Wages & Prices

Thursday's CBS Evening News poured cold water on President Obama's now-infamous "if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it" promise. Scott Pelley noted how the President has "repeated one reassuring phrase" about the American people being able to hold onto their health insurance, and bluntly pointed out that, contrary to the Democrat's vow, "hundreds of thousands of Americans...are…

President Obama likened HealthCare.gov to Kayak.com on the day the ObamaCare website went live, but the travel company wouldn't stay in business very long if it gave "incredibly misleading" price quotes, as Wednesday's CBS This Morning revealed about the federal health care website. Jan Crawford underlined how "in some cases, people could end up paying nearly double what they see on the website…

A 6 p.m. Google News search on "Occupy Movement" (not in quotes, sorted by date) returned 69 items dated September 16 and 17. The same search adding the word "capitalism" returned only two items. This is odd, because, as one of the two items returned noted, "capitalism" — as in ending it — is the core platform of the few who remain involved with the two year-old movement.

Imagine a major news network anchor, in 1985, telling President Reagan that five years into his presidency rising income inequality wasn’t his fault. Ludicrous, given how the media used the term Reaganomics to denigrate his policies, policies far more successful than President Obama’s in turning around an inherited poor economy.  Yet in a sit-down with Barack Obama for ABC’s This Week,…

It's almost amusing to watch writers like Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, pretend not to understand why the economy isn't growing as much as one would "expect" based on the number of jobs being added each month and falling weekly unemployment claims. In a Thursday story which was mostly worthless because the incompletely collected government data…

CNN's Carol Costello is quite cozy with striking fast food workers who want the minimum wage at $15 an hour, but she is openly hostile with restaurant and retail executives. On Friday, Costello repeatedly badgered a retail executive over why Walmart wouldn't raise wages for D.C. employees even though some other businesses wouldn't have to. Sounding like a broken record, Costello didn't offer…

 All three networks on Tuesday and Wednesday touted a new report showing the gap between the wealthiest one percent of Americans and everyone else has grown to its widest level since the Great Depression. Yet, none of them mentioned that Barack Obama was president for the last five years, the time in which the disparity grew so large. In contrast, ABC, NBC and CBS hammered Mitt Romney in 2012…

In a Saturday afternoon dispatch, the Associated Press marred a mostly decent presentation of the August employment situation reported by the government yesterday in three ways. The first is the story's misleading headline: "The Job Market Fed Faces: Healing But Still Ailing." Whether there's genuine healing going on is highly debatable, given that the labor force participation rate fell to…

In a Thursday morning speech, AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka told of how surprised how he was, in the words of Time's Alex Rogers at it Swampland blog, "that employers have reduced workers’ hours below 30-a-week to avoid an employer penalty scheduled to go into effect in 2015." Here's another "surprise" from Rogers' report, at least for those who think that lawmakers sit alone and draw up 2,000-…

Among ten charts presented by Brad Plumer at the Washington Post on Wednesday, the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington, all meant to show that "the black-white economic gap hasn’t budged in 50 years," is one which purports claims that "The gap in household income between blacks and whites hasn’t narrowed in the last 50 years." Words…

If we're to believe Tom Raum's Friday afternoon report at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, the economy is humming along smoothly enough that we really shouldn't think about it that much any more, especially as something to consider when voting. And besides, it's being "eclipsed" by "other pressing events." I'll stay away from those other "events" in the interest of…

At the Associated Press, economics writer Christopher Rugaber used not seasonally adjusted data published by the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics on metro area employment and unemployment to crow about "widespread improvement in the job market." The predominance of part-time jobs among the new ones created and fact that houshold incomes have yet to recover from the recession apparently…

 ABC on Thursday night again offered a one-sided take on the fast food "strikes," promoting the "living wage." Economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis featured multiple clips of angry protesters, but none of those on the other side. (She did the same thing earlier in the day on Good Morning America.) In comparison, NBC's Nightly News at least highlighted those worrying about the economic impact…

Illinois Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky added her ignorant voice to the cacophony of economic confusion Thursday on the low-rated MSNBC show hosted by Chris Hayes. If a Republican congressperson made a statement as breathtakingly ignorant as the one you're about to see, it would get wider media play. Schakowsky's "brilliant" suggestion almost certainly won't. Why has nobody thought…