Authored by Jonathan Turley,

In 1937, it was said that a critical shift of one justice in a critical case ended the move to pack the Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It was said that it was “a shift in time saves nine.” In 2024, a shift in the Senate may have had the same impact. 

Trump’s victory means that absent a renewal of the court-packing scheme and other extreme measures of the left, the Court will remain unchanged institutionally for at least a decade.

The expectation is that Associate Justice Clarence Thomas could use this perfect time to retire and ensure that his seat will be filled with a fellow conservative jurist. Justice Samuel Alito may also consider this a good time for a safe harbor departure.

They have a couple of years before they reach the redline for nominations before the next election.

The election means that court-packing schemes are now effectively scuttled despite the support of Democratic senators like Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). Given Kamala Harris’s reported support, the Supreme Court dodged one of the greatest threats to its integrity in its history.

The impact on the law will also be pronounced. Returning the issue of abortion to the states will remain unchanged. A younger generation will grow up in a country where the voters of each state are allowed to determine what limits to place on abortions.

Likewise, gun rights and religious rights will continue to be robustly protected. The checks on the administrative state are also likely to be strengthened. Pushes for wealth taxes and other measures will likely receive an even more skeptical court.

The possible appointment of two new justices would likely give Trump a total of five to six nominees on the court. Liberals previously insisted that it was time for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to leave the Court, a campaign that I opposed. The appointment of seven of the nine justices by a single president would be unprecedented.

(I expect, as with the calls to “end the filibuster” as undemocratic, the liberal campaign to push Sotomayor to retire ended around 2:30 am on Tuesday night).

Trump has shown commendable judgment in his prior nominations.

All three—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—are extraordinary jurists who have already created considerable legacies. I testified at Neil Gorsuch’s Senate confirmation hearing and still consider him one of the most consequential and brilliant additions to the Court in decades.

These justices were subjected to appalling treatment during their confirmation process, including attacks on Barrett for her adopting Haitian children. New Trump nominees can expect the same scorched-earth campaign from the media and the left, but they will have a reliable Senate majority for confirmation.

These justices have shown the intellect and integrity that bring credit to the Court, including each voting in key cases with their liberal colleagues when their principles demanded it. Trump can cement his legacy by continuing that legacy over the next four years with nominees of the same caliber.

In this way, the election may prove the key moment in ending one of the most threatening periods of the Court’s existence. With the loss of the control of the Senate, the push for new limits on the Court and calls for investigations of conservative justices will subside for now. However, the rage in the media and academia will only likely increase.

Both media and academic commentators pushed for sweeping constitutional changes, including packing the Court or curtailing its jurisdiction. Many saw the Harris-Walz Administration as the vehicle for such extreme measures. Harris herself pledged to “reform” the Court.

Some liberals figures even called for the dissolution of the Court and other radical changes.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, called for the scrapping of key constitutional elements in his “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.” In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, he described conservative justices as “partisan hacks.”

In the New York Times, book critic Jennifer Szalai denounced what she calls “Constitution worship” and warned that “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.” She frets that by limiting the power of the majority, the Constitution “can end up fostering the widespread cynicism that helps authoritarianism grow.”

In a New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for liberals to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

Other law professors have denounced the “constitutional cult” and the First Amendment as the Achilles Heel of America.

Given that the majority of voters reject panic politics and radical agendas, these figures are likely to become more activist and aggressive.

I recently debated a Harvard professor at Harvard Law School on the lack of free speech and intellectual diversity at the school. I noted that Harvard had more than 75 percent of the faculty self-identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only  5 percent identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.” It is not that Harvard does not resemble America, it does not even resemble Massachusetts in its virtual purging of conservative or Republican professors.

We just had a country where the majority of voters chose Donald Trump. Among law school faculty who donated more than $200 to a political party, 91 percent of the Harvard faculty gave to Democrats.

Yet, the professor rejected the idea that Harvard faculty or its students should look like America (only 7 percent of incoming students identified as conservative). So, while the Supreme Court has a strong majority of conservatives and roughly half of the federal judges are conservative, Harvard law students will continue to be taught by professors who overwhelmingly reject those values, and some even reject “constitutionalism.”

The result is that the Court will continue to be demonized while the media and academia maintain their hardened ideological silos.

The rage will continue and likely rise in the coming years. However, this critical institution just moved out of harm’s way in this election. It will remain the key stabilizing institution in the most successful constitutional system in history.

*  *  *

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” He teaches a course on the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

Who could have seen this coming?

Less than 24 hours after Trump won the national election in a red sweep landslide victory, none other than Watergater Bob Woodward is trotted out on to CNN to claim that Putin might be “blackmailing” the former President.

“There are lots of things to watch in what is the new Trump administration, I just want to cite one of them,” Woodward told Anderson Cooper.

“That is the relationship Trump has with Putin,” the ‘journalist’ stated, adding that he talked to Trump’s former DNI Dan Coats, asking him what’s going on with Trump and Putin’s relationship; to which Woodward claims Coats replied:

“It’s so close, it seems like it might be blackmail.”

Woodward went on stammering through an apparent script he was reading that “Putin is planning to do what he did in the first term. His plan is to play Trump.”

“There is much to watch, particularly in that relationship.”

Watch the interview here:

Bob Woodward: Trump’s former DNI Dan Coats tells me Putin might be “blackmailing” Trump pic.twitter.com/PaVyratLJ6

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 7, 2024

Social media was, shall we say, less than impressed by Woodward’s apparent ‘journalism’:

Woodward is not a journalist. He’s an intelligence community operative.

— Jeff Carlson (@themarketswork) November 7, 2024

Yeah, it is pretty much just like the first Trump presidency. Putin blackmailed Trump into sanctioning Russia and blocking his pipeline. Apparently this Putin guy just isn’t very bright. I’m just sayin…

— .𝕩𝕏 SJV 𝕏𝕩. (@sjvsworldtour) November 7, 2024

They will say anything.
They lie with impunity.

— NotYourJewishMom (@CaffMomREDACTED) November 7, 2024

Why do they keep putting these decrepit old bastards on TV? Oh I know, because they will say whatever they are told to say because they don’t care… They are old.

— Justin van Sant (@justinvansant) November 7, 2024

Andnhere we go. Two days from the election and we are already getting russia russia russia from democrats

— Mike Ray (@MikeRay_22) November 7, 2024

Are we seriously going to do this again!??

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Houthi, what, when, where, why, how?

If there has been one key message in the Global Daily in the past few years it has been that major shifts in politics and geopolitics, especially ones people don’t like, are going to matter to markets. Yesterday made that point even if Trump’s re-election was not a grey rhino, let alone a black swan, if you had done real digging, rather than digging in, in advance. Yet the major market moves we saw yesterday are likely just the start, not the end of this process.

It now seems the Republicans may take narrow control of the House of Representatives as well as the Senate and presidency, giving them the trifecta. While that was also true in 2016, the first Trump administration was a chaotic affair initially aware of what it could do, with the Republicans deeply divided over ‘Trumpism’. By contrast, the second Trump administration is staffed with a motivated MAGA talent pool which knows how the levers of power work domestically and internationally. Many things could change very significantly, very quickly.   

As a case in point, yesterday saw fake news reports the Houthis had declared an end to their blockade of the Suez Canal, with enormous implications for maritime global trade. I’ll confess that I briefly fell for it, as did a slew of geopolitical commentators. We all assumed a Houthi retreat was a logical response to a US soon not afraid to show what ‘deterrence’ means: as opposed to removing the Houthis from the global terror watchlist; ineffective bombing; an ineffective naval taskforce; asking Iran for help (as it attacks Israel); asking China for help (as it tells the Houthis which are its ships, and to leave them alone); and ocean carriers pay $2bn protection money to the Houthis to incentivize them. In short, while the US will now need to escalate to deescalate to deal with the Houthis, and others, moving parts will move.

People are already talking about a surge in freight rates if Chinese/global exporters try to flood the US with goods now to front-run any 60%(+?) US tariffs. As has been pointed out here repeatedly, there’s been no underlying improvement in US logistics since the Covid supply-chain crisis, and under a sudden surge of demand strains will be seen and freight rates will rise, with global ripple effects: and the ILA east coast US port strike still looms from 15 January.

However, also note Trump economic advisor Bessent is being considered for Treasury Secretary: I again underline he favors a ‘T+X’ tariff plan that gives global firms, say, two years to build factories in the US to avoid sanctions, reducing most of their direct inflation impact, but getting all the capex, supply-side, and trade-deficit narrowing gains – Samsung yesterday said this is what they plan to do. That might mean new economic models are needed for US tariffs – if economists want to model the world as it is rather than as they (or their models) want it to be.

Meanwhile, no sooner had Trump won than Germany’s government collapsed. Chancellor Scholz fired Finance Minister Lindner, whose FDP has left the coalition. A confidence vote now looms, which is likely to fail, at which point Germany has elections around March, in which the far right AfD and far left BSW are both expected to do well enough that perhaps no centrist coalition can be formed. Notably, Scholz wanted to bridge a €9bn fiscal hole with borrowing and offer subsidies to firms leaving the country due to its high costs. Lindner wanted to cut taxes, and spending by more, and de-regulate to stick to the holy-of-holies, a German balanced budget – as Germany becomes ever more unbalanced. Parts of both plans are arguably needed (and such thinking may well emerge in the US), but Germany will get neither now, and maybe not later.

The focus now shifts to what China’s policy response to a Trump win will be. We have heard repeated chatter of a large fiscal package of some form, even if little of this so far represents a real economy game-changer: but let’s wait and see what might appear if we were to get US tariffs. Imagine a go-go US pre-tariff boom and a go-go real China stimulus.

Similarly, we have heard market whispers that tariffs = a large CNY depreciation, and yesterday saw CNY weaken the most in one session for almost two years. However, if that happens, Trump will logically shout for even higher tariffs, and a downwards spiral begins that drags in the entire global economy. Can you see how this dynamic geopolitical and geoeconomic process is not your traditional macro or FX model? Or that the answer to most of the potential questions posed above is *NOT* “rate cuts”?

On which note, today is a Fed meeting decision day. The consensus is still another 25bp cut to take Fed Funds to 4.75%, despite the surge in long bond yields, stocks at a record high, Bitcoin at a record high, and gold close to one; and the strong Q3 GDP print, low initial jobless claims, and the good ISM services (and employment sub-index) reading. Presumably, the last hurricane-impacted 12K payrolls print will be the “stag” the Fed looks to, not the persistent “flation” from services to assets. That is notable given the impact of inflation is being seen in many quarters as a large part of the explanation for the Democrat’s stinging election defeat.

Moreover, as the Fed meets today, rumor swirls of Trump still wanting an ex-officio rate-setting advisory role, that Powell won’t be reappointed, and that Trump might even name his successor in advance, muddying the monetary waters. Assuming this is all true, one is going to have to start factoring politics (and potentially even geopolitics) into central banking (“You want a swap line? We have a quid pro quo for you.”), as our Fed Watcher Philip Marey has already alluded to recently. Again, that calls for new models to capture the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

That process starts by looking around you and asking questions: Houthi, what, when, where, why, how?

As one starts thinking along those lines, note Brazil raised rates by 50bps, not 25bps, to 11.25% as expected, with pressure on the government to cut spending as the currency continues to weaken. Brazil, as a BRICS member and agri rival to key US sectors, especially in sales to China, could feature heavily in US geopolitical discussions going forwards.

In Australia, RBA Governor Bullock testified to parliament and argued a potential 10% Trump tariff on Australia would have little impact on it, but a 60% one on China may have an adverse effect – but they don’t know if it means significantly higher or lower inflation. Bullock also admitted the RBA had not done any scenario analysis on what a Trump presidency could mean for Australia. After all, it was only the most well-flagged election in the world, with equally well-flagged policies, with a well-flagged “50-50” potential outcome: why bother doing any work on that in advance?

Do you see what I mean about the need to ask better questions and to think about new economic models?

This should be good…

A week after President Biden called President-elect Trump “the kind of guy you’d like to smack in the ass” and labeled any Trump supporter as “garbage”, he will address the nation for the first time this morning.

We are sure there will be plenty of calls for “unity” blah blah blah…

…Or will Biden turn on his handlers as his lame duck-ness becomes more evident?

Watch Biden read live…

Former senior Obama advisor-turned-senior Kamala Harris advisor David Plouffe has deleted his X account after suggesting on Wednesday that Harris’ landslide defeat was Joe Biden’s fault for not dropping out soon enough, and right as a massive campaign debt scandal erupts.

“We dug out of a deep hole but not enough. A devastating loss,” Plouffe posted to X – in what many interpreted as a dig at Biden.

And now, Plouffe and X are no more.

David Plouffe has been unburdened from posts that have been. https://t.co/8YqM0VPGDH pic.twitter.com/K0AolWvWq3

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) November 7, 2024

That said, was this about more than salty tears?

20 Million In Debt

After raising over $1 billion and left with $118 million in the bank as of October 16, the Harris campaign ended the 2024 election season with “at least $20 million in debt,” according to Politico‘s Christopher Cadelago.

Kamala Harris’s campaign ended with at least $20 million in debt, per two sources familiar. Harris raised over $1 billion and had $118 million in the bank as of Oct. 16.

— Christopher Cadelago (@ccadelago) November 7, 2024

Breitbart CEO Matt Boyle says a Kamala campaign staffer “said there is a massive scandal here worthy of an audit.“

Ok so this just got very explosive. A Kamala campaign staffer who saw these posts called me just now and said there is a massive scandal here worthy of an audit.

The $20 million debt thing is real. Rob Flaherty, this staffer said, is currently shopping around the Kamala… https://t.co/7EJ9ruKQzs

— Matthew Boyle (@mboyle1) November 7, 2024

Boyle’s post in its entirety:

Ok so this just got very explosive. A Kamala campaign staffer who saw these posts called me just now and said there is a massive scandal here worthy of an audit.

The $20 million debt thing is real. Rob Flaherty, this staffer said, is currently shopping around the Kamala fundraising email list to anyone who wants it to try to raise the money back. This includes other campaigns and outside groups.

Flaherty is the deputy campaign manager and reports to Jen O’Malley Dillon.

“Jen blew through a billion dollars in a few months and it was all Jen’s idea to do all the concerts.” — Kamala campaign adviser told me

This source added that O’Malley Dillon did these “concerts,” like Katy Perry, Lizzo, Eminem, Bruce Springsteen et cetera at the expense of “prioritizing and spending money on social media and other campaign priorities.”

Apparently a group in Georgia had to lay off 100 people because they couldn’t pay them.

It’s unclear at this time if the campaign PAID the talent to perform but the cost of production for the events was “immense.”

What’s more, this Kamala campaign staffer said several people who were working for the Kamala Harris for President campaign are still awaiting several overdue payments they were promised for their work. IE, they didn’t pay the staff.

This Kamala campaign staffer said to me of @jomalleydillon

“People didn’t like working with her. Many people on the campaign felt like we lost because Kamala wasn’t allowed to run her campaign. They were running Joe Biden’s campaign instead of a Kamala campaign. Obnoxious and very much a gate keeper and interfering with the vice president’s people who were trying to do their job.”

According to data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Harris campaign had received over $1 billion up until October 16 – including when it was the Joe Biden campaign. 

Over the same period, the Trump campaign took in $392 million and spent $345 million.

Democrats spent $1.1 billion on aired advertising and associated reservations, according to AdImpact – a site which monitors the cost and content of ads, Newsweek reports.

According to The New York Times, the Harris campaign spent “six figures” to fly banners over four NFL games in October in an attempt to reach male voters in swing states. The Guardian reported in November that it also spent “a reported $450,000 a day” to have ads displayed on the Las Vegas Sphere in the swing state of Nevada.

Ultimately, the messaging did not appear to hit its mark(s). Speaking to Newsweek, Mark Shanahan, an American politics expert who teaches at the University of Surrey in the U.K., said Harris “never really landed” her economic message during the presidential election campaign.

“Once again, the Democrats underestimated the appeal of Trump. He turns politics into a soap opera and it keeps many more than his MAGA loyalists tuned in. Allied to that, he offered simple messages: the economy is poor and he can fix it; and America’s troubles start at its borders, and he can fix that too,” said Shanahan. “Harris had too little time to introduce herself to America. She never really landed her messages on the economy with great clarity, and the one area we really thought would boost her, around reproductive rights, really didn’t get the expected cut-through with voters.”

Hours after the German government collapsed, forcing Chancellor Olaf Scholz to call for a confidence vote that he said would take place on January 15 (which if he were to lose, which is virtually certain, will force a snap election by March), Reuters reports that Germany’s cabinet on Wednesday approved a draft law that would allow the army to gauge the readiness of the country’s 18-year-olds to serve in the Bundeswehr as it looks to boost troop numbers for NATO obligations without resorting to conscription.

Reuters reports that the war in Ukraine prompted a debate in Germany over whether to reintroduce conscription, which was ended in 2011, to boost shrinking troop numbers in response to a more aggressive Russia

It currently has 180,000 soldiers, which it wants to increase to 203,000 by 2031, as well as 60,000 reservists.

The aim is to eventually reach 200,000 more reservists, which would enable Germany to swiftly expand its troops to around 460,000 in the event of war.

With the end of conscription, Germany stopped the registration of 18-year-olds for military service, leaving the country without a reliable data base on whom it could call up.

The aim of the new law is to once again have an overview of those figures:

Under the model proposed, all men turning 18 – about roughly 300,000 next year – will have to fill out a digital survey on their interest in joining the army.

Young women will also be sent the survey but are not obliged to respond.

Rather strangely, this decision echoes that of the incumbent UK PM just weeks before their own election that resulted in a landslide victory for the opposition.

As a reminder, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged to bring back mandatory national service if the governing Conservative Party won the July 4 national election, prompting a nationwide debate on a policy Britain abandoned more than 60 years ago.

Not exactly a winning strategy to gain votes from the ‘draftable’-age cohort?

And now zee Germans are doing the same?

Just hours before the Fed’s second rate cut this cycle, the Bank of England cut interest rates to 4.75% – as all economists expected – its second rate hike this cycle (it kept rates on hold at its previous meeting in September, following a reduction in August)…

…. after inflation fell to a three-year low in September; however the cut was seen as hawkish by the market, sending the pound up 0.7% to session highs after Governor Andrew Bailey signaled that a further move is unlikely before early 2025 as rates are likely to fall only “gradually from here” and that last week’s UK budget will lift inflation by just under half a percentage point at its peak.

The Monetary Policy Committee voted by a majority of 8-1 to reduce #BankRate to 4.75%. Find out more in our #MonetaryPolicyReport: https://t.co/lEYCgPolsz pic.twitter.com/bX4TpXQqB6

— Bank of England (@bankofengland) November 7, 2024

“We need to make sure inflation stays close to target, so we can’t cut interest rates too quickly or by too much,” said BoE governor Andrew Bailey on Thursday. “But if the economy evolves as we expect, it’s likely that interest rates will continue to fall gradually from here,” he added.

As the FT notes, this week’s decision suggests the BoE is taking a cautious approach to lowering rates as it weighs the impact of chancellor Reeves’ inflationary Budget last week, which aggressively loosened fiscal policy. The outlook has also been affected by Donald Trump’s victory in this week’s US election, particularly because of his support for higher tariffs, which many economists argue could stoke inflation.

The BoE said the Budget would increase consumer price inflation by just under 0.5 percentage points at its peak compared with previous projections, as well as boosting GDP by 0.75 per cent in a year’s time.

Inflation hit 1.7% in September, the first time it has dipped below the BoE’s 2% target since 2021, but the central bank expects it to increase in coming quarters. Partly as a result of the Budget, the BoE considers that inflation will now take longer than previously expected to return to target, reaching 2.2% in two years’ time before falling to 1.8% by the end of the following year. At the same time, growth will pick up from 1% this year to 1.5% in 2025 the BOE predicted, before easing back to 1.25 per cent in 2026.

In an indication of the Budget’s impact on UK businesses, J Sainsbury warned on Thursday that Reeves’ changes would be “inflationary”, as it complained that they would subject it to an “unexpected” and “significant” £140mn “barrage of costs.” BT also described the Budget as a “new inflationary pressure”, as it said it would now be hit by a £100mn increase in costs.

As we discussed previously, the Budget unveiled a £40bn increase in taxes, most of which will come from national insurance paid by employers. It also boosted government borrowing by an average of £28bn a year over the course of the parliament as Reeves increases.

The BOE’s inflation outlook prompted traders to trim their expectations of a further quarter-point cut at the BoE’s next meeting in December from about 30% to about 20%, which in turn led to tightening in financial conditions and sent the pound to session highs, up 0.7% on the day against the dollar at $1.297. The 10-year gilt yield was steady at 4.54 per cent.

Hussain Mehdi, a strategist at HSBC Asset Management, said he now expected a “fairly shallow easing cycle” that would put upward pressure on bond yields, in part due to the Budget’s impact on inflation.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

Tesla CEO Elon Musk scored a legal win on Nov. 6, as a federal appeals court upheld a jury’s decision clearing him of securities fraud over his 2018 tweets about taking the electric vehicle company private.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a memorandum and disposition on Wednesday, rejecting claims from a group of Tesla investors that the instructions a judge gave to jurors before they cleared Musk of liability in a February 2023 verdict were flawed and so warranted a new trial.

In the ruling, the three-judge panel concluded that there were no errors in jury instructions that would justify a new trial. The court also found that the instructions did not unfairly raise the burden of proof for the investors, and that the instructions were in line with the law.

“Even if there had been an instructional error, it was ’more probably than not harmless,’” the three-judge panel wrote, adding that, during their two-hour deliberations, the jurors asked no clarifying questions.

The appellate court noted that much of Musk’s trial focused on whether his tweets were important enough to affect investor decisions. The court found that the jury could have reasonably decided they weren’t, weakening the investors’ claims for billions in damages.

“A jury considering the evidence—which included testimony about a ‘handshake deal’ to take Tesla private and about a rise in Tesla’s stock price after Musk’s August 13th blogpost—could reasonably have found that the essential element of materiality was not established,” the judges wrote.

The case stems from a lawsuit brought by Tesla investors, who argued that Musk’s 2018 posts on Twitter, including the widely scrutinized “funding secured” post, caused significant volatility in the company’s stock price. The investors claimed the tweets were materially misleading and led them to suffer as much as $12 billion in financial losses.

During a three-week trial, Musk’s defense argued that he believed his statements were truthful, citing discussions with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) as evidence of potential funding. Musk, who spent hours on the witness stand, testified he met with PIF representatives who expressed strong interest in taking Tesla private, leading him to tweet that funding was secured.

“I had no ill motive,” Musk testified.

“My intent was to do the right thing for all shareholders.”

The jury ultimately sided with Musk, delivering a unanimous verdict in February 2023 that he and Tesla were not liable for misleading investors with the Twitter posts.

On appeal to the 9th Circuit, the Tesla investors claimed that U.S. District Judge Edward Chen gave the jury confusing instructions, making it harder for them to win by requiring proof Musk knew his tweets were false. However, the appellate court disagreed, finding that Chen had correctly instructed the jury to consider whether Musk acted “recklessly”—a lower standard than knowingly making false statements.

Nicholas Porritt, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times on the Nov. 6 ruling.

Musk’s lawyer Ellyde Thompson welcomed the appellate court’s Nov. 6 decision.

The composition of American households has shifted significantly since 1960 as fewer people have kids and the scale of economic resources has declined.

Today, the number of households without kids exceeds those with kids, a trend that first emerged in 2014. In addition, single-person households have broadly continued to incline, reaching 29% of the total last year. This figure has more than doubled over the past six decades.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, shows the composition of American households over time, based on data from the Census Bureau via USAFacts.

Over Half of Households in the U.S. Don’t Have Kids

Below, we show the makeup of U.S. households from 1960 to 2023 at a time of rising costs, record home prices, and low fertility rates:

Other represents households with unmarried partners, roommates, or adult relatives.

In 1960, the share of U.S. households that consisted of married parents was 44.2%, which has since dropped by half as of 2023.

More Americans today are delaying or forgoing marriage altogether, with just 20% of women and 23% of men aged 25 being married—the lowest on record. Projections indicate that by 2050, one-third of Americans aged 45 may remain unmarried.

Meanwhile, households consisting of single parents or individuals living alone have doubled over this period, coinciding with the U.S. fertility rate falling to a historic low of 1.6 children per woman in 2023, well below the 2.1 replacement level needed for population stability.

Personal preference plays a significant role in changing attitudes toward parenthood. Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids, while 44% preferred to focus on other priorities. Financial concerns also weighed heavily, with 36% citing the cost of raising children—three times the rate among childless people over 50.

Last year, just 16% of homes in America were considered affordable as mortgage rates more than doubled since 2021. This represents a sharp decline from 2013, when 50% of homes were affordable—a shift that is likely shaping household dynamics as rising costs influence Americans’ future choices.

To learn more about this topic from a global perspective, check out this graphic on the countries with the lowest fertility rates in the world.

Authored by Robin Gaster via RealClearEnergy,

Solar and wind are rolling out rapidly in the U.S. They account for about 19 percent of energy generation today, and could reach more than 40% by 2030. This clean energy will rapidly replace coal, and many expect it will simply replace natural gas as well. But that’s a mistake: In fact, solar and wind will depend on gas for decades to come.

Today, solar and wind are relatively low cost, and prices will likely fall further. But they are not like fossil fuels—they are what’s known as variable renewable energy (VRE)—meaning they only produce electricity when the sun shines or the wind blows.

Sometimes this variation is predictable. For example, solar doesn’t generate power at night, and generates less power in the winter. But some variation is unpredictable; cloud cover or wind droughts can last weeks at a time. These “VRE deficits” are not a problem as long as wind and solar are a small percentage of electricity generation. But as they become dominant, how do we fill the gaps when VRE supply is low?

Electric utilities are currently adding lots of short duration (4-hour) lithium-ion batteries to address daily and hourly variation, providing enough power in the evening when demand is high. DOE expects that trend to accelerate, but while these batteries are reliable and can be turned on with the flip of a switch, they only solve VRE deficits for a few hours at a time.

Longer duration VRE deficits are another matter. What happens when deficits last for weeks or months? How do we keep the lights on? Detailed studies—for example, from the Royal Society in the UK—show that that there can be sustained periods of poor weather, leading to annual shortfalls as high as 20% of total grid production (in a completely decarbonized grid).

Right now, when demand spikes or supply is disrupted, we turn mainly to “peaker plants”—gas plants that run on a single cycle to power turbines for electricity. These plants are less efficient than combined cycle gas turbine plants (CCGTs), and their energy is more expensive, so they are kept in reserve and are paid to provide spare capacity, ensuring that sufficient emergency power is always available. Typically, grid operators pay for about 15% of peak energy demand as spare capacity. Any less, and there might be blackouts. Any more, and money is wasted. While VRE use is relatively modest, peaker plants can cover VRE deficits.

But as VRE becomes a larger and larger share of the overall grid, the impact of adverse weather events will become more pressing, and supply will become more variable. A grid with 40% VRE will need much more insurance to guarantee the lights stay on.

There are alternatives to gas-fired energy, technologies that can store energy for very long periods and provide it on demand at massive scale—notably hydrogen, hydropower, and compressed air. Hydropower is cheap to run, a mature and well-established technology, and its generators last for decades. But we are removing more dams than we build, and there is no U.S. appetite for the dozens of huge new dams that would be needed. Conversely, green hydrogen suffers from very low efficiency—it takes 100KWh of green electricity to provide 40KWh of stored dispatchable electricity—and it is very expensive to make and store, while transportation is also expensive and can cause serious emissions. Moreover, hydrogen will not suddenly become cheaper quickly, like wind and solar. Compressed air currently operates at about 50% efficiency. Substantially improvement will require cooling and then re-heating air, which is costly when the air is stored for long durations. And the electro-chemical batteries now being added to the grid won’t provide the combination of long duration, huge scalability, and low costs that are needed.

This leaves us with gas.

To make a VRE-dominated grid possible, natural gas must be used as insurance against VRE deficits. That’s why DOE projects that peaker plant capacity will actually grow during the clean energy transition, and why it projects no significant decline in CCGT capacity either.

However, the function of gas power will change. Today, CCGT plants are used primarily as firm baseload power, an energy source used 100% of the time, with additional capacity available through peaker plants. As the green energy transition gets fully underway, CCGT plants will shift from producing baseload power to providing insurance against supply disruption, just like peaker plants do today.

Eventually, we can hope to build a green grid with no emissions. In that world, gas emissions will eventually be phased out altogether. Perhas gas will be replaced with new fuel sources like geothermal or even fusion, carbon capture might eliminate emissions from gas power plants, or scalable storage technologies could finally mature so they can become the energy insurance of tomorrow. Overall though, it’s clear that we don’t have all the technology we need, and that we need to push much harder to improve those critical technologies, many of which are still not ready for full commercial deployment. 

In the meantime, we have to understand that in the United States, gas will be a critical enabler of wind and solar, providing the reliability for the grid that wind and solar alone cannot.  If we are serious about decarbonization, that’s what’s needed: a realist view of the near and medium term, a massive financial commitment to develop the critical technologies that will provide cheap and reliable energy, and a realistic understanding of the changing but still critical role of gas in a decarbonizing grid, where it will still be needed for decades to come.

Robin Gaster is Director of Research with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).