Important Takeaways:
- Poll finds 71% of Americans believe country is on wrong track
- The 71% of Americans in our latest NBC News poll saying the country is headed in the wrong direction is the eighth time in the last nine NBC News surveys dating back to Oct. 2021 when the wrong track has been above 70%.
- And the one exception was in Sept. 2022, when it was 68%.
- We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.
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Important Takeaways:
- Medical debt is becoming an increasingly pervasive problem, with a seemingly never-ending stream of media reports chronicling bankruptcies, garnished wages, lost homes and insidious tactics from hospitals all too eager to sue their patients.
- State lawmakers are taking notice and enacting a flurry of reforms designed to protect their constituents from late notices, threatening voicemails and credit score declines
- The actions — in more than a dozen states — represent a determined, if patchwork, effort to help the roughly 100 million Americans who deal with medical debt.
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Important Takeaways:
- 61% of Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck even as inflation cools
- Lower-income workers have been the hardest hit by price spikes, particularly for food and other staples, since those expenses account for a bigger share of the budget, studies show. Roughly three-quarters of consumers earning less than $50,000 annually and 65% of those earning between $50,000 and $100,000 were living paycheck to paycheck in June, based on LendingClub’s numbers.
- Fewer top earners have been struggling to make ends meet. Of those earning $100,000 or more, only 45% reported living paycheck to paycheck, the report found.
- A majority, or 52%, of adults, including high earners, said they have felt more financially stressed since before the Covid pandemic began in 2020, according to a separate CNBC Your Money Financial Confidence Survey conducted in March — largely due to inflation, rising interest rates and a lack of savings.
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Important Takeaways:
- Staggering Degree Of Biblical Illiteracy: Poll Finds Fewer and Fewer Americans Believe in Hell and the Devil
- Going back over twenty years when Gallup first polled Americans on belief in these religious entities (2001), this is the lowest point in the poll. Here’s the breakdown from high to low:
- 74% believe in God
- 69% in angels
- 67% in heaven
- 59% in hell
- 58% in the devil
- Belief in God and heaven is down the most (16 points each), while belief in hell has fallen 12 points. Is this simply a result of the world having more influence over the church than the church has over the world? Perhaps.
- Nearly three in 10 do not believe in hell or the devil. Not surprisingly, belief in the five spiritual truths was highest among frequent churchgoers. But the message in God’s inspired word doesn’t seem to be reaching the culture and there are several reasons for it.
- This poll reveals in part the consequences of compromising church leadership as reported in last year’s Barna research on pastors. They found only 37% of Christian pastors have a biblical worldview.
- On the other hand, a majority of church leaders (62%) possess what is referred to as a “hybrid worldview” known as Syncretism, having a combination of different forms of belief or practice, often representing personal preferences. This is also known as creating a god in your own image.
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Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.
Important Takeaways:
- U.S. recommends Americans reconsider traveling to China due to arbitrary law enforcement and exit bans
- The U.S. recommended Americans reconsider traveling to China because of arbitrary law enforcement and exit bans and the risk of wrongful detentions.
- No specific cases were cited, but the advisory came after a 78-year-old U.S. citizen was sentenced to life in prison on spying charges in May.
- It also followed the passage last week of a sweeping Foreign Relations Law that threatens countermeasures against those seen as harming China’s interests.
- China also recently passed a broadly written counterespionage law that has sent a chill through the foreign business community, with offices being raided, as well as a law to sanction foreign critics.
- “The People’s Republic of China (PRC) government arbitrarily enforces local laws, including issuing exit bans on U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries, without fair and transparent process under the law,” the U.S. advisory said.
- “U.S. citizens traveling or residing in the PRC may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime,” it warned.
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Revelations 13:16-18 “Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.”
Important Takeaways:
- More Than Eight Million Americans Reportedly Behind on Rent
- 8,070,524 people ages 18 or older in the U.S. aren’t caught up on rent payments. Put another way, 13.17% of the nation’s adult renters live in a household that charges them rent and are behind on payment.
- Nationwide, 3,560,345 adults — 5.81% of adult renters — live in a household that doesn’t pay rent.
- The states with the largest share of adults behind on rent payments are New York, Nevada and Louisiana.
- Mississippi, West Virginia and Alaska are the states where the largest share of people live rent-free.
- Over the past year, 53.03% of renters across the U.S. saw their rent increase, while 36.91% saw no increase and 1.75% saw a decline. The majority of those who saw their rent payments jump reported increases between $100 and $249 a month.
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Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.
Important Takeaways:
- The U.S. has intensified plans to evacuate Americans living in Taiwan, The Messenger reported.
- The plans, which have been underway for at least six months, have “heated up over the past two months or so,” a senior U.S. intelligence official told The Messenger.
- The report came a day after Taiwan’s air force scrambled into action after spotting 10 Chinese warplanes crossing the sensitive median line of the Taiwan Strait, as the island’s defense ministry said four Chinese warships also carried out combat patrols.
- The intelligence official told The Messenger that a “heightened level of tension” had driven the evacuation preparations.
- Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was involved in the 1975 evacuation of Americans from Saigon. He told The Messenger that planning for an evacuation from Taiwan “is a very prudent thing to do.”
- “The fact that the U.S. is doing this doesn’t mean that they expect there will be a war,” Cancian told The Messenger. “It’s only a statement that there could be a war.”
- As of 2019, more than 80,000 Americans were in Taiwan.
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Romans 12:2 “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Important Takeaways:
- Nearly a Third of Gen Z Favors the Government Installing Surveillance Cameras in Homes
- In a newly released Cato Institute 2023 Central Bank Digital Currency National Survey of 2,000 Americans, we asked respondents whether they “favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.” Not surprisingly, few Americans—only 14 percent—support this idea.
- However, Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐style in‐home government surveillance cameras.
- 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor “the government installing surveillance cameras in every household” in order to “reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.”
- Support declines with age, dropping to 20 percent among 30–44-year-olds and dropping considerably to 6 percent among those over the age of 45.
- Here is reason to think part of this is generational. Americans over age 45 have vastly different attitudes on in‐home surveillance cameras than those who are younger. These Americans were born in or before 1978. Thus, the very youngest were at least 11 before the Berlin Wall fell. Being raised during the Cold War amidst regular news reports of the Soviet Union surveilling their own people may have demonstrated to Americans the dangers of giving the government too much power to monitor people. Young people today are less exposed to these types of examples and thus less aware of the dangers of expansive government power.
- It is also possible that increased support for government surveillance among the young has common roots with what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt describe in the Coddling of the American Mind: young people seem more willing to prioritize safety (from possible violence or hurtful words) over ensuring robust freedom (from government surveillance or to speak freely).
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Revelations 13:16-18 “Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.”
Important Takeaways:
- America’s ‘working homeless’ who live in RV encampments lining streets across the nation: Small business owners, prison guards and Amazon workers among people opting to live off the grid – but locals say they’re a blight on their communities
- Similar communities have formed across the US from New England to California where people have chosen a nomadic lifestyle amid a national cost of living crisis.
- Rising costs across all sectors have caused pain for Americans in every state, particularly those living in rural areas, over the past 12 months. Rental prices continue have risen eight percent compared against the same time last year. In New York, they’ve reached record highs with a median cost of $3,410 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. Mortgage rates have more than doubled since the Federal Reserve’s key interest rate hike in March 2022, and last week hit 6.52%.
- Resident Paul Reevers described himself as ‘working homeless.’ He said that he has a job but the rent went up too high and he could no longer afford an apartment.
- Reevers, who works for a New York City hospital, said that he took out a loan and bought his RV.
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John 4:23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.
Important Takeaways:
- The importance of religion in the lives of Americans is shrinking
- Just 16% of Americans surveyed said religion is the most important thing in their lives, according to the PRRI study, down from 20% a decade ago.
- However, for people who do still attend religious services, they say they’re optimistic about the future of their house of worship.
- Even though the U.S. as a whole is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, the vast majority of Christian churchgoers report that their congregations are “mostly monoracial.”
- The research also found that religious Americans are on the move.
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