Free Republic

A new study details how Americans manage credit cards and how stressful credit debt can be. **SNIP** “The most shocking find to me was how many Americans carry credit card balances month to month,” Tommy O'Shaughnessy, an analyst at Clever Real Estate Analyst and the author of the report, told Yahoo Finance. Nearly half of the respondents (47%) carried some amount of credit card debt month to month, according to the survey, with 72% of borrowers carrying more than $1,000. “With the average 17.64% APR, that debt compounds quickly and can become unmanageable for lower income families,” O'Shaughnessy noted.

California's socialists are burning through money like there's no tomorrow. And tomorrow might not be coming. California leads the nation in outmigration, and has experienced a domestic outmigration decline since 1991, according to the California Department of Finance. According to a recent survey, 53 percent of all Californians, 63 percent of millennials, and 76 percent of residents in the Bay Area say they are seriously considering leaving the state.

NEW HAVEN, Conn., Feb. 25, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- In just one month, Americans have made a sudden and dramatic shift away from the pro-choice position and toward a pro-life stance, according to a new Marist poll. The shift was led by Democrats and those under 45 years old, according to a survey taken Feb.12-17 in the wake of efforts in several states to legalize abortion up until birth. "Current proposals that promote late-term abortion have reset the landscape and language on abortion in a pronounced – and very measurable – way," said Barbara Carvalho, director of The Marist Poll. In...

You could be forgiven if you thought that the media onslaught against conservatives the last few years would have an effect on how most of the country views the right. That media campaign - directed against Donald Trump but also against conservatives - has been unprecedented in its scope and intensity. Conservatives are routinely portrayed as racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Muslim, and paranoid xenophobes.  But Gallup found some remarkable conservative strength all across the country. Their latest survey shows that liberals outnumber conservatives in only 6 states and that there are 25 states where conservatives are polling above their national average....

Senator Kamala Harris, one of many Democrats running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, released a statement about the latest developments in the Jussie Smollett case. Her response is just about what is to be expected from the left, especially those running for president. That’s too bad because her statement falls short of being worthy of being taken seriously. This is the woman who was Attorney General of California and before that, District Attorney in San Francisco.Harris devotes a whopping one sentence to express her sadness, frustration, and disappointment in Smollett. Then she delivers a single sentence to say...

The false promise of “safe, legal, and rare” made living with the evil of abortion seem tolerable to so many Americans. Cut to thunderous applause (minute 1:18) in New York over legislation making it common and profitable, all the way up until the moment of birth.As noted by The New York Times: “if liberal social policies really led inexorably to fewer unplanned pregnancies and thus fewer abortions, you would expect ‘blue’ regions of the country to have lower teen pregnancy rates and fewer abortions per capita than demographically similar ‘red’ regions…But that isn’t what the data show…liberal policies don’t...

U.S. housing sales, a key pillar of economic growth in recent years, are looking weaker again. Existing home sales declined for much of 2018. In December, according to the National Association of Realtors, sales of single-family homes, condos, and co-ops fell a larger-than-expected 6.4% from the previous month. A Reuters survey of economists projected home sales to decline by a modest 1% in December.

It's 2019. We need to stop shaming women who refuse to succumb to stereotypical gender norms-women have every right to embrace their body hair. Gloriously, the first month of the new year has been dubbed "Januhairy," an ongoing celebration on social media encouraging women to grow out and show off their body hair. Now, women are dynamic, radiant, vibrant beings-so, naturally, Januhairy got really colorful. On Instagram, some women are dying their armpit hair in rainbow shades and calling them #UnicornPits. Girls just wanna have fun.

Fertility rates for white women were down in every US state in 2017 - below the rate needed for the population to replace itself, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals.

Witchcraft is thriving in the US, with an estimated 1.5 million Americans now identifying as witches - more than the total number of Presbyterians. As Christianity declines across the country, paganism has swung to the mainstream, with witchcraft paraphernalia for sale on every high street and practises normalised across popular culture. In the past two years, it has also become darkly politicised. Dakota Bracciale, a 29-year-old transgender/queer witch and co-owner of Catland Books and witch shop in Brooklyn, is pleased with the outcome of the ritual hex placed on US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in October. The curse, carried...

Out of the major tech companies, people trust Facebook the least with their personal information. Amazon and Twitter come in a distant second and third, with 8 percent of people saying they trust these companies the least with their personal information. As Statista’s Sarah Feldman shows below, five times more people place Facebook as the least trustworthy company to handle their personal information when compared to Amazon and Twitter.Infographic: Facebook Loses the Public's Trust | Statista Reports recently revealed that Facebook had hired a communications firm to do opposition research against George Soros to traffic anti-Semitic attacks against the progressive...

Falling birthrate, rising death rate slow population growth as more Americans move to western and southern states The U.S. population grew in the past year at its slowest rate in over eight decades, with growth in the South and West continuing to outpace the Northeast and Midwest, according to figures the Census Bureau released Wednesday. The numbers, which cover the year ended July 1, show the country’s population rose by 0.6% to 327.2 million people. That was the lowest rate since 1937 in data going back to 1901, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. The figures...

The poll carried out bt the Marist Institute for Public Opinion showed that 52 percent of Americans did not want public discourse to become more PC, including a majority of independent voters. The mood reflects what President Donald Trump and his supporter have railed against, arguing that political correctness -- the desire to not use language which minority groups may find offensive -- had limited their right to say what they really want to say.

New York State leads the country in an undesirable category. New data from the U.S. Census Bureau says New York tops the nation in population loss. The report says nine states saw a drop in population between July 1, 2017, and July 1, 2018. New York led the way at a loss of 48,510 people.

A Shocking Loss of Faith: Reflecting on the Closing of So Many Churches Msgr. Charles Pope • December 6, 2018 • Lincoln Congregational Temple in Shaw, credit: NCinDC, FlickrAs I walk or drive through my Capitol Hill neighborhood here in Washington, D.C., I pass by more than twenty churches (all of them Protestant) that have been closed in the past decade. Many of them are grand and prominent buildings. (Click here to see four of them.) Most of the them have been converted to condominiums, likely due to historic preservation norms that seek to retain the exterior appearance of...

Midterm election polling analysis reveals deep divides between Democrat and Republican voters on the growing multicultural populations in the United States. Polling analysis from the Pew Research Center reveals that the overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the recent midterm elections, 85 percent, say the U.S. today favors minorities over white Americans. Only 11 percent of GOP voters said white Americans are favored over minority groups. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, 87 percent of Democrat voters in the midterm elections say white Americans are favored in the U.S. over minorities. Only 12 percent of Democrat voters say...

(CNSNews.com) - The economy is the second most important issue for registered voters as the midterm election nears, a new Gallup Poll says. And there was very good economic news on Friday, as the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics rolled out the October employment report -- the final one before next week's midterm election. The number of employed Americans has never been higher. The 156,562,000 Americans employed in October is the twefth record set under President Donald Trump. In October, the number of employed men age 20 and up -- 80,405,000 -- set the 12th record since Trump took...

Leading surgeon says lack of hobbies and creativity in schools has affected children’s practical abilities. New medical students have spent so much time on screens that they lack vital practical skills necessary to conduct life-saving operations, a leading surgeon has warned. Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College London, said that a decline in hands-on creative subjects at school and practical hobbies at home means that students often do not have a basic understanding of the physical world. Kneebone said spending hours engaged in virtual worlds was no substitute for experience in the real world. “Partly it stops...

A June poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, published in The Atlantic magazine, reported that just 28% of young adults 18 to 29 said they were absolutely certain to vote; but 74% of seniors (a group that voted for Donald Trump) were absolutely certain to vote. So Republican supporting seniors said they would be voting and 18 to 29 year olds were distinctly disinterested in voting. Of course you didn’t hear anything about this; but that doesn’t mean it is not a dangerous red flag for the Democrats. “That was June, and things change”, some would say. Nevertheless, that...

Although the great engine of American capitalism is now humming on all cylinders, Americans remain strangely reluctant to have children. That birthrates plummeted during the Great Recession, which ran from 2008 to 2016, is no surprise. Who would want to bring children into a jobless, stagnant economy? But the return of prosperity after the 2016 election should have produced a quick uptick in births. That, after all, was the consistent pattern we had seen in the past. Despite generous tax cuts and rising middle-class incomes, however, our birth rate remains mired at the lowest level ever recorded in American history....