Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of sixty-six. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:16 PM, for 12h 48m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.7% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the one thousand thirty-fourth day.
On this day in 1966, NBC broadcasts The Man Trap, the first broadcast episode of the first season of Star Trek on NBC: “The Enterprise visits planet M-113 for a routine medical inspection of the husband-wife archaeological team stationed there, but the crew finds that the wife has been replaced by a deadly, shape-shifting creature.”
Recommended for reading in full:
Jason Lange and P.J. Huffstutter report Farm loan delinquencies surge in U.S. election battleground Wisconsin:
The share of farm loans that are long past-due rose to 2.9% at community banks in Wisconsin as of June 30, the highest rate in comparable records that go back to 2001, according to a Reuters analysis of loan delinquency data published by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
While the number of seriously delinquent farm loans is rising nationwide, the noncurrent rate has more than doubled at Wisconsin’s community banks since Trump took office in January 2017. It now stands higher than in any other of the top 10 U.S. farm states as measured in production – a list that includes California, Iowa and Texas.
Craig Gilbert reports In battleground Wisconsin, views of the economy aren’t as rosy as they used to be:
In more than 50 surveys since the beginning of 2012, Marquette Law School pollster Charles Franklin has asked Wisconsin voters whether they expect the economy to get better, worse or stay the same “over the next year.”
In every survey during the Obama presidency, more voters said “better” than “worse.” That remained true during the first two years of the Trump presidency.
But in two of the three Wisconsin polls that Marquette has done in 2019, more voters have said “worse” than “better.”
In short, public expectations about the economy are darker this year than they have been at any time since at least 2011. And that’s not based on just one survey; it is based on the yearly averages of 52 surveys Marquette has done from 2012 to 2019.
This finding is also consistent with national trends. In August, a widely followed index of consumer sentiment by the University of Michigan registered its biggest monthly drop since 2012.
Jennifer Rubin writes of Trump’s ‘tell’ on the economy:
Moreover, Trump’s tax cuts were spun on the basis that they would permanently hike business investment, raise workers’ wages by $4,000 and bring on a new era of more than 3 percent growth. That hasn’t happened. Rattner wrote: “In fact, during the second quarter, new investment fell for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2015. As the 2020 election season continues to unfold, Americans may be surprised to learn that the rate of investment under Mr. Trump — 3.9% — is actually lower than under President Obama (5.7%) after the nation’s economy began to recover in 2010.”