About thedatabulletin
Real data made light enough to follow, but strong enough to trust.
What this site is
thedatabulletin shows the latest U.S. economic picture - jobs, prices, growth, housing, energy costs, crime trends - pulled straight from official sources and presented the moment new figures are released. No hot takes, no cherry-picking: the chart, the source, and a plain-English explanation of what it means.
The same promise now extends beyond the U.S.: global climate and disaster data (storms, wildfires, disaster tolls) and human well-being measures (life expectancy, hunger, freshwater, child survival, homelessness), from the same kind of primary sources.
Where the data comes from
Every number on this site comes from an official primary source: FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the FBI Crime Data Explorer (Uniform Crime Reporting program), and the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Each chart links or names its exact series, so you can verify anything yourself in one click.
The climate and well-being sections draw on NOAA IBTrACS (the world's official tropical cyclone archive), NASA FIRMS (satellite wildfire detections), EM-DAT (the international disaster database at UCLouvain), the WHO Global Health Observatory, the World Bank (carrying UN FAO food and water series), and the OECD Affordable Housing Database. Where a source needs care - homelessness counts, for instance, are defined differently country to country - the caveat sits right next to the chart, not buried here.
Two honest caveats we always carry: official figures are released on schedules (monthly, quarterly, weekly - not continuously), and agencies routinely revise past figures. We always display the latest official vintage.
How Data Check works
When a politician, pundit, or news story quotes a statistic, we put the claim next to the official numbers. Every check gets exactly one of three findings:
Matches the data Needs context Doesn't match the data
Our rules: quotes are exact and dated; primary sources are always linked; we check claims from all sides and keep the mix balanced over time; nothing is published without human review; and if we get one wrong, the correction is visible - never silent.
Why we don't rank states on crime
The FBI itself warns against ranking states or cities - reporting practices, urbanization, and demographics differ too much for rankings to be fair. So we show trends and state-vs-national context instead. (Energy prices, by contrast, are designed to be compared across states - so there we compare away.)
Contact & social
Questions, corrections, or a claim you'd like checked: contact@thedatabulletin.com
Find us soon on: X/Twitter · Instagram · TikTok · YouTube · LinkedIn (links land here as each account goes live)