Economy

Instead of leaping in celebration at the Hillary rollout on Morning Joe, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski lamented the fact she was forced to settle for a pale imitation of the left’s true savior, Senator Elizabeth Warren.     Brzezinski, a devout Warren fan-girl with the shirt to prove it, took issue with Hillary Clinton’s philosophical plagiarism of her hero’s ideas, "I just feel like she's, it's a…

The New York Times' fight for the economically dubious $15 minimum wage (and its related obsession with "income inequality") boiled over onto the front page the day after nationwide protests against fast-food companies by left-wing activists. The same reporter also challenged Hillary Clinton from the left, insisting she must embrace a $15 figure or risk losing "progressive" support.

It was the best of coverage - it was the worst of coverage.

In response to the far-left and union-led protests nationwide on Wednesday for a $15 minimum wage for fast-food and retail workers, NBC Nightly News applauded the protests with a glowing report that felt more like a campaign commercial. Disguised as a segment on the broader topic of income inequality, interim anchor Lester Holt and correspondent Stephanie Gosk led the way in offering no opposing…

Today, the Census Bureau reported that retail sales in March increased by a seasonally adjusted 0.9 percent. While that was the first such positive figure in four months, it was less than the 1.1 percent increase analysts expected, and did little to calm fears that the economy contracted during the first quarter of 2015. An unbylined report at Bloomberg News and a dispatch from Josh Boak at the…

Journalists' and leftists' (but I repeat myself) misguided love for Cuba goes back decades. Y'know, free healthcare (cough), yada-yada. Now that President Obama is unilaterally changing the relationship between the two nations, and as usual getting nothing in return, you'd think that they'd be happy. Heck no. It started several months ago when Fox News's Shepard Smith fretted about how a thaw in…

Late Monday afternoon, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger produced a typically dodgy dispatch on the government's Monthly Treasury Statement. The Treasury Department released the March version of that report covering the first six months of the current fiscal year early Monday afternoon. The odd thing is, while it has been published elsewhere at the web sites of certain of its subscribers…

Cherry blossoms are blooming and as sure as a springtime rainstorm liberals are repeating false claims that women make significantly less than men do for the same work. Why? Discrimination, of course. The feminist holiday Equal Pay Day is April 14, this year and already media outlets are marking it with complaints about how a “gender pay gap” concerns graduating women. Time ridiculously included…

Well, this is awkward. Undermining most of what the business press has done to try to portray the post-recession U.S. economy as performing adequately under President Barack Obama, Bill Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff, told CNBC today that Hillary Clinton "can’t run as the third term of Barack Obama economically," because the recovery has been "uneven" and has only benefited "a small slice…

Imagine if a Republican or conservative U.S. president told an audience — on foreign soil, no less — that he didn't properly warn Americans about how long it would take for the economy to recover from a recession. "So-and-so Admits He Lied About the Economy" would be headlined everywhere. At the University of the West Indies in Jamaica on Thursday, President Barack Obama essentially admitted…

Imagine you're a Cuban who has somehow managed to catch the cablecast of Melissa Harris-Perry's MSNBC show today.  The topic is President Obama's opening toward Cuba. You're scraping by on the average Cuban monthly salary of $20/month and are thrilled at the prospect of getting a better-paying job if and when American tourists start coming in numbers. Then suddenly you hear Harris-Perry fretting…

Vaccine skeptics have a well-deserved reputation for not caring about facts, but according to American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, many right-wing anti-taxers resemble anti-vaxxers in terms of their shaky grasp of reality. “All the GOP presidential candidates are lining up to receive the wisdom of Arthur Laffer as they formulate their economic plans,” wrote Waldman in a Friday post. “This is…

In a Friday American Prospect piece (originally published on Wednesday in the Washington Post) WaPo columnist Harold Meyerson suggested that even though the South didn’t win the Civil War, its mean-spirited ideas, racial and otherwise, now drive the Republican party. Meyerson asserted that today’s GOP “is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis. It…

It took the Associated Press barely 2-1/2 hours to bury the bad news in the Census Bureau's 10 a.m. release on February wholesale sales and inventories. As of 12:32 Eastern Time, Martin Crutsinger's 10:21 a.m. time-stamped story was not present at the AP's Top 10 Business stories page (saved at my host for future reference), making it quite likely that the news won't get much prominence at the…