Economy

What everyone knew would happen as a result of Philadelphia's 1.5 cents-per-ounce soda tax began materializing on Wednesday, as Pepsi announced that it would lay off roughly 20 percent of its workforce there over the next several months. Coverage at both Philly.com and Associated Press allowed the city to engage in fantasy by claiming without meaningful challenge, or even clarification, that…

How is Donald Trump “not a normal Republican”? Let New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait count the ways. Trump is “crudely ethno-nationalist,” wrote Chait in a Tuesday post, and he’s “personally ignorant and undisciplined in a manner that sets him apart not only from traditional Republicans but most human adults.” That’s pretty much it for Trump’s deviations from orthodoxy, according to Chait, who…

A week ago, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Wendy's, the fast-food chain, announced "plans to install self-ordering kiosks in 1,000 of its stores — about 16 percent of its locations — by the end of the year." Although company officials observed 18 months ago that such a move would be inevitable if the trend towards laws demanding far-above-market minimum wages continued, both J.D. Malone's…

While most of the major broadcast network anchors and panelists were pleasantly surprised by President Trump’s Tuesday night speech to Congress, former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw uncorked some long-winded complaints about the address that he claimed will have fact-checkers “very busy for the next 24 hours.”

On Saturday, President Donald Trump tweeted that "The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo." Demonstrating that "fact checking" by the partisan press is a sick joke which has instead turned into a vehicle to make cheap political points, Politifact rated Trump's utterly true statement "Mostly False."

Tuesday on ABC’s Good Morning America, anchor George Stephanopoulos interrogated Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director, over President Trump’s proposed budget plan. The ABC journalist and former Clinton staffer downplayed the fiscal effects of the plan as inconsequential in balancing the budget while at the same time touting Democrats’ criticism that Trump was taking a…

Things got bizarre during NBC Nightly News on Monday when reporter Hallie Jackson seemed to suggest that President’s Donald Trump wealth somehow precluded him from increasing military spending. “The President who's talked plenty about his money now spending the taxpayers',” she chided while a clip of Trump talking about his money played, “In a new budget blueprint that's as much a political…

At CPAC on Friday, Nigel Farage, a key leader of the "Leave" campaign which resulted in UK voters choosing in June 2016 to leave the European Union, reminded attendees and the world of something that the U.S. press has virtually failed to acknowledge: that then-U.S. President Obama was instrumental in his effort's success. Two months before the vote, Obama, in a UK speech, promised that a "Leave…

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — Speaking to a boisterous, full-capacity crowd at the 2017 edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), President Donald Trump delivered all-encompassing remarks that included blistering attacks on the “fake news media,” incorrect polling, anonymous sources, and “the Clinton News Network” of CNN.

In June, the City of Philadelphia, in what was hailed as a "historic moment for public health," passed a deliberately misnamed 1.5-cent per ounce "soda tax." What anyone with a lick of sense could have predicted would happen is happening, and the national press is mostly ignoring the tragic results.

On Tuesday morning's MSNBC Live, Louise Mensch, though she claims to be a conservative, put forth what I suspect will be the left's core economic argument if the economy improves under Donald Trump. That argument: The economy is "fantastic" already, and Trump will have had nothing to do with whatever economic improvements over what is already "fantastic" we might see.

CPAC, currently going on just outside the Beltway in National Harbor, Maryland, has changed along with the conservative movement, believes Matthew Yglesias. Old-school CPAC, Yglesias contended in a Wednesday piece, was philosophically driven, populated by the sort of activists who “helped [Ronald] Reagan mount a primary challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford.” In the past fifteen-plus years…

It was Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman who made famous the adage, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." Professor Friedman could have added that there is a difference between something's being free and something's having a zero price. For example, people say that there's free public education and there are free libraries, but public education and libraries cost money. Proof that they…

A 2:00 p.m. Wednesday deadline to leave the area looms for hundreds of bitter-ender protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline site following Donald Trump's January 24 executive order advancing its approval. Based on previous reporting I've seen, the presence of "hundreds" is a revelation. What's more, despite the oncoming environmental disaster caused by their trash, filth and abandoned items, up…