Economy

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Krugman tries to clarify what he said. Although he was likely taking a swipe at former governor Sarah Palin with the reference, Paul Krugman on Sunday recommended "death panels" as a means of helping to balance the federal budget. In a Roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist said of what recently came out of the President's deficit…

When you increase demand for something, its price should go up. In the case of bonds, if the demand for them increases, their price should go up, and their effective interest-rate yield should go down. That didn't happen on Friday when the Federal Reserve began executing its second round of "money from nothing" quantitative easing. Even though the Fed increased demand, bond prices went down…

Don't go overboard with it, but have some pity on Sewell Chan at the New York Times. On Thursday evening online and in Friday's print edition, Chan was among three Times reporters who composed a report ripping President Obama's lack of results at the G-20 summit. The piece's original title -- "Obama's Economic View is Rejected on World Stage" -- originally appeared online and actually made…

Glenn Beck has been a favorite punching bag for liberal media members since he moved from HLN to Fox News and started getting huge ratings. The folks at NBC's "Saturday Night Live" have also been on this Beck bashing bandwagon, which made the following sequence during Saturday's opening sketch rather surprising (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Rush mentioned this when he opened his show today, and it deserves a bit of graphic support. Today's New York Times print edition has a headline at the top right which reads: "Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage" (captured here for future reference). Ouch. But there's also a story about the story, specifically concerning its stinging headline.

Thursday evening, NB's Ken Shepherd accurately pointed out how little establishment press interest there has been in prominently carrying an Associated Press report about how the Obama administration has been, in the words of the wire service's Dina Cappiello, "downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited." This is…

Time Magazine is having some problems with very basic issues of logic. First, it doesn't seem to understand the difference between correlation and causation. The notion that debt is equal to income minus expenditures also eludes the folks at Time. A blog post on the magazine's website on Wednesday alleged that the Tea Party will cause hyperinflation. If that seems counterintuitive, take…

According to Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos, a deficit commission suggesting deep cuts will call the "bluff" of voters who want to severely restrict government spending. The ABC host on Thursday dismissed the plausibility of the panel's recommendations. Stephanopoulos condescendingly began, "A week after voters seemed to say that they wanted more aggressive action against the…

Before critiquing, I should recognize that USA Today, while most of the establishment press has snoozed, has done a very creditable job of exposing the wide differential between federal employee and private-sector pay (Aug. 10, 2010; "Federal workers earning double their private counterparts"), and of identifying the outrageous degree by which salaries in the upper levels of Uncle Sam's empire…

Come to think of it, Schultz has a point. This type of thing spells trouble for Democrats. On his radio show yesterday, Schultz was talking with a caller about unemployment when he said something that demonstrated how liberals hold mixed feelings when people make the transition from dependency on government to gainful employment --

Despite 9.6 percent unemployment nationally, with some areas of the country suffering far worse than that, the New York Times editorial board believes state governments must raise taxes to balance their budgets:

CNN's Kathleen Parker and Eliot Spitzer endorsed Matt Taibbi's bashing of conservatives on their Monday program. Spitzer marveled over the Rolling Stone editor's "brilliant" label of the Tea Party as "15 million pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid." This was the second straight evening that the network brought on an anti-conservative author to promote their latest…

The Wall Street Journal can't seem to decide whether Sarah Palin is knowledgable on monetary policy or not. WSJ reporter Sudeep Reddy criticized Palin's "inflation hyperbole" in an article Tuesday, claiming that, contrary to Palin's claims, "Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly." "Do Wall Street Journal reporters read the Wall Street Journal?" Palin shot back in a Facebook…

A current headline at an Associated Press story (saved here at my web host in case it's updated) has to be seen to be believed: G20 leaders meet amid strains as US splashes cash "Splashes cash"? If the AP's headline writer was trying to be cute, it didn't work for me. Sadly, replacing "splashes" with "trashes" might have been more appropriate, but of course less "funny."