Economy

On Sunday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Lester Holt touted how President Obama's plan to "propose tax hikes for wealthiest Americans" during Tuesday's State of the Union address would be "potentially putting Congress in the position of appearing to defend the highest income earners over the middle class."

Ann Jones has doubts about allegations that America is “crazy,” but adds, “Some people who question me say that the U.S. is ‘paranoid,’ ‘backward,’ ‘behind the times,’ ‘vain,’ ‘greedy,’ ‘self-absorbed,’ or simply ‘dumb.’  Others, more charitably, imply that Americans are merely ‘ill-informed,’ ‘misguided,’ ‘misled,’ or ‘asleep,’ and could still recover sanity.  But wherever I travel, the…

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal picked on the liberal "explainer" site Vox.com on Friday under the headline "Two Voxen In One!" In a story on "11 myths about homelessness," German Lopez seemed very contradictory. There was "Myth #4: Homelessness is typically related to mental illness." Lopez then immediately allowed that "Serious mental illnesses are more prevalent among the homeless."

Interesting: Cuba's Bureau of Tourism sponsored a three-minute promo on today's Morning Joe. Oh, wait, no.  That was NBC itself, in the person of Kate Snow, with a smiley, unrelentingly upbeat segment promoting the glories of tourism in Cuba that will now be possible for Americans under President Obama's executive order relaxing former restrictions. Snow's segment—entitled 'Bienvenidos a Cuba'…

In an interview with newly elected Colorado Senator Cory Gardner for PBS's Charlie Rose, Bloomberg View columnist Al Hunt grilled the Republican on conservatives in Congress being obstructionist: "Some of your Republican colleagues, Ted Cruz in the Senate, those twenty-four House members who voted against Speaker Boehner, they're not interested in getting things done as much as they are in…

Esquire’s Pierce deems Ryan “the single biggest fake in American public life” and declares that he “should have no more credibility on [fiscal] issues than does Sarah Palin, his predecessor in the second spot on the [Republican] ticket. Any Democratic congresscritter who seeks to make a deal with him should be drummed out of Washington. Any reporter or pundit who takes his plans for the economy…

The latest report out of Venezuela by the Associated Press's Hannah Dreier has a time stamp of 1:15 p.m. today. This means that the wire service has had plenty of time to report, and has chosen not to report, a powerful pastoral letter issued yesterday by that country's Catholic bishops (original in Spanish; full Google Translation) denouncing that country's descent into a system they described…

New York magazine’s Chait argues that Obama “has incontrovertibly made major progress on, or fulfilled, every one of” the goals with which he started his presidency, and that “the horrifying consequences conservatives insisted would follow have all failed to materialize.”

In an economic columnist face-off, The Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson declared Paul Krugman of The New York Times wrong about inflation history. Samuelson said that Krugman’s Jan. 5, column made a “glaring error” when it claimed President Ronald Reagan had little to do with getting double-digit 1980s inflation under control. Samuelson said it was the first time he could recollect devoting…

Well, they're nothing if not consistent. When the Obama administration lost a court ruling against its ban on Gulf of Mexico drilling after the BP oil spill, it simply issued another ban. When it lost at the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case, it just issued a new rule which hardly differed from the one the Court nullified. Now, when it becomes clear that the administration won't get the…

Three results returned in a search at the Associated Press's national site on "Venezuela" tell us almost nothing about that country's deepening economic crisis. An unbylined January 10 item reports on the visit of Nicolas Maduro, the country's de facto dictator, to Iran in hopes of "stabilizing" (i.e., raising) oil prices. A second unbylined report on January 9 tells readers that there's really…

Appearing on Saturday's Fox & Friends on Fox News, Media Research Center research director Rich Royes detailed the utter failure of several media predictions about 2015. From The New York Times estimating huge budget surpluses for the U.S. government to CNN warning of a real-life war on women, Noyes told hosts Tucker Carlson and Peter Johnson just how wrong the liberal press was in its…

The big-government supporters at the New York Times offered two classic big-government news stories on the front of its Business section two days in a row. On Friday: "Government Spending, Edging Up, Is a Stimulus." The text box underlined the pro-government spending sentiment: "The public sector is once again adding to prosperity." On Thursday: "Hourly Wage Is Going Up for Millions." The online…

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who died on Thursday, is predictably being lionized today by USA Today's Aamer Madhani "as (a) giant in political rhetoric," and by others elsewhere in similarly glowing terms. Madhani goes on to characterize the three-term Empire State chief executive's 1984 Democratic Convention speech in San Francisco as "what is widely considered one of the finest pieces…