Wages & Prices

This sentence actually appeared at the web site of the San Jose Mercury News Monday afternoon regarding California's Democratic Governor Jerry Brown: "In his 2016 budget plan, the notoriously frugal governor warned that a $15 minimum wage would cost the state about $4 billion a year and risk plunging it back into the red." Yesterday, Governor Brown "sudden(ly) embraced" the $15 minimum wage. At…

For the past month, the conventional wisdom about the U.S. economy has been that consumer spending and "(not really) robust" job growth will continue to prop up the economy, even as weaknesses in manufacturing, trade and other areas continue to present problems. President Obama bragged in early March that the economy is "pretty darned good now." Today, the first of those two pillars got pulled.…

The government's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that consumer prices fell 0.2 percent in February. Lower prices should be good news, right? Wrong, at least according to Martin Crutsinger at the Associated Press. Crutsinger's Wednesday dispatch also managed to ignore the fact that even the supposedly low inflation seen during the past 12 months has eaten up most of workers' very…

Today's report from the government on February's retail sales was awful. Last month's sales fell by 0.1 percent, which was bad enough. Beyond that, January's originally reported 0.2 percent increase was revised down to a 0.4 percent decrease. Additionally, as I noted at my home blog this morning, January's seasonally adjusted revision should have been much worse, based on how terrible that month'…

Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. apparently got on the good side of the Associated Press a year ago when it announced that would be raising entry-level wages. Since that announcement, AP, in particular wire service reporter Anne D'Innocenzio, has been excusing the company's relatively poor financial performance while complimenting it for a virtually imaginary "perk up" in sales. Falling profits…

From reading most establishment press news, especially their economy-related reports, you'd think that those who are complaining about the current U.S. economy are outliers — especially the millions of Americans who are angry about it. Though they sometimes acknowledge that forward progress  since the recession hasn't been robust, the media's meme-makers have mostly told us that "overall job…

The press is mostly thrilled over yesterday's Employment Situation Summary from the government, which reported that the unemployment rate stayed at 4.9 percent and that the economy added 242,000 seasonally adjusted payroll jobs. President Barack Obama took the opportunity to take what CNBC's Jeff Cox described as "a victory lap ... in Friday remarks to the media." Well, why not? Obama was secure…

For all that the liberal media and politicians rake CEOs over the coals for being paid too much, it turns out there is a group of people getting paid even more. Turns out, the average college president is making $377,261 per year, more than twice the annual haul for the average CEO, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and CBSNews.com. Academia is known to be a bastion of liberal…

The Associated Press's choice of a headline to accompany business writer Stan Choe's Saturday morning report on the state of the economy — "MAIN STREET HOLDS UP AS WALL STREET STRUGGLES, FOR A CHANGE" — has a couple of interesting implications. Is AP celebrating the fact that Wall Street is struggling? Or does the idea that "Main Street" is holding up "for a change" mean that it hasn't been…

On Thursday, Venezuela's Supreme Court decided to grant Bolivarian socialist "President" Nicolas Maduro what an unbylined Associated Press report described as "broad decree powers" to deal with the economic crisis and humanitarian nightmare he and his predecessor Hugo Chavez created. Maduro's government now for all practical purposes has total control of that nation's economy, which in the…

In an extensive interview for Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley took a stroll with socialist Senator Bernie Sanders around his childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn but not before a surprisingly tough sit-down that hit Sanders from the right on tax increases, the minimum wage, and how his ideas would be guaranteed to be “dead on arrival” in Congress.

Disabled, divorced, with a degree, working several jobs yet making less than $10,000 a year. Struggling to pay bills. Unable to buy presents for her children. Waiting for her disability to come through. Dependent on her parents. That was the sad story that a woman told Bernie Sanders at an event in Iowa yesterday. On today's Morning Joe, after airing that clip, a visibly moved Mika Brzezinski…

As Friday's CNN Newsroom with Carol Costello devoted a segment to discussing the reasons so many young women are siding with Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential race instead of Hillary Clinton, Daily Beast columnist Keli Goff oddly claimed that Hillary Clinton has been a "victim of her own success" as she theorized that there is less hunger for electing a woman President because it has…

You could have set your watch to it. When a leftist local, gubernatorial or presidential regime enters its final year after demonstrating its corruption, incompetence and inexcusable disrespect for law and procedure to that point, someone in the press will directly or indirectly excuse them by saying that the entity that person is running is "ungovernable," or that "its best days are behind it…