Hi! Most blessings start with the word may, so why not bring ourselves more blessings from the very start of May. One such blessing of course is moving in to your own house, but home ownership isn't all rainbows and sunshine all the time:

Well, good luck with asking rent from your pissed off residential spirits, you might just get lucky on the occasion of New Homeowners Day. So, don't forget to mow your lawns and tidy up your homes and let's get started with our regular!

Today’s special:

United States of Asthma: America might struggle to breathe with their asthma problem!

The Tariff Tantrums: Did the U.S. really reaped any benefits from the Tariff wars?

Tweet These Numbers: ‘X’ continues to fall from grace post Elon Musk’s acquisition.

For millions of Americans, breathing problems are a daily reality, it isn’t something they can take for granted rather it’s something that needs to be managed. Roughly about 28.2 million people across the U.S. live with asthma, making it one of the most prominent chronic diseases in the country. 1 in 12 American children now currently lives with this condition, and that includes more than 14 million missed school days each year.

Those symptoms don’t just stay mild either, about 10 people die each day because of Asthma, making it a big reason why Americans are visiting hospitals in large numbers yearly. Emergency departments record nearly 2 million people visiting due to asthma-related exacerbation.

Where someone lives can also shape how severe the risk becomes. Rochester ranks as one of the top asthma metro area, with a total score of 94.91, followed by Allentown at (90.49). Miami and Atlanta have an average score of 60.37 and 59.49 respectively. While Porvo is much better at 31.42 and De Moine can be considered as the best metro area with a score of 28.22.

As if asthma wasn’t already widespread enough, it seems environmental policy could just make things worse. An analysis by the Center for American Progress exhibits consequences of weakening certain environmental protections which could lead to more than 100 million additional asthma attacks between 2025 and 2050. If we’re breaking down numbers, then that projection translates into roughly 10,000 extra asthma attacks every single day across the country.

Air pollution as it stands undoubtedly can trigger asthma flare-ups, if policies begin to shift on emission standards or industrial regulations, it will directly influence how often Americans experience those attacks.

Moreover, the hold Asthma has on Americans extends beyond medical necessity, it’s financial too. Treatment costs roughly $82 billion yearly, and patients spend a hefty amount of $3,266 more annually versus those without the condition. Meanwhile, policy shifts could worsen the outlook: 12 of the 31 EPA rules under scrutiny target air pollutants and rolling them back could lead to nearly 200,000 premature deaths by 2050.

At first glance, the tariffs delivered exactly what they promised, which was revenue. By 2025, U.S. customs duties had reached a summit of $287 billion in a single year, up 192% year-over-year. This marked one of the, if not, the sharpest tariff income increase known in modern history.

But it doesn’t stop at the yearly total; month by month the surge became more striking. The tariff revenue collections in March 2025 sat at $8.2 billion then April doubled it to $15.6 billion. From there on, it compounded to $31.4 billion by October and as of early 2026 it’s still printing $26.6 billion.

However, it’s all in the nuances: tariffs were supposed to make foreign producers pay yet the numbers seem to allude to the fact that Americans are picking up much of the bill.

U.S. tariff rates didn’t just rise in 2025, they took a big leap from 2.6% to 13% in under a year. And crucially, about 90% of those added costs weren’t absorbed overseas; in fact, they were picked up by the U.S. companies, who then increased the price of imported goods to consumers. In other words: tariffs which were supposed to be a foreign penalty, in reality were more like extra domestic taxes.

In the household level due to tariffs, the average American family is estimated to have paid roughly $1,000 in 2025 and that figure is expected to rise to $1,300 in 2026. Even after accounting for reduced consumption, the “effective” tariff rate still sits at 9.9% and that’s the highest it’s been since 1946.

Despite all that, inflation shock has been surprisingly quiet, and the economy proved more resilient than anticipated. Even at the backdrop of tariffs on Chinese imports climbing as high as 57.6% in November 2025, overall U.S. inflation came in at just 2.7%, below the projected 3.1%. Tariffs added, contributed only 0.9 percentage points to inflation far less than what economists were dreading. At the same time, revenue is already losing its lead and declined steadily in just 3 months as per the research note of Pantheon macroeconomics earlier this year.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it as X, he pitched the platform as the future “everything app.” But several years later, the numbers suggest that Musk's vision for X must have been oversold because the company isn’t justifying the hype it first had since Musk’s takeover.

For starters, user engagement on the once dominant platform is diminishing. As of Q2 2025, X’s daily user base reached 132 million, but its year-over-year growth declined by 15.2%. Meanwhile, competition is growing cutthroat by the second: by early 2026 Meta’s Threads had already edged out X at 141.5 million in terms of mobile daily users compared to X’s 125 million. In addition, newer platforms such as Bluesky continue to chip away at X’s cultural relevance.

Amid the ever-changing landscape of social media, X’s earnings have failed to regain momentum and managed to generate roughly $2.5 billion in revenue in 2024, a 13.7% decline from the previous year. By 2025, revenues showed a little recovery, with Q1 sitting at $722 million only to fall at $707 million by Q2, accentuating the stagnation that continues overall.

The company’s finances have remained turbulent since Musk’s takeover revenue in the UK alone plunged 66.3%, falling from £205.3 million in 2022 to £69.1 million in 2023.

After an initial boost following political events in the U.S., the company reported about $707 million revenue in June 2025, a 2.2% decline from the previous quarter. The platform’s ad business remains volatile, which in the company’s history had been its key growth driver. The weakness isn’t limited to advertising either, in fact the platform’s mobile growth is also faltering, and it’s failing to make its mark on Android. In Q3 2025, new installs on Google Play plunged 44% year over year, dragging overall mobile downloads down to 26% annually.

The slowdown is beginning to show up in subscriptions too, with X generating $16.9 million in in-app revenue in July 2025, lower than the $18.8 million recorded in March of the same year. Even Musk himself has acknowledged the headwinds, and the billionaire admitted X’s growth had become “stagnant,” while revenue remained “unimpressive”. For a company bought for $44 billion, the reality now looks far less dazzling considering it’s now valued at about $12.3 billion, a steep drop from its acquisition price.

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