Personal Finance

In the first the first White House press briefing of President Donald Trump’s second term, Press Secretary Karoline Levaitt made clear from the onset of the 46-minute-and-36-second briefing things would be different inside the Brady Briefing Room. Along with the opening and closing statements made famous by Kayleigh McEnany, Leavitt announced seats for new media and called on 21 different…

I have written often that there is a common denominator in our deeply divided nation. That is the general sense that something is wrong. The points of departure among our large and diverse population are the perceptions about what the problems are and what must be done. In this spirit I ask, as many have over recent days, what message we might take from the coincidence of the inauguration day…

With the final White House press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, we’re looking back at the best hardballs, tussles, and moments over the hundreds of Biden administration press briefings, primarily helmed by Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre. The story of the Biden White House press corps is far more complex than Fox News – led by Peter Doocy and Jacqui Heinrich – asking challenging questions…

As the Trace Adkins song goes, you’re going to miss this, you’re going to want this back. Deep down, that’s surely the way at least some feel about the bizarre, entertaining, meandering, only occasionally informative, and stammering White House press briefings in 2024 under Karine Jean-Pierre. With part one having covered 10 moments from January to May, this blog contains the second 10…

There’s no doubt at least some of you out there will miss the antics, hardballs, stumbles, and throwdowns that came to define Karine Jean-Pierre’s 2024 at the White House Briefing Room podium. With over 70 blogs from our press briefing tag to choose from and the topics ranging from the economy to foreign policy to Biden’s mental slippage, Jean-Pierre and the press corps made it difficult for…

Between Thursday night and Friday morning, ABC, CBS, and NBC used their flagship morning and evening newscasts to promote a disinformation campaign first launched by The Bulwark’s Sam Stein to use President-Elect Trump’s comments about grocery prices to argue he can’t and won’t improve the lives of struggling Americans.

On Wednesday and Thursday, ABC and NBC have omitted from their flagship morning and evening newscasts the Wednesday morning release of the November inflation report (known as the Consumer Price Index) that showed the Biden economy coming to an end on a sputtering note with a jump in prices of 2.7 percent from this time a year ago. With the Federal Reserve and economists having hoped inflation…

As we gather this Thanksgiving, it’s easy to take abundance for granted. Leftovers are practically guaranteed. It wasn’t always this way. For most of history, there were no Thanksgiving feasts. Hunger, if not starvation, was the norm. Today, supermarkets are stocked with exotic foods from all over the world. Most of it is more affordable than ever. Even after President Joe Biden’s 8% inflation…

If any constitutional amendment can be hated, it would be the 16th Amendment. Passed by Congress in 1909 and ratified by the states in 1913, it allowed Congress to “levy income taxes without apportioning them among the states based on population.” At first the collection of revenue came…

On the first Sunday following Donald Trump’s sweeping November 5 victory, CBS’s 60 Minutes featured a somber post-election analysis carried out by Scott Pelley, the former CBS Evening News anchor who previously treated President Biden to two absurd softball interviews. Pelley’s apparent disappointment at the election result was outshone only by his seeming lack of…

With no White House press briefing since October 30, Thursday’s briefing was the first since Tuesday’s general election and, with the massive red wave yielding a Trump presidency and possibly a Republican Congress, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre faced a room of reporters (ostensibly most being supporters) full of questions about the administration’s reaction to this thorough rebuke.

CBS News was largely dominated late Tuesday into Wednesday by out-of-touch, elitist tongue lashings toward Trump voters as too stupid to understand how the economy works, ABC News had takes of their own that, surprisingly, grew largely more and more sensible as the night wore on, creating a remarkable turn for a few hours by the network with the horribly biased and hostile newscasts, Good…

The Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada, just published, for 2024, its annual Economic Freedom of the World Report. There are many ideas about what freedom means. Economic freedom, which the Fraser Institute focuses on, is of key and central importance. It is about the extent to which individuals have control of their economic life.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich now makes videos, like I do. In fact, his channel, Inequality Media, is very much like Stossel TV. He also reaches people via social media platforms, gets millions of views and covers economic topics. Reich does almost exactly what I do, except ... Reich is repeatedly wrong. It’s understandable. Despite being frequently introduced as “economist Robert Reich…