Politicians often complain about America’s struggling middle class, but according to Squawk Box host Andrew Ross Sorkin, they should quit crying over spilt milk. Sorkin argued on Dec. 23 that the mid-20th century idea of middle class was a historical anomaly.
“This middle class that we keep talking about, this Leave it to Beaver middle class that was this panacea that people talk about is actually, I would argue to you, an historical aberration,” Sorkin said. Sorkin made the argument after co-host Joe Kernen and Aspen Institute CEO Walter Isaacson decried the current state of America’s middle class.
Unemployment
By Sam Dorman | December 23, 2015 | 6:16 PM EST
By Tom Blumer | November 29, 2015 | 10:03 PM EST
As yours truly noted in several posts at my home blog on Wednesday and at NewsBusters on Friday and Saturday, the torrent of pre-Thanksgiving "getaway day" economic data was largely disappointing.
That didn't stop the Associated Press's Chris Rugaber from pushing the "All is well" meme late Wednesday afternoon, declaring, contrary to what anyone's eyes could see, that "the fundamentals of the U.S. economy remain solid," that "Consumers appear relatively confident in the economy," and that "Americans are unleashing pent-up demand for big-ticket items such as homes and cars."
By Tom Blumer | November 27, 2015 | 11:24 PM EST
Twenty years of economic growth averaging less than 1 percent have failed to convince Japan's leaders — and apparently its citizens — that Keynesian-style government spending and handouts are not the answer to turning that long-suffering nation's economy around.
So the Shinzo Abe government, fresh from learning that the country is in yet another recession — its fifth since 2008 — is doing more of the same, while counting on press shills around the world like the Associated Press's Elaine Kurtenbach to be gentle in their coverage. Kurtenbach cooperated as expected early Friday morning (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
By Tom Blumer | November 24, 2015 | 3:09 PM EST
There was yet another sighting of the U-word ("unexpectedly") in connection with disappointing economic news today.
Bloomberg News, which most frequently employs the word, told readers that "Consumer confidence unexpectedly declined in November to the lowest level in more than a year as Americans grew less enthusiastic about the labor-market outlook." Expectations were that confidence would increase from October's value of 99.1 to between 99.6 and 101.0, not drop like a rock in just one month by almost 9 percent to 90.4. Over at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Economics writer Josh Boak clearly wanted his readers to believe that the news was a one-off "curveball" in an economy which he contended "has strengthened by many measures over the past month." All one can say is that he must not be looking at the same economy as the rest of us.
By Tom Blumer | November 12, 2015 | 10:58 AM EST
Tuesday evening, Associated Press economics writers Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak attempted to "fact check" statements made by candidates at the just-completed Republican presidential debate.
Claiming that "The fourth Republican presidential debate was thick on economic policy — and with that came a variety of flubs and funny numbers," the two writers botched at least half of the six points they tried to make. Their most obvious economic error concerned the impact of minimum-wage increases (I will cover two others in a future post):
By Seton Motley | November 9, 2015 | 1:04 PM EST
The political definition of Cronyism is: government policy that favors one or more specific beneficiaries - at the expense of everyone else. To wit: $80 billion of the 2009 “Stimulus” was wasted on “green energy” companies - 80% of whom were Barack Obama donors. Amongst the parade of horribles contained therein: the government took money from energy companies - to fund competitors to their energy companies.
Sadly, a $3.5-trillion-a-year federal government budget is filled to the rafters with nigh-endless Cronyism. There’s so much to undo - one must triage and prioritize. And while we work to reduce and eliminate, we most certainly should not create a whole new Cronyism - that will dwarf all the others combined.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) late last week gave us a quintessential example of aiming at the tiny - while they have for years championed the huge. Behold:
By Tom Blumer | October 22, 2015 | 4:13 PM EDT
If a Republican or conservative was in the White House, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger would have found a reason to be unimpressed in his dispatch today about how low initial unemployment claims continue to be, even as hiring has been slowing down. (Ideally, reporters should just relay the facts and leave the theorizing out of their stories, but that ship has sadly long since sailed.)
Crutsinger exhibited no real curiosity because a Democrat is in the White House. Therefore, it's left to New Media to at least get the alternative ideas out there; a contributor at the contrarian blog Zero Hedge did that several days ago. After the jump, readers will find most of Crutsinger's report covering the Department of Labor's initial claims release today, and a healthly chunk of the just-mentioned Zero Hedge analysis.
By Tom Blumer | October 21, 2015 | 6:55 PM EDT
On October 2, the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that U.S. payroll employment increased in September by a seasonally adjusted 142,000 jobs. That was disappointing enough, but then the BLS's regional and state report for September released on Tuesday showed a combined total of 21,000 jobs lost in all 50 states and DC.
In his coverage of the state report, the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber didn't report this wide variance, even though the monthly national vs. total state difference is usually much smaller. The closest he got was reporting that more states lost jobs than gained them, which should have piqued his curiosity about how that result could happen when the nation somehow gained as many jobs as it did during the month, but apparently didn't (bolds are mine):
By Dylan Gwinn | October 19, 2015 | 11:54 PM EDT
Minority Report predicts the dim futures of both the Redskins name change and the working class.
By Tom Blumer | October 4, 2015 | 12:13 AM EDT
In their coverage of government and other economic reports, the business press routinely tells readers that the figures they are relaying are "seasonally adjusted." That is, raw results are smoothed out to supposedly "remove normal, recurring variations" in data.
There's one notable exception: The government's monthly employment report.
By Tom Blumer | September 19, 2015 | 10:51 PM EDT
The business press just can't understand why the Federal Reserve decided not to raise interest rates on Thursday. After all, these alleged journalists have been telling us for months bordering on years that U.S. economy is really in good shape. So it should be able to handle a rate hike, especially after over seven years of rates at essentially zero. The problem is that they now believe their own bogus blather. The U.S. economy is not in good shape, and data seen during the past several weeks show that the situation is deteriorating, not improving.
Excerpts from an early Friday report at the Associated Press by Josh Boak illustrate how out of touch the business press really is (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
By Tom Blumer | September 10, 2015 | 11:14 PM EDT
Today's Monthly Wholesale Trade report from the Census Bureau covering July was the latest in a wave of disappointing reports on business activity this year. Wholesale inventories remained very high, while sales turned in a seventh consecutive month of year-over-year declines.
Much of that sales decline is due to the fall in oil prices during the past year. But even after factoring that out, wholesale sales are either flat or declining, leading one to wonder how the economy could have grown at all during the past year or so. Josh Boak at the Associated Press appeared to understand that there are some problems out there, but his Thursday morning report understated their seriousness, largely because he doesn't seem to understand that a high level of inventories can be a very dangerous thing: