Economy

In a New York Times op-ed with so many holes it wouldn't hold up as swiss cheese, two political science profs, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, set out to reassure the leftist elites that "The Path to Prosperity Is Blue." This would be pretty funny if it weren't for the fact that many of the Old Gray Lady's smug readers will actually buy this nonsense. The pair's presentation tortures economic…

Over two weeks ago, the Bolivarian socialist government of Venezuela under de facto dictator Nicolas Maduro decreed that private-sector and government workers can be forced to work on farms if the military, which is now responsible for food production and distribution in that shortage-wracked country, deems it necessary. Relevant site searches indicate that the country's forced-labor decree…

Donald Trump spent more than 52 minutes laying out his plans for the economy in Detroit Monday. It’s an issue voters ranked as their most important, yet ABC spent only devoted 33 seconds to what Trump proposed.

Once again the broadcast networks showed that when it comes to economic news, they pick news that makes Obama look good. ABC World News and CBS Evening News both reported the “good news for the economy” on Aug. 5, that 255,000 jobs were added in the month of July. NBC did not. That same day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced those increases to payroll employment and the unchanged 4.9…

The Republican Party needs to be soundly thrashed, or maybe even euthanized, believes Esquire’s Pierce, who wrote in a Friday post that “it long has been the duty of the Democratic Party to the nation to beat the crazy out of the Republican Party until it no longer behaves like a lunatic asylum. The opportunity to do this…never has been as wide and gleaming as it is right now." In Pierce’s view,…

In Saturday’s lead New York Times story, reporter Jackie Calmes glimpsed a silver lining in the rise of Donald Trump, as a challenge to the Republican party's myopic focus on “business and the privileged” that could relegate Reagan's "outmoded" ideas of tax cuts to the dustbin of history. The full deck of headlines: “As Trump Rises, G.O.P. Faces Push On Its Economics – Working-Class Appeal –…

There’s a famous line attributed to Henry Kissinger about the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s: “It's a pity they can't both lose.” Left-wing Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins adapted Kissinger’s quip for his Tuesday post about whether “vicious, ignorant megalomaniac” Donald Trump is “more contemptible” than “steely-eyed devotee of Ayn Rand” Paul Ryan.

The press's reporting on the Obama era's awful economy has been nothing short of abysmal. Looking at the bigger picture on July 25, MRC Business's Julia Seymour named "6 key indicators of (a) weak economy" the press has glossed over or ignored since the recession ended seven years ago. The most obvious item she identified is the fact that the current alleged "recovery" is by far the worst since…

What economists call an ability to make "compensating differences" is a valuable tool in everyone's arsenal. If people are prohibited from doing so, they are always worse off. You say, "Williams, I never heard of compensating differences. What are they?"  

Food is so scarce in Venezuela that last week a group of starving people broke into a zoo and killed a horse for food. Burdened by government regulations, Venezuela’s economic crisis and its food shortage are forcing many people to leave their country. However, the networks haven’t done much reporting on the subject. The July 31, NBC Nightly News was an exception.

The U.S. economy “sputtered” again in the second quarter, according to The Wall Street Journal. However, that “disappointing” economic news, coming on the heels of the Democratic National Convention, wasn’t reported by the broadcast evening news shows. The Commerce Department announced July 29, that the economy grew at an annual rate of 1.2 percent annual in the second quarter. But ABC, CBS and…

Venezuela’s economy continues to deteriorate under the rule of its socialist president Nicolas Maduro. The collapsing economy, combined with government regulations and price controls created a food shortage so severe some have taken drastic measures. One group of desperate Venezuelans broke into a zoo and butchered a horse for meat on July 24, according to Fusion’s Manuel Rueda.

Yesterday's news about the economy was the latest in a 7-1/2 year series of mostly regular disappointments. The government reported that nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at an annual rate of just 1.2 percent in the second quarter, half or less of what most alleged "experts" expected. Additionally, the first's quarter's originally reported 1.1 percent growth was revised down to 0.8…

Is media bias just smart marketing? Yes, suggests Taibbi, who claims it’s “irrelevant” that “most individual reporters” are liberals given that their profit-driven, audience-conscious corporate overlords keep them on a short leash. “Whatever their personal leanings, influential reporters mostly work in nihilistic corporations, to whom the news is a non-ideological commodity, to be sold the same…