Economy

On NBC's Sunday Meet the Press, host David Gregory took on an alarmist tone as he worried that any significant attempts to address the nation's enormous debt could lead to violence: "Look at the images that came out of Greece this week as you've got...big cuts in public spending. And this is the result, rioting in the streets....Could we have that kind of reaction here?" Gregory posed that…

Update, June 20, 12:30 p.m.: Revised to reflect another AP math error not caught the first time around. Update 2, June 20, 3:20 p.m.: The AP has issued a correction indicating that lost sales taxes are $23 billion and teachers' salaries which could be paid are 460,000. The contradiction explained below about California's claim that it is failing to collect only $200 million (less than 1% of…

Gosh, I would have thought that someone in Wisconsin's or America's labor movement would have caught Scott Bauer's clear June 15 understatement of the net pay hit many unionized public sector workers in the Badger State will be taking as a result of 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, commonly known as the "Budget Repair Bill," once the law's provisions become effective on July 1. That error is in the…

Newsweek's Evan Thomas on Friday tried to float the typical media meme that neither Party is doing anything to solve our nation's budget crisis. Unfortunately for him, fellow "Inside Washington" panelist Charles Krauthammer accurately noted that the Republicans have offered a proposal to cut $6.6 trillion in the next ten years, "but the Democrats have done nothing except to demagogue the plan…

It seems these days Bill Maher puts his foot in his mouth virtually every time he's in front of a camera. On Friday's "Real Time," the holier than thou host actually said liberals never talk about nationalizing the oil industry minutes before calling former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) a couple of "crazy" "know nothings" "who both get their…

Syndicated columnist Mark Shields said Friday that today's low income tax rates are "fundamentally un-American." Such happened on PBS's "Inside Washington" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Both President Obama and leading Republican candidate Mitt Romney got into hot water for supposedly making insensitive comments about the economy this week. But CNN's response offers a textbook case of media bias, as the supposedly-objective news network virtually ignored Obama's gaffe while trumpeting Romney's comment. President Obama poked fun at the ineffectiveness of his own stimulus…

Thursday morning, initial weekly unemployment claims as reported by Uncle Sam's Department of Labor came in at a seasonally adjusted 414,000. It was 16,000 lower than the previous week's upwardly revised (as usual) number, but certainly no indicator in and of itself of meaningful improvement. The housing industry data really wasn't any better. True, the seasonally adjusted figures from the…

For years America's media have been enthralled by anything that supports the theory that carbon dioxide is warming the planet leading to an imminent cataclysm if governments don't regulate this partially man-made gas. By contrast, reports that might undermine CO2's importance in global warming, like the following released Tuesday by the AAS Solar Physics Division in Las Cruces, New Mexico,…

Update (11:55 a.m. EDT): MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts just mentioned the 62% spike in Pelosi's net worth, attributing it mostly to her husband's real estate dealings. As my colleague Noel Sheppard noted today, the media have largely ignored the fact that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has seen an astonishing 62 percent spike in her net worth over last year. Yet in a June 16…

It is no longer a secret that President Obama's administration is willing to allow electricity prices to "necessarily skyrocket," in order to accomplish his green energy agenda. Although he has so far been unsuccessful at instituting cap-and-trade, Obama's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hard at work running coal companies and consumers into the ground. Not that you'd know it from…

Last week, in a much-discussed, open, live, televised forum, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, asked Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke the $64 trillion question. While most commentators focused on the apt question, it was Bernanke's answer that shocked me when I heard it — and ought to shock the nation much more than it so far has. Question: "Now we're told there are going to be…

On the June 14 edition of NBC's "Today," President Barack Obama ascribed part of the blame for the high unemployment rate to ATMs, yet most media outlets continue to ignore the gaffe. "There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers," lectured Obama in an interview with NBC's Ann Curry. "You see it…