Economy

PBS anchor Judy Woodruff asked a question on Monday’s NewsHour that perfectly captured the modern liberal mentality about government spending and debt. During a taped interview with former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Woodruff asked: [Video below. MP3 audio here.]

On CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday, Sun Microsystems founder and Harvard-trained economist Scott Mc Nealy asserted the Federal Reserve has become a "marketing department" for the government and "shouldn't be in any business at all. They shouldn’t be in the business of taxing people by devaluing the dollar, and they shouldn’t be in the business of setting expectations." He said the Fed should…

A 6 p.m. Google News search on "Occupy Movement" (not in quotes, sorted by date) returned 69 items dated September 16 and 17. The same search adding the word "capitalism" returned only two items. This is odd, because, as one of the two items returned noted, "capitalism" — as in ending it — is the core platform of the few who remain involved with the two year-old movement.

[UPDATED BELOW] Three times on Tuesday morning, CNN mentioned sequester cuts as a possible culprit behind the security breach at the Navy Yard that led to Monday's shooting there. A CNN headline actually read "Did Government Cuts Put Lives at Risk?" This came after a former Navy commander warned on CNN that blaming the sequester was "very premature." And just before noon, correspondent Dana…

Within hours of the shootings at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard Monday, Barack Obama took to the airwaves to amongst other things attack Republicans. On Fox News’s Special Report, Brit Hume said, “I think that this president tends to engage in partisan attacks from the platform at the White House more than any president I can remember.”

If President Barack Obama is losing Al Hunt, there is definitely trouble in Lefty-land. But let's not go too far. In the midst of leveling criticisms at Obama as "bordering on incompetence," the former host of CNN's Capital Gang and executive editor at Bloomberg News, who is now a Bloomberg View columnist and host of a Bloomberg TV's Political Capital Sunday news show, cited three examples of…

One thing which is almost as reliable as the sun rising in the east is the Associated Press, aka the Adminstration's Press, putting a better face on the federal government's fiscal situation than it deserves when a Democrat is in the White House. Almost as reliable is the arrival in a related report of some kind of statement about spending cuts which describes them as "deep," "steep," or some…

Have you witnessed Republicans “using extortion and blackmail?” The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward apparently has, and claimed on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that some House GOPers are using such methods to defund ObamaCare (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Imagine a major news network anchor, in 1985, telling President Reagan that five years into his presidency rising income inequality wasn’t his fault. Ludicrous, given how the media used the term Reaganomics to denigrate his policies, policies far more successful than President Obama’s in turning around an inherited poor economy.  Yet in a sit-down with Barack Obama for ABC’s This Week,…

Most of America’s media think President Obama's 2009 bailout of General Motors and Chrysler was a huge success. Former Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank threw cold water on this meme on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday correctly informing viewers that the auto bailout lost money for the federal government. By contrast, we made money from George W. Bush's 2008 bank bailout (video…

It's almost amusing to watch writers like Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, pretend not to understand why the economy isn't growing as much as one would "expect" based on the number of jobs being added each month and falling weekly unemployment claims. In a Thursday story which was mostly worthless because the incompletely collected government data…

I guess we should acknowledge a tiny improvement when an ordinarily in-the-tank apparatchik like Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press expresses even the slightest bit of skepticism about a White House claim. But let's not take it too far. Kuhnhenn is reporting in a brief "Big Story" item this morning that President Obama "is laying claim to an economic turnaround and warning Republicans not…

A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll stumbled across a very interesting finding: 44 percent of respondents said they did not think Congress should raise the debt ceiling before the U.S. reaches it in October, while only half as many (22 percent) said Congress should raise it. On Friday, Andrea Mitchell reported that finding on her eponymous MSNBC program Andrea Mitchell Reports, but she…

CNN's Carol Costello is quite cozy with striking fast food workers who want the minimum wage at $15 an hour, but she is openly hostile with restaurant and retail executives. On Friday, Costello repeatedly badgered a retail executive over why Walmart wouldn't raise wages for D.C. employees even though some other businesses wouldn't have to. Sounding like a broken record, Costello didn't offer…