey

Two-thirds of Americans say they think that former President Trump should be prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to a new poll.

A Politico-Morning Consult poll released on Wednesday asked respondents if they believed Trump’s efforts to overturn the last presidential election’s results was a crime and that he should face prosecution. 

Sixty-six percent of respondents said that they thought it was a crime and should be prosecuted, while 19 percent said it was not a crime and 18 percent said they thought it was a crime but Trump should not be prosecuted.

A majority of respondents also believed that Trump misled people in the country about the 2020 election outcome (57 percent), tried to overturn the 2020 election results (65 percent) and claimed fraud had been committed in the last election without evidence (64 percent).

The poll comes amid the latest hearing held by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack. 

The panel heard from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former special assistant to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, on Tuesday, in which she offered surprising new insight into the days before and after the Capitol riot.

Among some of the revelations offered during her in-person and recorded testimony, they included acknowledgements from within the White House that things could go wrong on Jan. 6, that the former president’s efforts to toss the last presidential election’s results were warned as being illegal to Trump and that the former president allegedly lunged at a Secret Service agent in an effort to go to the Capitol that day.

Her testimony was immediately dismissed by Trump on his Truth Social platform in which he said, “I hardly know who this person, Cassidy Hutchinson, is, other than I heard very negative things about her (a total phony and ‘leaker’).”

The Morning Consult-Politico poll was conducted between June 24 and June 26 with a sample of 2,004 registered voters. The margin of error is plus or minus two percentage points.

Source: TEST FEED1

Extreme pride in being an American at record low: Gallup

A record low percentage of U.S. adults — 38 percent — say they are “extremely proud” to be an American, according to a new Gallup poll.

The survey giant said the percentage is the lowest since it began recording the trend in 2001, and is 4 percentage points below the previous low of 42 percent. Additionally, 27 percent in the new survey say they are “very proud” to be an American.

At the same time, 22 percent now say they are “moderately proud” to be an American, while 9 percent are “only a little” and 4 percent “not at all” proud.

Prior to 2015, the percentage of U.S. adults saying they were “extremely proud” did not dip below 55 percent, Gallup noted, with the highest reading following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Along party lines, Republicans’ pride in being an American has consistently surpassed Democrats’ and independents’ since 2001, and the trend continues today, according to the survey giant. However, Republicans just hit their lowest percentage in the trend, with 58 percent now expressing extreme national pride. Independents’ extreme pride is also at its lowest on record, with only 34 percent expressing extreme pride.

Democrats’ extreme pride in the nation has also trickled down this year, to 26 percent. It rose slightly to 31 percent in 2021 after hitting a 22 percent low point in 2019.

The poll comes amid increasingly challenging times in the U.S., with Gallup noting that the survey was conducted amid high inflation and in the wake of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.

Gallup added that the recent passage of the bipartisan gun safety bill and the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade may impact Americans’ pride, pointing to strong support in previous surveys for stricter gun laws in the U.S. and Roe.

The new survey was conducted from June 1 to 20 among a random sample of 1,015 U.S. adults. The margin of error is 4 percentage points.

Source: TEST FEED1

Two-thirds in new poll favor 'stricter gun control laws'

Two-thirds of Americans support “stricter gun control laws” in the country, according to a new poll released just days after President Biden signed bipartisan gun safety legislation in the wake of several high-profile mass shootings. 

The Politico-Morning Consult poll out on Wednesday showed 66 percent of respondents back stricter laws compared to 30 percent who oppose them. 

When asked how important it should be for Congress to pass legislation that would add more restrictions for owning a gun, 44 percent said it should be a top priority while 16 percent said it is important, but should be a lower priority.

Twenty-one percent said passing more restrictions on gun ownership should not be done and 11 percent said it is not too important a priority. 

Biden last weekend signed a bipartisan gun safety bill into law, which was crafted in the wake of shootings in Buffalo, N.Y. and Uvalde, Texas. 

While the president conceded that the legislation “doesn’t do everything I want,” he also acknowledged that “it does include actions I’ve long called for that are going to save lives.”

Aspects of the bill include closing the “boyfriend loophole,” which blocks people who have been convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence against a romantic partner of having a firearm for at least five years, bolstering background checks for those between the ages of 18 and 21 years old, and offering $750 million for states that want to enact their own red flag legislation.

The Morning Consult-Politico poll was conducted between June 24 and June 26 with a sample of 2,004 registered voters. The margin of error is 2 percentage points. 

Source: TEST FEED1

Here's why your July Fourth cookout will likely be more expensive than last year

(NEXSTAR) – It’s no secret that inflation has been pushing the price of nearly everything up. Unfortunately, those prices likely won’t be cooling off for your July Fourth cookout.

In a recent report, the American Farm Bureau Federation found the average July Fourth cookout (serving 10 people) will cost $69.68, up 17% – or about $10 – compared to last summer. The usual culprits – supply chain disruptions, inflation, and war in Ukraine – are to blame, according to AFBF.

“Despite higher food prices, the supply chain disruptions and inflation have made farm supplies more expensive; like consumers, farmers are price-takers not price-makers,” AFBF Chief Economist Roger Cryan said in a Monday news release. “Bottom line, in many cases the higher prices farmers are being paid aren’t covering the increase in their farm expenses. The cost of fuel is up and fertilizer prices have tripled.”

While reviewing the prices of 12 common cookout dishes, AFBF found the cost of ground beef has risen the most since last year. A 2-pound pack of ground beef now costs just over $11, up 36% from $8.20 in 2021.

Other popular cookout meats like chicken breasts and pork chops, and staples like potato salad, hamburger buns, and cookies, have also increased in price since the summer of 2021.

Not every item is on the rise, though. According to AFBF, the prices for strawberries, sliced cheese, and potato chips have dropped year-over-year. That’s especially true for the berries – two pints of strawberries cost $4.44 this summer, down from $5.30.

Here’s a look at the year-over-year price differences for each item reviewed by AFBF:

The AFBF compiled data with the help of 176 volunteer shoppers across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

Grocery store shelves aren’t the only places with high prices. The national average for a regular gallon of gas is almost $5, nearly $2 higher than it was around the same time last year, AAA reports. Gas prices have been falling for the past two weeks, according to AAA, but it’s unclear just how low the prices will go.

AAA predicts roughly 42 million Americans to hit the roads for July Fourth, up from 41.8 million last year.

Source: TEST FEED1

Why are laws so long and complicated?

Americans often complain that our laws are too complicated, with many statutes running to dozens or even hundreds of pages of dense language. When the late Herman Cain was briefly the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, he drew sustained applause by vowing to veto any bill longer than three pages.

More serious political figures in both parties realize that complex issues – such as health care, taxes and national security – must be addressed in detail. But it is still reasonable to ask why so many statutes appear to be so long-winded.

It is certainly true that legislators tend toward verbosity, but there are often good reasons for laws to be as long as they are. President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, affecting nearly one-sixth of the U.S. economy, famously runs to about 900 pages, while President George W. Bush’s USA Patriot Act, passed in the aftermath of 9/11, clocks in at 132 pages. A more recent example is the 81-page Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, just signed by President Biden, which, among other things, closes the notorious “boyfriend loophole” in the law limiting gun possession by convicted domestic abusers.

As originally written, a federal law prohibited access to firearms by a person who had been “convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,” but only if they were a “current or former spouse, parent, or guardian of the victim [or] a person who is cohabiting with or has cohabited with the victim,” or with whom they have a child. That left a glaring exception for certain domestic abusers who had never married, parented with or lived with their victims. (A different law makes it illegal for any convicted felon to possess a firearm.) Although expanding the law might seem like an easy fix, it turns out to be not quite so simple.

Marriage, parenthood and cohabitation all have plain legal meanings, but less determinate relationships can be just as abusive and therefore in need of protection. The drafters of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act settled upon “current or recent former dating relationship” as the operative term to plug the loophole, but that was only the beginning. After all, what constitutes a “dating relationship”?

If the statute left that unanswered, the result would be chaotic. There are over 1,500 federal district judges and magistrates in the U.S., and each one could potentially have a different conception of “dating relationship,” leading to the inconsistent application of a law that carries criminal penalties. Just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a sweeping decision expanding Second Amendment rights, so a law limiting gun ownership must be written with special clarity.

Consequently, closing the boyfriend loophole required two pages of definitions, explanations and limitations. A dating relationship is defined as “a continuing serious relationship of a romantic or intimate nature,” to be determined by considering factors such as “the length of the relationship,” the “nature of the relationship” and the “frequency and type of interaction between the individuals.” Importantly, the statute provides that a “casual acquaintanceship or ordinary fraternization in a business or social context does not constitute a dating relationship.” Moreover, the provision is not retroactive, and it does not apply to offenses that have been pardoned or expunged.

The definitions do leave open questions – how recent is “recent”? how intimate is “intimate”? – but at least they provide some guidance for the courts. (The original statute, before the addition of “dating relationship,” includes another four pages defining “firearm” and related terms, which is necessary if the government is going to prosecute somebody for possessing one.)

Eliminating the boyfriend loophole is only one part of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Some of its more extensive provisions include funding for states to establish crisis intervention orders and violence prevention initiatives, additions to the Instant Criminal Background Check System, improved classification of federally licensed firearms dealers, access to juvenile court records for firearms purchasers under 21, new penalties for “straw purchasers,” incentives for state “red flag” laws, funding for 11 different community-based mental health services and funding for improved school safety measures.

Because they were the product of intense negotiations between Republicans and Democrats, each of these provisions had to be set out with great specificity, describing the programs, goals and limitations for funding, penalties for violations, lines of authority, means of implementation and, of course, definitions for dozens of terms. It is somewhat encouraging that the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act could encompass so many disparate and controversial subjects with such relative economy in so few pages.

It can be frustrating even for lawyers that statutes are so long and complex. But shorter statutes would inevitably result in additional gaps, ambiguities and unintended consequences — such as the one that led to the boyfriend loophole in the first place.

Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. His most recent book is “The Trials of Rasmea Odeh: How a Palestinian Guerrilla Gained and Lost U.S. Citizenship.”

Source: TEST FEED1