Economy

On Sunday's Fareed Zakaria GPS show, the host peddled the long-discredited mythology that the Reagan and Bush 43 supply-side tax cuts caused annual budget deficits to explode. Zakaria interviewed former Treasury Secretary and Obama economic adviser Larry Summers and current Trump administration Council of Economic Advisers head Kevin Hassett, but he did so separately, thus teeing up Summers to go…

The most recent cover of Time Magazine — or I should say what's left of it, given its parent company's recent decision "reducing ... circulation and frequency" of the formerly iconic publication — calls President Donald Trump's cabinet "The Wrecking Crew" on a mission of "dismantling government as we know it." Separate reports singled out EPA Director Scott Pruitt, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos…

It would be hard to find an example of a story covering an aspect of business and the economy more pathetic than Jordan Yadoo's report on the government's biennial 10-year employment growth projections published at Bloomberg News on Tuesday. 

Federal income tax was first introduced under the Revenue Act of 1861 to help defray war costs. Congress repealed the tax in 1871 when the need for government revenue declined, only to restore it in 1894 as part of the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act. The public policy debate surrounding the constitutionality of income tax has been going on ever since.

Last week, Anthony Crupi at AdAge.com was either willfully ignorant or deliberately deceptive when he claimed that the size of the National Football League's TV ratings decline is inconsequential. Crupi also appears to be quite wrong in contending that actual game attendance — not reported attendance, but "turnstile" attendance — during the 2017 season is only barely down compared to last year.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged to more new records on Oct. 17 and 18, crossing 23,000 points for the first time during a trading day then closing above 23K for the very first time the next day.

Politicians exploit public ignorance. Few areas of public ignorance provide as many opportunities for political demagoguery as taxation. Today some politicians argue that the rich must pay their fair share and label the proposed changes in tax law as tax cuts for the rich. Let's look at who pays what, with an eye toward attempting to answer this question: Are the rich paying their fair share?

While covering the stock market milestone of the Dow surging past 23,000 on Tuesday, the cast of Wednesday’s NBC Today seemed surprised that the economy could be doing so well despite all the “chaos in Washington” being created by President Trump.

In a series of bizarre comments on Monday’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough made the case that the recent Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. had no true conservatives present. In order to support this assertion, Joe extensively used liberal talking points, including ones about the GOP’s tax reform plan. Joe ended up claiming that Trump’s administration might raise the national debt up to $35…

On Monday, NBC’s Today finally discovered the elusive secret to happiness – European-style socialism. While taking a bicycle tour of Copenhagen with National Geographic’s Dan Buettner, correspondent Cynthia McFadden proclaimed: “For 40 years Denmark has ranked as one of the happiest places on Earth....the Danes make life less stressed and more joyful.”  

On Wednesday, "the Cook County (Illinois) Board of Commissioners repealed the penny-an-ounce levy on sweetened beverages it passed last November." The inflammatory "Big Soda" label appears frequently in press coverage of this reversal of what the government-always-knows-best crowd had thought was a major nanny-state victory, and reflects the fact that many in the media are quite unhappy with this…

In theory, the larger and stronger a nation’s private sector, the more robust and diverse its news media. Nonetheless, New York’s Eric Levitz suggested on Tuesday that the American media aren’t robust enough. As Levitz sees it, though “democracy cannot function without a well-funded, adversarial press...market incentives do not adequately reward news outlets for investing in high-impact…

On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, prominent New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof came on the show to promote his latest piece based on his recent trip to North Korea. The resultant segment’s melding of Kristof’s sentiments reflecting NYT’s pro-communist “Red Century” series combined with Joe Scarborough and his fellow panelists’ tendency to paint Trump as a dictator added up to produce the perfect…

On Monday, EPA Director Scott Pruitt announced that he would be putting an end to the Obama-era policy known and the Clean Power Plan. The plan put stiff regulations on new and existing coal-fired power plants which resulted in many being closed down, miners to be let go, energy bills to skyrocket, and put greater strain on the power grid. All in the name of so-called green energy. CBS Evening…