The Rasmussen Reports Consumer Index for the full month of November shows the highest level of economic confidence in more than two-and-a-half years. The Consumer Index monthly rating of 84.3 is the highest since February 2008 but is still well below the baseline month of October 2001, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
President Obama’s bipartisan deficit reduction commission is considering a radical overhaul of one of the most sacred of sacred cows – the income tax deduction on interest paid on home mortgages. Americans are narrowly divided when asked about possible ways to limit that deduction.
Sandwiched between the Democrats’ disappointing 2002 election cycle and their 2010 “shellacking,” the party made significant gains during the three, mid-decade intervening elections of 2004, 2006 and 2008. And nowhere were the party’s gains more impressive than in four states: Colorado, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia.
We always talk about "The American Dream" -- about living it, saving it, wondering what happened to it. Few bother to define it.
Most voters believe public release of U.S. secret and confidential documents hurts national security, and they consider the leaking of such information to be an act of treason.
Just 29% of Likely U.S. Voters now say the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey taken the week ending Sunday, November 28.
In November, 36.0% of American Adults identified themselves as Republicans; 34.7% considered themselves Democrats, and 29.3% were not affiliated with either major party. That’s the largest number of Republicans since February 2005 and the first time ever that Rasmussen Reports polling has found more people identifying as Republicans than Democrats.
Defenders of Mohamed Osman Mohamud are already arguing to the press that he was set up and in court that he was entrapped. Every state recognizes a defense that argues a defendant was "entrapped," but most of them define it narrowly, as do the federal courts.
Voters are strongly concerned about the impact of the latest dump of sensitive and secret U.S. data on the Internet by the WikiLeaks organization and think the U.S. government needs to do a better job protecting that kind of information.
When tracking President Obama’s job approval on a daily basis, people sometimes get so caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations that they miss the bigger picture. To look at the longer-term trends, Rasmussen Reports compiles the numbers on a full-month basis, and the results can be seen in the graphics below.
I suppose it is to be expected that the Great Recession should be accompanied by a sweeping national pessimism in which our purported leaders and commentators express historic despair, while the people and corporations mope about, convinced that the sun will not come up tomorrow.
Most Americans are in the decorating mood when it comes to the holiday season, but they still have work to do.
Forty-seven percent (47%) of voters believe the U.S. spends more on national defense than it does on Social Security.
One of the constants in Rasmussen Reports Consumer Index tracking of economic confidence is that women are more skeptical about the economy than men. Some might say that women are more pessimistic while others might say more realistic; the gap is a regular feature of consumer confidence data.
The Rasmussen Employment Index posts its largest single-month gain in over a year and reaches its highest level since September 2008 for the third straight month.
They’re off and running, but Black Friday doesn’t appear to have given the boost to holiday shopping that it did a year ago.
"My wife and I started a business a couple of years ago. We formed a limited liability company (LLC) to run the business, and split the ownership (and the work) 50-50.
The recently leaked diplomatic cables reveal both Arab and Israeli horror at a nuclear Iran. Last year, Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, evidently told the American ambassador that the world had 18 months or less to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, warning "any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage." Bahrain's King Hamad sent a cable saying, "That program must be stopped," and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed said, "Ahmadinejad is Hitler."
Voters continue to blame the George W. Bush administration more than President Obama's policies for the country's ongoing economic problems.
In Greece earlier this month, Al Gore made a startling admission: "First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake." Unfortunately, Americans have Gore to thank for ethanol subsidies. In 1994, then-Vice President Gore ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn't factor the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed.
