Economy

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.

The U.S. economy “sputtered” again in the second quarter, according to The Wall Street Journal. However, that “disappointing” economic news, coming on the heels of the Democratic National Convention, wasn’t reported by the broadcast evening news shows. The Commerce Department announced July 29, that the economy grew at an annual rate of 1.2 percent annual in the second quarter. But ABC, CBS and…

Venezuela’s economy continues to deteriorate under the rule of its socialist president Nicolas Maduro. The collapsing economy, combined with government regulations and price controls created a food shortage so severe some have taken drastic measures. One group of desperate Venezuelans broke into a zoo and butchered a horse for meat on July 24, according to Fusion’s Manuel Rueda.

Yesterday's news about the economy was the latest in a 7-1/2 year series of mostly regular disappointments. The government reported that nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at an annual rate of just 1.2 percent in the second quarter, half or less of what most alleged "experts" expected. Additionally, the first's quarter's originally reported 1.1 percent growth was revised down to 0.8…

Is media bias just smart marketing? Yes, suggests Taibbi, who claims it’s “irrelevant” that “most individual reporters” are liberals given that their profit-driven, audience-conscious corporate overlords keep them on a short leash. “Whatever their personal leanings, influential reporters mostly work in nihilistic corporations, to whom the news is a non-ideological commodity, to be sold the same…

Now we know why Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's de facto dictator, recently handed over responsibility for food production to the military: He's going to need soldiers on farms and elsewhere in the food distribution chain to keep conscripted workers in line. That's because on July 22, now over a week ago, Maduro's government decreed "... that any employee in Venezuela can be effectively made to work…

They call it a comeback. It is true, the U.S. economy is no longer in the depths of what has been called “The Great Recession.” But, in many ways the economy remains “weak.” Overall economic growth remains “subpar” and labor force participation rates remain shocking, not far from 38-year lows. Then of course there’s poverty, food stamp use, weak wage growth and household income struggles. The…

The Washington Post “Fact Checker” column is running its critiques of the Republican convention this week, and in the process is trying again to rebuff a figure of $15,000 per household that I employ as a placeholder for the annual cost of federal regulations.  

The 2016 Republican National Convention brought the radical, left-wing fringe out in Cleveland, and some of the groups’ ideas were downright ridiculous.

It’s almost as if “Net Neutrality” is a Leftist safe word - to be uttered when the free market growing freely causes them too much discomfort. Few things demonstrate the insular Media-Government Bubble better than this:

The latest installment in leftist excuse-making when socialism fails goes into the "It would work if leaders just had the right people handling things" file. It comes in the form of a Friday morning "analysis" at the Associated Press. Writers Jorge Rueda and Joshua Goodman want readers to believe that the economy in the Bolivarian socialist and once fairly prosperous nation of Venezuela would be…

Much like Phil Mickelson took a big early lead in the British Open, Esquire’s Charles Pierce has taken a big rhetorical-excess lead in early blogging about Donald Trump’s VP pick, Indiana governor Mike Pence, calling him a “very strange and completely unreconstructed wingnut” whose paper trail contains “a rich deposit of sweet crude crazy.” Kevin Drum of Mother Jones described Pence as "not…