Economy

Criticism of Barack Obama came from a surprising source Sunday. Appearing on Meet the Press, former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw said the President “is going to have to answer for” the explosion in the federal budget deficit that “happened on his watch” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In an op-ed at "Bloomberg View" on Wednesday evening, editor and columnist Michael Kinsley's headline teased that "Maybe President Romney Wouldn’t Be So Bad," before twice urging readers to vote to reelect President Obama, including in the final paragraph after an alleged parenthetical (and obviously mythical) "Pause for reflection." Ha ha. What came in between wasn't very funny at all -- and…

UPDATE: Henry Blodget at Business Insider reports that a "source, who is an analyst at the Department, " has told him that "the number of California claims that were not processed totalled about 15,000-25,000." Today's release of the Department of Labor's weekly unemployment claims report showed 339,000 initial claims filed during the previous week -- a sharp decline of 30,000 from the previous…

Remember when President Obama bragged about Joe Biden's fiscal discipline cred in 2009? "To you, he's Mr. Vice President, but around the White House, we call him the Sheriff," Obama warned government employees. "Because if you're misusing taxpayer money, you'll have to answer to him." Fast-forward to 2012. Call in the search teams. Since being appointed the nation's stimulus spending cop,…

The World Bank issued a very concerning economic forecast Monday. Across East Asia and the Pacific region, things are slowing down, particularly in China where the current economic softness is likely to worsen.

Dr. Thomas Sowell's "'Trickle Down Theory' and 'Tax Cuts for the Rich'" has just been published by the Hoover Institution. Having read this short paper, the conclusion you must reach is that the term "trickle down theory" is simply a tool of charlatans and political hustlers. Sowell states that "no such theory has been found in even the most voluminous and learned histories of economic…

I originally thought that the story of Linda Morrison which will follow after the jump would be all about the Obama campaign completely misreading the situation surrounding a question asked of GOP vice-presidential nominee at a Clinton County, Iowa town hall forum. It turns out that it's actually biased reports from their good friends in the establishment press which led the overeager campaign…

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman made a fool of himself on ABC's This Week Sunday. Seconds after claiming "The press just doesn't know how to handle flat out untruths," Krugman called factual misstatements by President Obama during Wednesday's debate "minor fudges" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

There were serious fireworks on the set of ABC's This Week Sunday. Mostly at odds were George W. Bush aide Mary Matalin and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman with the former eventually telling the latter, "You're hardly credible on calling somebody else a liar" (video follow with transcript and commentary):

In a Friday interview where the primary purpose was to give her an opportunity to defend her Bureau of Labor Statistics, Obama administration Department of Labor head Hilda Solis gave CNBC viewers the false impression that prior-month upward revisions to reported job additions were in the private sector (they were all government jobs), and falsely claimed, despite her boss's refusal to do…

So much for sophisticated liberalism. Nicholas Kristof's Thursday New York Times column is titled "Why Let the Rich Hoard All the Toys?" Despite (or because of) an opening that's almost a parody of simple-minded liberalism, it was the 1# most e-mailed Times story as of Friday morning. Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys. Yet you gasp: one…

With almost exactly one month left till the election, the government reported Oct. 5 the unemployment rate plummeted to 7.8 percent in September. While media outlets like The New York Times called the number “unexpected good news for Obama,” both liberal and conservative economists were quick to tear it apart. The labor force jumped in one of the two government employment surveys – “the…

On Thursday's CBS This Morning, just hours after Mitt Romney's "crisp" debate performance, Norah O'Donnell stuck to her fixation on playing up the Republican's supposed negatives. O'Donnell maligned how Romney phrased his opposition to the federal government's subsidization of PBS: "This may have been the first time in a presidential debate that Big Bird was mentioned. It seems kind of like a…

A Romney campaign senior adviser blistered CNN's Soledad O'Brien on Wednesday morning, quipping that "I know you have your talking points" before citing an independent study to attack Obama's jobs record. O'Brien later retorted that "Only one person who is spinning at this moment, and that would be you." Romney advisers and supporters could make a habit of mocking Soledad O'Brien's bias on…