Economy

It’s no secret that I’m very leery of Donald Trump. Simply stated, I don’t sense any genuine commitment to smaller government and free markets. But skepticism isn’t the same as bias and there is plenty of it in the media. As Julia Seymour at Newsbusters recently pointed out: 2 of 3 Networks Cover ‘Good’ Jobs News; All 3 Silent about Collapsing GDP. 

When it came to covering issues voters cared about, the networks didn’t catch ‘em all, especially the most important one.  According to the Pew Research Center, voters ranked the economy as their highest priority in July. But the media had different priorities in its coverage. It spent twice as much time reporting on Pokemon Go, a mobile game in which players caught cartoon monsters, than it did…

The day before Donald Trump reflected on “Second Amendment people” and their response to Hillary Clinton’s taste in judges, he made news with a speech about economics. To The New Republic’s Brian Beutler, the takeaway there was that Trump had “adopted [both] Paul Ryan’s tax policy and the GOP’s gaffe-centered 2012 campaign strategy of misquoting or misrepresenting the Democratic candidate’s words…

COLORADO SPRINGS — My adopted hometown will soon be the base of operations for a new Netflix movie starring aging elitist hippies Robert Redford (estimated net worth: $170 million) and Jane Fonda (estimated net worth: $120 million).  

In a New York Times op-ed with so many holes it wouldn't hold up as swiss cheese, two political science profs, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, set out to reassure the leftist elites that "The Path to Prosperity Is Blue." This would be pretty funny if it weren't for the fact that many of the Old Gray Lady's smug readers will actually buy this nonsense. The pair's presentation tortures economic…

Over two weeks ago, the Bolivarian socialist government of Venezuela under de facto dictator Nicolas Maduro decreed that private-sector and government workers can be forced to work on farms if the military, which is now responsible for food production and distribution in that shortage-wracked country, deems it necessary. Relevant site searches indicate that the country's forced-labor decree…

Donald Trump spent more than 52 minutes laying out his plans for the economy in Detroit Monday. It’s an issue voters ranked as their most important, yet ABC spent only devoted 33 seconds to what Trump proposed.

Once again the broadcast networks showed that when it comes to economic news, they pick news that makes Obama look good. ABC World News and CBS Evening News both reported the “good news for the economy” on Aug. 5, that 255,000 jobs were added in the month of July. NBC did not. That same day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced those increases to payroll employment and the unchanged 4.9…

The Republican Party needs to be soundly thrashed, or maybe even euthanized, believes Esquire’s Pierce, who wrote in a Friday post that “it long has been the duty of the Democratic Party to the nation to beat the crazy out of the Republican Party until it no longer behaves like a lunatic asylum. The opportunity to do this…never has been as wide and gleaming as it is right now." In Pierce’s view,…

In Saturday’s lead New York Times story, reporter Jackie Calmes glimpsed a silver lining in the rise of Donald Trump, as a challenge to the Republican party's myopic focus on “business and the privileged” that could relegate Reagan's "outmoded" ideas of tax cuts to the dustbin of history. The full deck of headlines: “As Trump Rises, G.O.P. Faces Push On Its Economics – Working-Class Appeal –…

There’s a famous line attributed to Henry Kissinger about the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s: “It's a pity they can't both lose.” Left-wing Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins adapted Kissinger’s quip for his Tuesday post about whether “vicious, ignorant megalomaniac” Donald Trump is “more contemptible” than “steely-eyed devotee of Ayn Rand” Paul Ryan.

The press's reporting on the Obama era's awful economy has been nothing short of abysmal. Looking at the bigger picture on July 25, MRC Business's Julia Seymour named "6 key indicators of (a) weak economy" the press has glossed over or ignored since the recession ended seven years ago. The most obvious item she identified is the fact that the current alleged "recovery" is by far the worst since…

What economists call an ability to make "compensating differences" is a valuable tool in everyone's arsenal. If people are prohibited from doing so, they are always worse off. You say, "Williams, I never heard of compensating differences. What are they?"  

Food is so scarce in Venezuela that last week a group of starving people broke into a zoo and killed a horse for food. Burdened by government regulations, Venezuela’s economic crisis and its food shortage are forcing many people to leave their country. However, the networks haven’t done much reporting on the subject. The July 31, NBC Nightly News was an exception.