Stimulus

In case you didn't get the message the first or second time around, the Washington Post wants you to hear it again: Cool your complaints about the weak U.S. economy, because it's your fault. To be clear, the problem is primarily with the Post's headline — "The economy’s real drag: Us" — than with Robert J. Samuelson's content, which at least gave American consumers credit for having "sobered up…

As his final term wanes, the New York Times is making excuses for the economy’s performance under President Obama, with the president himself guiding the way. Economics reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin’s interview of Obama for the cover of the Times Sunday magazine dug in in defense of Obama. The subhead: “Eight years after the financial crisis, unemployment is at 5 percent, deficits are down and G.D.…

Just in time for tomorrow's first-quarter economic growth announcement from the government, Bloomberg Businessweek's Economics Editor is telling readers: "Don't Sweat America's Upcoming Microscopic GDP Growth." Besides, Peter Coy writes, people need to get used to the supposedly inescapable fact that "Normal growth for the U.S. economy is just a lot lower than it used to be." Americans shouldn't…

If what Barack Obama contended in London, England on Saturday was obviously true, I suspect that the establishment press would be broadly proclaiming it and looking back at the President's wonderful work. What Obama is claiming — that his presidency is responsible for "saving the world economy from a Great Depression" — is nonsense, but he's clearly beginning to lobby for it to become the…

It's so predictable. Whenever a government or leader follows the left's playbook and the results "uexpectedly" don't turn out to be anywhere near what was desired, it isn't the policies' or the leader's fault. No-no-no. During the Mayor David Dinkins era in New York City, it was because Gotham had become ungovernable by any human being – until Rudy Giuliani took over. During the Carter Era, the…

It appears that there's an effort underway to expand the definition of "deniers" beyond the realm of climate change/"global warming." Ideally, in leftists' minds, a "denier" would be "anyone who doesn't accept leftist dogma without reservations." That definition would apparently extend to anything relating to the economy, if Associated Press White House reporter and dedicated Barack Obama…

At the Associated Press, in a Friday morning writeup, the wire service's headline writers and reporter Martin Crutsinger demonstrated extraordinary auditory powers. The headline writers somehow heard the entire U.S. economy start the year off "with a bang." Meanwhile, Crutsinger, continuing to earn his designated title of "worst economics writer" given by Kevin Williamson at National Review…

On Friday, in its January Employment Situation Summary, the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics served up a stack of lemons disguised as lemonade. President Barack Obama declared in a tweet that "We've recovered from the worst economic crisis since the 1930s," and the press dutifully fell in line. The BLS reported that the economy added seasonally adjusted 151,000 payroll jobs and that the…

Observers can be excused for thinking that the politicial establishment is preparing the battlespace to convince us plebes that progress and economic growth are overrated. (That's sort of odd for people who call themselves "progressives," but making sense is not their strong suit.) How interesting, for example, that Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon's book, The Rise and Fall of…

Over the past several months, economics reporters at the Associated Press have told us time and time and time again that the U.S. economy is "largely insulated" from adverse economic developments overseas. So why is the AP's Martin Crutsinger going along with the now-shifting conventional "wisdom" that Janet Yellen's Federal Reserve may have to defer implementing additional interest-rate…

During the middle years of last decade, the business press, including the Associated Press, worked the word "recession" into its reports on the economy quite regularly. Yesterday, despite a current economy facing far worse fundamentals than were seen during 2007, the AP's Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon gave us a nearly 882-word treatise on "WHY GLOBAL WOES AND SINKING STOCKS DON'T MEAN US…

The Associated Press's coverage of Friday's deep U.S. stock market dive in two Friday afternoon reports engaged in the reality avoidance longtime readers here have come to expect. An item by Stan Choe ("Get used to it: Big drops for stocks are back again") spent most of its verbiage on "volatility," and only cited "China's sharp economic slowdown ... Tensions in the Middle East ... the plunge in…

The press's fierce determination to avoid blaming any of the steep decline in this nation's stock markets so far this year on horrid U.S. economic data, or on the Obama administration which has given us such a sour economic environment, has gone way beyond annoying. Shortly after noon at Yahoo Finance, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average's Friday dive hit 500 points, Nicole Sinclair, who is also…