Inflation Is Back. Savings Are Gone. A Dog Shot Someone.

Good News: A Florida man found $30,000 in a fanny pack in a Wawa bathroom and returned every dollar. No hesitation. Florida Man gets a bad rap. Not today.

Bad News: Scientists are warning Earth's population could be cut in half by 2064. Climate collapse, pandemics, resource wars — pick your apocalypse. Enjoy your weekend, apparently it's one of the good ones.

Thomas Massie lost his House primary and immediately filed to run in 2028. The man does not quit.

Inflation hit 3.8% — the highest since 2023 — driven by energy prices that spiked after Trump launched a war with Iran. Republicans spent four years hammering Biden over grocery bills. They now own the grocery bill. The midterms are coming.

A Clinton-appointed judge blocked Trump's $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" — a taxpayer-funded pool to compensate people who claim the government targeted them politically. Bad look regardless of where you stand. The judge agreed.

The CIA has allegedly been accused of having a backdoor into 23andMe and Ancestry, searching DNA records for signs of alien life. We don't know whether to laugh or not be surprised.

Vermont became the first state to ban paraquat — a pesticide linked to Parkinson's disease. It is 2026. One state. Baby steps.

Where you shop for groceries could be costing you up to 60% more. Costco and BJ's come in around 20% cheaper than Walmart. Aldi and Lidl are among the cheapest. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's run 25-40% higher for the same items. You're not buying better food. You're buying the vibe.

Trump officials have been pushing for a $250 bill with Trump's face on it — despite a law banning living people from US currency since 1866. The law hasn't changed. The pushing hasn't stopped.

College students expect to earn $80,000 out of college. The actual starting salary averages $56,000. Nobody told them. Or somebody did, and the brochure looked really good.

Mortgage refinance demand dropped 18% as rates hit their highest point since August. If you were waiting for a better time to refinance, this wasn't it.

Elon Musk is reigniting SpaceX-Tesla merger chatter and pushing SpaceX toward a Nasdaq listing. We'll be watching.

Guzman y Gomez promised "hundreds, if not thousands" of US locations. Six years later they've quietly closed every American restaurant. Confidence and a good burrito are not a business plan.

Bernie Sanders warned AI could displace workers and deepen inequality if left to billionaires. He also said "kids are lonelier and lonelier — I do not want the next generation to have AI bots as their friends." Bernie and Red State Finance don't agree on much. We'll give him this one.

Hyundai is recalling 421,000 vehicles for a software bug causing unexpected braking. Your car stopping when it feels like it is not a feature. Get that checked.

Meta laid off nearly 1,400 workers in Washington state. The company is fine. The workers, less so.

Amazon is now licensing its AI shopping technology to other retailers. The system that nudges you into buying things you didn't know you needed could soon run the entire web's checkout. What could go wrong.

Last Week:

Winner: First $120K Tax-Free For Everyone at 39.58%. The people would like to keep their money. Best comment: "Income tax is robbery." No notes.

This Week

81% of registered voters agree with Reagan — "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." So we're asking:

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Literally Any AI Stock:
Snowflake closed up 36% — its best day ever. If you owned anything with "AI" in the pitch deck this week, you won. No strategy required. Just a dart and a vague sense of optimism.

Newborn Babies:
Every newborn U.S. citizen now gets $1,000 at birth, invested in American companies. Parents can add up to $5,000 a year. A baby born this summer has a funded investment account before they can hold their own head up. Some adults still don't. The babies are winning.

Americans Savings Accounts:
The personal savings rate hit 2.6% in April. A year ago it was 5.8%. Outside of 2022, Americans haven't saved this little in 65 years. Wages aren't keeping up, costs aren't coming down. The math doesn't math.

Hotel & AirBnB Owners:
80% of FIFA World Cup host city hotels are reporting bookings below expectations. Turns out hiking rooms from $300 to $1,000 a night makes people creative. Fans waited, stayed further out, or didn't show. Greed wrote a check the market didn't cash.

We're new to this. We're learning. Be gentle.

What we can promise is honest conversation, real debate, and the occasional disagreement that doesn't end in someone rage-quitting. This week's episode is about how America lost the ability to argue without losing its mind — why outrage sells, nuance doesn't, and how a brain drowning in notifications is a brain too fried to think straight. The good news? Its a quick 10 minute listen.

Honest feedback welcome. Yes, that includes "this is terrible." We can take it.

Robinhood just launched tools letting AI assistants trade your stocks and make purchases on your behalf — with minimal human involvement. Rebalance portfolios, execute strategies, shop for deals. All on autopilot.

Translation: You can now give an AI your login and tell it to handle your money while you go touch grass. What could possibly go wrong.

The FBI raided a former CIA official's Virginia home and found 303 gold bars, $2 million in cash, and 35 Rolexes. David J. Rush had been requesting tens of millions in gold and foreign currency from his agency, claiming "work-related expenses." He was also pretending to be a decorated Navy pilot. He was not either of those things.

Translation: A CIA official asked for $40 million in gold bars, called it expenses, took it home, and thought nobody would notice. Rookie mistake.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling for a new tax targeting the AI industry, specifically floating the idea of taxing the energy consumed by AI data centers. "It's time to tax AI and invest in people," she said this week, adding that Americans should consider "ideas that sound radical today but may quickly become common sense."

Translation: The government's answer to a technology it doesn't understand is to tax it. To be fair, the government's answer to everything is to tax it.

A former Microsoft executive says he's relocating his new startup from Washington to Idaho, citing the state's business taxes as the breaking point. He didn't mince words on the way out, calling the state's tax environment punishing and saying enough was enough. Idaho, a state that has been quietly attracting businesses and residents fleeing high-tax coastal states, gets another one.

Translation: Another business owner did the math, didn't like the answer, and moved somewhere the math works.

Pittsburgh claimed the number one spot on AmeriSave's 2026 list of the most affordable cities in America. The median home price sits around $250,000 — more than $150,000 below the national average — with a strong job market and a cost of living well under the national norm. Decatur, Alabama came in second with a median home value of just $89,855, and Enid, Oklahoma rounded out the top three with median rents of $647 a month and homes averaging around $143,000.

Translation: The city that built the steel that built modern America is also one of the most affordable places to live in it. Meanwhile people in San Francisco are paying $4,000 a month to share a wall with a stranger.

We've added some new gear to the Red State Finance store. If you've ever wanted to wear your common sense on your chest, now's your chance. Take a look and grab something before everyone else does.

A dog in Scottsbluff, Nebraska accidentally discharged a loaded shotgun inside a truck while its owner was inside a convenience store. The dog jumped from one side of the back seat to the other, hit the trigger, and the shot blew through the passenger-side door — hitting a person standing outside. Police were initially told it was a BB gun. It was not a BB gun.

Translation: Nobody was more surprised than the dog. This is also a reminder that if you're leaving a loaded shotgun loose in your back seat, the universe will eventually find a way to make it everyone else's problem.

Kathleen Thomas, a 36-year-old amputee, was pulled over in Florida and accused of holding her phone with her right hand. She responded by holding up her right arm — which ends at a stump — and laughing. The officer did not laugh. He asked her to put a "hand to God" and swear she hadn't been texting. He then issued her a $116 citation anyway. The ticket was eventually dismissed at the request of the same deputy who wrote it.

Translation: The officer pulled over a one-handed woman, accused her of using the missing hand, asked her to swear on it, wrote the ticket anyway, and then quietly made it go away. Florida Man has company. Apparently Florida Officer is a thing now too.

The Ferrari Luce — a £474,000 five-seater EV designed with Jony Ive — landed to universal mockery. The internet compared it to a vacuum cleaner, a tin can, and Homer Simpson's car. Even Ferrari's former chairman twisted the knife: "This is surely a car the Chinese won't copy from us." Shares dropped 8%.

Translation: Ferrari watched Jaguar destroy its brand doing exactly this. Then did it anyway.

A Google engineer allegedly used the company's unreleased "Year in Search" data to place winning bets on Polymarket under the username "AlphaRaccoon." He walked away with $1.2 million in crypto. The FBI traced it back to him.

Translation: A Google employee had access to what the entire world was searching for before anyone else knew, bet on it, won $1.2 million, and named himself AlphaRaccoon. The raccoon part was accurate. They always get caught digging through the trash.

Sunny Hostin described the arson, looting and vandalism from the 2020 BLM protests as "very limited destruction of property" on The View this week. Insurance estimates put the total damage between $1 billion and $2 billion.

Translation: One to two billion dollars in damage is many things. "Very limited" is not one of them.

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New York City's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, announced his "Block by Block" housing plan this week — and buried inside it was a line that set off a national debate. For buildings with "chronic neglect," his administration will pursue legal action to seize ownership from landlords and transfer it to community land trusts, nonprofits, or the tenants themselves.

He called it fixing the housing crisis. A lot of Americans called it something else.

The case for it: New York has a genuine slumlord problem. Buildings with hundreds of unresolved violations — rat infestations, broken heat, mold — where landlords collect rent for years and fix nothing. If the legal system can't force accountability, transfer of ownership is the next step. Nobody is defending the right to pocket rent while tenants freeze.

The case against it: The moment government decides who is "negligent" and redistributes property accordingly, you've handed enormous power to whoever is in charge. Today it's the 10 worst landlords in New York. Tomorrow the definition of "negligent" gets wider. Business leaders are already warning it will drive developers and investment out of the city — making the housing shortage worse, not better. Worth noting: a nonprofit building Mamdani used to promote his own housing commissioner had over 200 unresolved violations. The government is not automatically a better landlord.

The concept of private property being seized by the state and redistributed has a long history. It has never ended the way the people announcing it said it would.

Our take: Nobody is crying for slumlords. But "we'll only take it from the bad ones" is how every expansion of government power over private property starts. Every single time. The road to the government owning your neighborhood is paved with genuinely good intentions and a very flexible definition of who deserves to lose what they own.

What do you think? Drop your thoughts in the comments — we actually read them.