Economy

This morning's April factory orders report from the Census Bureau showed yet another seasonally adjusted decline. This time, they fell 0.4 percent, seriously underperforming expectations that they would come in flat. This naturally brought forth another sighting of the U-word ("unexpectedly"), this time at Reuters. Both Reuters and the Associated Press failed to note how steep the year-over-year…

In case you missed it, the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland have requested disaster relief assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to recover costs incurred during that city's April riots. You read that right. Yvonne Wenger at the Baltimore Sun predictably buried the lede in her May 26 story's third paragraph, giving uninitiated readers the impression that…

When did Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president of the United States end? Officially, on January 20, 1989, but Washington Monthly blogger D. R. Tucker posits that in a sense Reagan stayed in office well after that. In a Saturday post, Tucker asserted that in 1988, some right-wing “ideologues” sought to “artificially extend the Reagan administration past its constitutionally limited time by propping…

Facts are such inconvenient things. Especially financial facts and figures. On Tuesday, Rebecca Shabad at the Hill composed a 34-paragraph report entitled "Washington is ready to spend." Really? When have Congress or the White House not been ready to spend? Oh, I get it. She really means that they're getting ready to spend more. How much more? Readers will search in vain for anything beyond a…

A recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans self-identify as social liberals, and that an equal percentage call themselves social conservatives -- the first time since Gallup began conducting such surveys in 1999 that conservatives haven’t outnumbered liberals. On Tuesday, pundit Michael Tomasky seized on this development as an indication that Republicans no longer will be able to use…

This shouldn't be a trick question, but to the nation's establishment press business reporters it apparently is: What is the current length of the U.S. economy's expansion? The answer, after yesterday's reported 0.7 percent annualized contraction in U.S. Gross Domestic Product, is obviously zero. But that's not what Bloomberg News and reporter Sho Chandra, who has used her full first name of…

Friday's Morning Edition on NPR did its best to try to promote the liberal cause of expanding Medicaid in Texas. Wade Goodwyn lined up six soundbites from pro-expansion talking heads, versus only two from former Texas Governor Rick Perry, an opponent. Goodwyn played up that "in hating the Affordable Care Act, the state is leaving on the table as much as a hundred billion dollars of federal money…

This has to be the month's top entry in the "Just when you think you've seen it all" category — and it will be more than a little interesting to see how the nation's press handles it. As the Associated Press reported a week ago, the City Council in Los Angeles, by a vote of 14-1, ordered the drafting of a law mandating a citywide minimum wage of $15 per hour by 2020, noting that "the support of…

Seldom does one see such an obvious betrayal of reporters' biased mindsets as the one found in the opening paragraph of an Associated Press report earlier today on CEO pay at major U.S. publicly-held companies. According to the AP's Steve Rothwell and Ryan Nakashima, that entertainers, whose incomes are derived from leveraging special physical and artistic talents, deserve all the money they can…

In the early 1990s, politicians floated the term “peace dividend” regarding a hoped-for post-Cold War reduction in the U.S. defense budget, and Pentagon spending indeed fell somewhat in the mid- and late ‘90s. Sean McElwee, a research associate at the lefty think tank Demos, argues that America now needs a post-9/11, post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq peace dividend which would allow greatly increased…

Given how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there was in the press when the old Hostess liquidated in 2012, a mid-April story at Forbes on the company's has gotten surprisingly little attention. Well, maybe it's not that much of a surprise, for reasons which will be indentified here. Readers may recall that the final straw in that drama occurred late that year when the the AFL-CIO-affiliated…

On Wednesday’s NBC Today, co-host Tamron Hall stumbled upon conservative economic philosophy as she defended a hot dog vendor’s right to charge customers whatever he wanted, even if it was overpriced: “But why can’t he set his own prices? I mean, if a restaurant sells their hot dog, steak, or whatever for the price they want, why is his price regulated?”

The former Democratic governors of Michigan and Ohio are on tap to be in the same place at the same time on June 27 in the Buckeye State capital of Columbus. This is a made-for-the-media event for the record books. I certainly can't recall a time when two former governors who oversaw a combined total of over 1 million peak-to-trough job losses during their terms in office have been at the same…

It's bad enough, as Bryan Ballas at NewsBusters noted on May 16, that the Washington Post's Philip Bump dishonestly used last week's Amtrak tragedy to rip Republican members of Congress for somehow being responsible for the (theoretically) for-profit entity's "constant struggle" for funding. As Sean Davis at the Federalist explained, Amtrak has really had no funding struggles. Bump had to make…