Housing

Appearing as a guest on Friday's All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson slammed the Donald Trump administration's accomplishments so far as a "debacle" and declared that the Republican budget has "savagely" taken money from poverty programs and education. Abramson: "I think both of the scenarios, Chris, that you just laid out equal debacle because,…

Before White House press secretary Sean Spicer threw down with reporters over President Trump’s wiretap claims on Thursday, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney faced left-leaning questions on the President’s budget that included fears people will “suffer” as a result of the conservative proposals.

In his first remarks this week to Housing and Urban Development (HUD) employees, Secretary of HUD Ben Carson called slaves “immigrants,” that had hopes for the American Dream, comments that sent the media in an uproar. From print to television to social media, journalists and celebrities alike condemned the remarks as extremely offensive. Yet the media forgot that former President Obama has also…

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Dr. Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development-designate, told a story. He said his mother was a domestic who cleaned beautiful homes. One day she asked him if he would rather live in those nice houses or the house in which he and his brother lived in Detroit. She told him that only he could decide the type of home he would eventually live in by…

Esquire’s Pierce readily concedes that Ben Carson (“an elite neurosurgeon”) and Mike Pompeo (“graduated at the top of his class at West Point”) are smart guys. In a way, though, they’re also tragic figures, he suggests, since they’ve “had to tailor their politics and their public personae to cater to the anti-rational, theocratic, anti-intellectual Id of modern conservatism…This means that both…

Philip Bump and the Washington Post have apparently had a couple of pretty bad days. The Post had to endure having to cover, and cover for, an absolutely awful jobs report released Friday morning. That news made their beloved Dear Leader, who had just celebrated the allegedly wonderful economic accomplishments seen during his presidency on Wednesday, look quite foolish. Never fear: By Paragraph 4…

In an analysis for the front page of Wednesday’s New York Times business section, Eduardo Porter trumpeted that the real issue ailing the American economy and impeding on its improvement is the lack of mass government jobs programs similar to its “large and underappreciated role in reshaping” the country during the 19th and 20th centuries. 

The government reported this morning that seasonally adjusted March housing starts and building permits fell by 8.8 percent and 7.7 percent, respectively, far worse declines than analysts and economists predicted. After the report, the business wires at least communicated the facts accurately, but continued to insist almost to the point of editorializing that there's no reason to be worried…

In covering Thursday morning's report from the Department of Labor on initial unemployment claims, one of a relatively few economic reports showing strength these days, Associated Press reporter Scott Boak spread his enthusiasm over the result to the entire economy. It wasn't justified. It's as if the poor guy has missed most of the pertinent other economic news during the past week, most of…

Today's report on February's new-home sales from the Census Bureau showed seasonally adjusted declines in three of the nation's four regions and an increase in the West. The Associated Press and reporter Josh Boak, displaying brazenness which might have even embarrassed the scribes at Pravda during the worst days of the Soviet Union, concentrated on how great things were in the West in their…

Ridicule by media critics has apparently made some headway against the business press's annoying habit of describing bad news about the economy as having occurred "unexpectedly." Now they seem to be reserving the "U-word" for unexpected improvements, which haven't been seen very much during the past seven-plus years. Instead, reacting to today's bad news from the National Association of Realtors…

At the Associated Press, in a Friday morning writeup, the wire service's headline writers and reporter Martin Crutsinger demonstrated extraordinary auditory powers. The headline writers somehow heard the entire U.S. economy start the year off "with a bang." Meanwhile, Crutsinger, continuing to earn his designated title of "worst economics writer" given by Kevin Williamson at National Review…

In the context of his pathetic writeup on the government's disappointing report on January new-home sales, Josh Boak at the Associated Press had the nerve to claim that "demand for housing has recovered over the course of the 6 ½-year recovery from the recession." Wow. Who knew that the industry has made it all the way back to an acceptable level at long last? The obvious answer to that question…

Two important economic reports came out today at 10 a.m. One had relatively good news, while the other was a definite downer. At 2:43 p.m., the good-news item was still listed second at the Associated Press's list of Top 10 business stories, while the bad-news item was gone. That's all in a day's work of news manipulation at what should be called the Administration's Press. (UPDATE: At 9:12 p.m…