Economy

For the second time in two days, Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday lobbied for tax increases, wondering why it's "okay" for the "wealthiest Americans" to continue to receive a tax cut. The GMA host pushed Congresswoman Michele Bachmann to accept a deal in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts. After the conservative leader expressed skepticism about extending…

Every week, we receive more bad news about the American economy. Last week was no exception. The Fed began monetizing the national debt, while China's gross domestic product for the third quarter expanded 8.9 percent from the previous quarter, Dagong (the Chinese quasi-government ratings agency) downgraded the credit rating of the United States, and billionaire George Soros expanded his…

Former top Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos on Monday pestered his old White House colleague Erskine Bowles on the need to let the Bush tax cuts expire. The Good Morning America co-host also touted the critique of liberal columnist Paul Krugman in opposition to a panel calling for deficit reduction. Stephanopoulos pushed Bowles, the co-chairman of the National Commission on Fiscal…

I guess after about a year and a half of dancing around the truth, the Associated Press decided that confession of some of the truth about Government/General Motors is good for the soul. Conveniently, the AP's de facto partial confession, delivered via reporter Sharon Silke Carty, comes as the success of the company's initial public offering seems assured. Carty's confession consists of…

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Sunday claimed the President's stimulus plan combined with 2008's Troubled Assets Relief Program resulted in ten million jobs being saved. Such was actually said on CBS's "Face the Nation" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

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…