It doesn’t matter how you look at it, Apple is raising the price that it charges for its streaming TV service. A contract will now cost over 40% more than it did before.

One-year Apple TV+ subscriptions will cost $99 instead of $69.99, and monthly subscriptions will cost $9.99 instead of $6.99.

Apple hiked the cost of a monthly contract from $4.99 to $6.99 exactly one year ago. This means that the cost has doubled in just over a year.

When people get their next bill, they will see the new prices.

The latest price changes in the streaming entertainment business are from Apple. In the past few months, Disney+, Netflix, as well as Amazon Prime Video have all raised prices on their services.

However, in contrast to its competitors, Apple has not yet shown a consumer alternative that is ad-supported.

The price increases across the board have been called “streamflation.”

A Wall Street Journal study released in August found that the average cost of using a big ad-free streaming service will be going up by almost 25% within a year. Streamers are placing wagers that customers are going to be ready to pay more or they will switch to a cheaper tier with ads, which is better for the streamer because it makes them more money.

The costs of Apple Music will also be going up for everyone. The yearly plan will now cost $109, which is 10% more than it used to be.

Another change is that Apple News+ and Apple Arcade will each cost $12.99 per month instead of $6.99.

President Biden has called on Congress to authorize millions of dollars from American taxpayers to help stop the flow of migrant children being trafficked through a labor pipeline. This started while he was in office because federal immigration laws were not being enforced properly.

$100 million to support the Department of Labor’s investigation into child labor, namely a labor trafficking network involving Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) that has grown to be a significant problem for the administration, is tucked away in Biden’s budget proposal to Congress.

The request for funding is the Biden administration’s way of admitting that the UAC labor trafficking pipeline needs millions of dollars more in funds to stop the network of traffickers and smugglers

By chance, the UAC labor trafficking route has grown while Biden has been in office.

The House of Representatives has been asking top officials at the Department of HHS for months why more than tens of thousands of migrant children haven’t been heard from since the federal government placed the children with adult sponsors across the U.S. Most of these adults are not necessarily their biological relatives.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has asked the DHS many times about the tens of thousands of UACs that the government has lost touch with after they were placed with adult supporters.

Blackburn still doesn’t know what’s going on.

A shocking report from the Labor Department showed that the number of children found working in the U.S. has gone up by 44 percent from October 2022 to July of this year.

United American Children (UACs) are often forced to work by adults who support them. The Labor Department says it is working with Mexico and other Central American countries to “educate migrant communities” about U.S. child labor rules.

In August, the Labor Department’s Inspector General (IG) said they would be looking into how the agency dealt with UACs who were being sold for work after they were let into the U.S.

In the years since Biden took office, over 300,000 UACs have been paired with adult sponsors across the country. However, migrant children are being trafficked for labor, sex, or domestic labor because HHS is not adequately screening those sponsors.

People who only read the major press would be constantly bombarded with stories about how great the economy is. Headlines have said things like, “Look at the jobs market,” as if our current situation were the most stable in history. The full-court press has become so powerful that the Biden administration has even started calling it “Bidenomics,” which has not been a great way to sell the plan.

But what appears good on paper doesn’t always show what will happen in the real world. So, Joe Biden’s present economic downturn, which people are told they should be very happy about, is having a much bigger effect on American households than Paul Krugman’s most recent pick-and-choose bar graph shows.

Surprisingly, if you disregard how much items really cost across the board, you can paint a rosy image in which a much-delayed decrease of the rate of inflation actually represents a remarkable achievement. In the real world, though, this truth still stands.

However, starting on January 20, 2021, the day Biden assumed office, the total inflation rate was 2.749%. All of this adds up to a 21.151 percent rise in inflation since he took office as president.

The cumulative or compounded inflation rate—call it what you will—has exceeded 21 percent since Biden entered office. In other words, Americans now have to pay 21% more than they did two and a half years ago to live exactly the same way. It is difficult to articulate the extent of the systemic shock that many families have experienced. Even though it has been said that wages are going up, they haven’t kept up with basic inflation, and most people haven’t gotten a 21% raise in that time.

When favored numbers meet the cold, hard truth of real-world results, this is what happens. Because there aren’t enough people to do entry-level jobs, the majority of the wage growth has been at the lower end of the scale. But what does that mean for the normal middle-class dad who is trying to support his family? The answer is nothing at all.

The job market, which is said to be strong, is the same way. Again, there are a lot of entry-level jobs open because of a lack of workers which is mostly due to bad COVID policies. A lot of those jobs are held by people who work more than one job in order to make ends meet. Is that good news for the United States? Is that the goal we should have? I don’t think it is.

Author: Scott Dowdy

In September, the main economic index fell again. This was the 18th month in a row that it fell, and it was thought to be a good indicator of how the economy would do in the future.

The Conference Board stated that its measure of leading indicators went down by 0.7% over the past month. The ten parts that make up the index are thought to show where the economy is going in the future.

According to Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, Top Manager, Business Cycles Index at The Conference Board, “the LEI for the US fell again in September. This makes it fifteen months in a row that it has gone down since April 2022. In September, fewer first-time applications for unemployment benefits were more than balanced out by negative or flat contributions from nine out of the index’s ten parts. The six-month growth rate in the LEI is a little less negative, and the recession warning did not go off, but it still shows that the economy may be weak in the coming months.”

Since things are going down less quickly now, Zabinksa-La Monica says this study did not sound the economic alarm. The measure is down 3.4% over the six months from March to September 2023. This is less than the 4.6% drop it experienced over the course of the last six months.

The recession alarm did not go off, but the Conference Board believes that we will enter a recession early in the coming year.

“Even though rising interest rates and high prices are putting pressure on the US economy, it has shown a lot of strength so far. However, The Conference Board thinks this trend won’t last for much longer, and a mild recession is expected in the first part of 2024,” Zabinska-La Monica stated.

Recently released data gathered from the National Association of Realtors shows that high mortgage rates have continued to hurt the housing market. As a result, the number of new homes sold has dropped to its lowest level in 13 years.

In the years after the housing bust, a lot of people locked in low-interest rates. People who owned homes locked in low rates when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates again during the pandemic. Since mortgage rates are already approaching eight percent, over sixty percent of homeowners are unwilling to sell their properties and purchase new ones because their current mortgage rates are less than six percent.

After taking into account the changing of the seasons, sales of existing homes fell 2% in September compared to the previous month. Sales are 15.4% less than they were a year ago.

Even though interest rates are going up, home prices have been going up because there aren’t many homes for sale. In September, the typical price of an existing home sold was $394,300, which was 2.8% more than the same month last year. This was the third month in a row that prices went up from the previous year.

Inflation hit its worst level in forty years in the spring of 2022, when the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates. This was because of the Biden administration’s wasteful spending plans and too-loose monetary policy.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors (NAR), said, “Lack of inventory and high prices continue to hurt home sales, as they have all year. The Federal Reserve can’t keep raising interest rates when inflation is going down and job growth is slowing down.”

Since its peak last year, inflation has gone down. But it has been stable for a while now, and it even went up in September, which made people worry that inflation might last longer than they thought. According to past measures, the unemployment rate in September was 3.8%, which is very low. At the same time, 336,000 new jobs were created.

Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, confirmed President Biden’s globalist plan this week by saying that the U.S. is “not trying to detach from China.”

Yellen informed Sky News this week, “We are not trying to separate from China. Our economic ties are strong, and the competition, trade, and investment that comes with it is good for both of us. We want to keep it going.”

Yellen went on to say, “We are strengthening our relationship with China” and that the Biden government does not want to “harm progress in China.”

Yellen’s remarks coincide with an increasing number of Republican senators endorsing a proposal to terminate the United States’ free trade agreements with China. These agreements contributed to the closure of 91,000 American manufacturing facilities and roughly five million manufacturing jobs in the United States between 1997 and 2018.

For example, Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) proposed the “Ending Normal Trade Relations with China Act” in July. This bill would bring an end to U.S. free trade with China and put high taxes on Chinese goods coming into the U.S.

In March, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) brought the bill to the Senate.

Similar bills, called the “China Trade Relations Act,” have been introduced by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), Ted Budd (R-NC), Rick Scott (R-FL), and J.D. Vance (R-OH) to end China’s regular trade relations status. Instead, each presidential government would decide if China could have free trade with the United States.

A recent research study conducted by the Coalition for a Prosperous America discovered that taking away China’s status as a normal trading partner of the U.S. would generate two million jobs and boost the economy by almost two percent.

There would be taxes on goods from China that range from 6.7% to over 70% under the plan. According to the study, real American family income would rise by upwards of $3,600 and American industrial output would rise over six percent.

The study said, “Removing China’s MFN status would have no effect on the U.S. economy or the standard of living in America as we try to gradually separate our economy from China’s. Instead, we think that further separating from China would help the U.S. economy grow, giving Americans more jobs and higher wages and allowing many important manufacturing sectors to recover.”