The Economy Is Booming and Hispanics Are Feeling the Glow

Gas prices stink, and nobody needs a lecture about that. Four dollars and nineteen cents a gallon will sour a mood in a hurry. That number on the station sign has become the unofficial mood ring for the whole country, and it is doing the Democrats no favors heading into the midterms. 

Fine. That part is obvious.

What is less obvious is that the country is paying an ugly but necessary price to keep the theocratic death cult running Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. The other thing the gas-price freakout keeps missing is the actual bottleneck: American refining capacity, or the criminal lack of it. The United States is exporting oil. The squeeze is downstream. 

Democrats and the environmental zealots have spent years terrorizing the industry so thoroughly that nobody wants to build a new refinery here. Even with Trump in charge, a lot of those companies are still sitting on their hands. They know the Dems will eventually claw their way back into power and try to shut the thing down. 

So the country keeps leaning on refineries overseas. Iran knows it. That is why Iran is targeting refineries.

If America had a halfway serious refining sector, Tehran would have no leverage at all. Thanks again, Democrats.

Now for the part the professional gloom merchants would rather nobody notice. Poverty rates, including child poverty and Hispanic poverty, have just hit the lowest numbers on record. Median household income after inflation has hit a record high. 

“The official poverty rate for chil­dren fell to a historic low of 13.4 percent in 2025,” reports the U.S. Census Bureau. “Between 2024 and 2025, the official poverty rate for Hispanic individuals decreased to a his­toric low of 13.9 percent. 

”Thanks, capitalism.

And unless the person in question is a lunatic or an addict living on the street, nobody in this country is poor the way the word used to mean poor. Get real. 

The American poor do not have a hunger problem. They have an obesity problem. They have a roof, heat, a $1,400 phone, the internet, free health care, a big TV, a Blu-ray player, a game console, a microwave, and, more often than not, air conditioning.

American capitalism beat poverty a long time ago. The official poverty rate is still a useful number. It is just not describing the same country it used to describe. That is a lovely thing.

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