Unemployment

Snooty New York Times columnist/Democratic hack Paul Krugman is very unhappy with Bernie Sanders and his Hillary-bashing supporters. Krugman had previously antagonized the left-wing hive of “Bernie bros” – supposedly sexist critics of Hillary Clinton supporters, and on Friday Krugman lit into Sanders’ economic plan, suggesting an economic plan strongly endorsed by his campaign “outdoes the GOP”…

West Virginia became the nation's 26th state with a "right-to-work" law a bit over a week ago. At the same time, it also repealed "prevailing wage" requirements for public construction projects. The idea that the formerly Democrat-dominated Mountain State would pass either item was unthinkable as little as a decade ago. That was before the Obama administration began its war on coal-powereed…

The Associated Press's choice of a headline to accompany business writer Stan Choe's Saturday morning report on the state of the economy — "MAIN STREET HOLDS UP AS WALL STREET STRUGGLES, FOR A CHANGE" — has a couple of interesting implications. Is AP celebrating the fact that Wall Street is struggling? Or does the idea that "Main Street" is holding up "for a change" mean that it hasn't been…

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…

On Wednesday, Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press was tasked with covering ADP's morning report on January private-sector payrolls. At 8:15 a.m., the payroll and benefits giant estimated that the economy added 205,000 seasonally adjusted private-sector jobs last month. Rugaber also attended the 8:30 a.m. conference call which followed the report's release. It's clear that he was on it…

The Associated Press may be down to one person in the whole wide world who will tell its economics reporters what they want to hear when the federal government releases economic data. That's what you almost have to conclude after reading the wire service's reports on two of Thursday's major releases, namely last week's initial unemployment claims and December's durable goods orders and shipments…

On Wednesday, Amber Phillips at the Washington Post's The Fix blog impressively took President Obama to task for his over-the-top bragging about the nation's mediocre (and likely getting worse) economy. She noted that "the biggest knock on the Obama economy ... is that the recovery has been very good for the wealthy and certain sectors and not so much for the middle class and everyone else." Hear…

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 Brookings Institution, the leftist think tank, is wailing and gnashing its teeth over its finding that in many metro areas, "income inequality," their favorite bogeyman, is being "driven by declining incomes" among their poorest residents. The problem isn't so much that the rich are getting richer as it is that the poor are getting poorer. As a result, "Inequality is higher today in most…

On Saturday, after one of the worst year-opening weeks for the stock market in many years, Myles Udland at BusinessInsider.com complained that "The stock market is having a nightmare start to 2016 and it's all the Fed's fault." This sentiment is apparently widely held in the media. At NationalInterest.org on Tuesday, Christopher Whalen wrote that "the Fed created the current unstable market…

It would appear that Yuri Kageyama at the Associated Press has fallen into the trap of believing the rubbish her employer and much of the rest of the world's press has been pushing about how the world's economies really aren't performing all that poorly, that this "new normal" world isn't all that bad, and what we are seeing is all we have a right to expect. You see, Kageyama doesn't understand…

Carol Costello surprisingly lumped in Senator Bernie Sanders with Donald Trump on Tuesday's CNN Newsroom: "Donald Trump is suggesting mass deportations and big tariffs to fix the economy. Bernie Sanders is offering things like free college tuition and huge tax increases. These things are extreme. Yet...they're being accepted by many voters." Costello later played up that "there's no nuance in…

At the Associated Press, as seen at its "Top Business News" page Friday afternoon, Christopher Rugaber opened his song of praise for yesterday's jobs report ("US EMPLOYERS HIRE AT ROBUST PACE, DEFYING GLOBAL TRENDS") as follows: "American employers added a robust 292,000 jobs in December, suggesting that the U.S. economy is so far defying global weakness and growing solidly. ..." Rugaber's…

Today was a fairly brisk day for economic data, as four noteworthy reports were released. One of them contained good news, but with a heavy asterisk. The other three were either not good, period, or came in below expectations. Readers here probably know which one the Associated Press was still carrying at its Top Business Stories page as of 2:39 p.m. Of course, it was the one with good news.