Economy

Consumer confidence plummeted in January to a 14-month low of 58.6. The Conference Board announced the drop on Jan. 29 and cited a tax hike as the reason for the 8.1 point drop, but the bad news got no mention on the evening network news programs that night. Instead ABC joyfully reported good news on the economy. “World News with Diane Sawyer” led its broadcast with an upbeat story about the…

Rick Santelli made a stunning observation Wednesday about the shocking report that the economy actually shrunk in the fourth quarter last year. "We are now Europe," he declared on CNBC's Squawk Box.

An emailer who is a retired journalist wrote to me today about a January 27 Associated Press item by Andrew Taylor presented as an objective news report, calling it "Appalling ... the worst ever." If it's not, it's pretty close, though I'm not sure how any report on a single congressional action can top the comprehensive slop seen in the June 2008 classic titled, "Everything Seemingly Is…

In his coverage of the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence report released earlier today, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger conveniently avoided using quote marks when he wrote that "Conference Board economist Lynn Franco said the tax increase was the key reason confidence tumbled in January, making Americans less optimistic about the next six months." That isn't what Franco said.…

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams joined Jimmy Fallon Monday in another "Slow Jam the News" segment on NBC's Late Night. This time the subject was the fight over the debt ceiling with the target of course being Republicans who were repeatedly hit with sexually-charged attacks (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Former Clinton labor secretary turned MSNBC contributor Robert Reich has a truly nutty solution for America's current economic woes. Writing at the perilously liberal Huffington Post Tuesday, Reich called for some of the top employers in the nation to unionize.

The front-page title at the Politico for David Nather's lengthy write-up on Democrats' alleged ideas for doing something about runaway entitlement programs is "The quiet liberal plan for entitlements; There are some ideas for reining in spending that have been blessed by the left." That gives readers the impression that the left might actually have something specific and potentially palatable…

Californians will be surprised to learn that the income-tax increase voters approved in November was, according to Doug Ferguson at the Associated Press (HT Steven Greenhut at Reason.com), "the first tax increase in the state since 2004." I had no idea that residents of the once-Golden state have been so lucky in avoiding any tax increases of any kind for so long. (/sarc) It would appear that…

Here's something I discovered in the course of preparing a column which will appear elsewhere. It appears to speak to the lengths to which Barack Obama's administration and his campaign went to avoid having any kind of bad economic news appear before the fall elections. By July of last year, the increase in food stamp program participation in the 42 months since Obama took office exceeded the…

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) made a comment on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday that is guaranteed to raise eyebrows on both sides of the aisle. "If we had a Clinton presidency, if we had Erskine Bowles chief-of-staff at the White House, or President of the United States, I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now. That's not the kind of presidency we're dealing with right now."

ABC and CNN contributor Donna Brazile - posing as one of Barack Obama's trusted defenders in the media like she always does! - got a much-needed education Sunday about the President's profligate spending. Countering Brazile's propaganda on ABC's This Week, George Will said, "A dollar spent on A cannot be spent on B...This is our future. We're going to be an assisted living home with an Army.…

Stop the presses! Stop the presses! Bill Maher on Friday actually said something well-reasoned and intelligent that conservatives - including members of the Tea Party - might agree with. "We have 23.5 percent dirt bags in America," the HBO Real Time host surprisingly said. "It just seems like there’s less people pulling the wagon and more people in the wagon, and at some point the wagon is…

File this under "careful what you wish for." In 2012, with a Democrat in the White House, union membership declined, not only as a percentage of the workforce, but in absolute numbers. Even though the related report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that the number of employed wage and salaried workers increased by almost 2.4 million, union membership fell by just under 400,000.…

For the second week in a row, actual (i.e., not seasonally adjusted) unemployment claims as reported by the Department of Labor came in greater than the analogous week in 2012.  At the same time, and also for the second week in a row, the department's seasonally adjusted claims number -- the only one the business wire services ever specifically identify in their reports -- came in lower. In…