Middle Schoolers' Reading & Math Scores Remain Below Pre-Pandemic Levels, US Results Show

Supreme Court Justices Kavanaugh, Jackson Publicly Disagree Over Emergency Docket Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times, U.S. Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson clashed on March 9 over the court’s various emergency orders that have allowed President Donald Trump to pursue his policy agenda. The setting was a federal courtroom in the nation’s capital, at an annual lecture honoring former federal judge and prosecutor Thomas Aquinas Flannery, who died in 2007. Kavanaugh, who was appointed by Trump in 2018, and Jackson, who was appointed by President Joe Biden...

Crisis Comes Closer: Social Security's Projected Insolvency Moved A Year Earlier Continuing a trend of increasingly dismal projections, Social Security's trustees have revised their prediction of when the massive benefit program's trust fund will run out of money, moving it to the fourth quarter of 2032, sooner than last year's projection that the money will run out in 2033. They attributed most of the the change to declining fertility rates and immigration, along with tax reductions included in Trump's 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).  When the trust fund runs...

401(k) Hardship Withdrawals Hit Record High The AI bubble and data center buildout have helped catapult equity markets to new highs (pre-Middle East conflict), minting a record number of 401(k) millionaires. However, beneath the surface, hardship withdrawals from 401(k) plans have also climbed to a record, reinforcing the view that the K-shaped economy is becoming more entrenched. Vanguard's How America Saves 2025 report shows that hardship withdrawal activity "increased to a new high" of 6% in 2025, up from 4.8% in 2024 and about 2% before the pandemic. The increase marks the...