Wages & Prices

For the second time in less than two weeks, CNN has advised the Republican Party on how to succeed. During the Friday edition of "The Situation Room," reporter Bill Schneider informed the GOP that the way for them to recover from midterm losses is to imitate Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and embrace liberal policies:

Mark Trumbull of The Christian Science Monitor has noticed something I mentioned last week, but had to try to get a dig in while doing it (bold is mine): American paychecks are rising again at a pace not seen since the 1990s. The pay increase amounts to 4 percent on average over the past 12 months, and it comes at a very helpful time for millions of households. For three years, pay increases…

The economy isn’t doing well, correct? The average American is going backwards, right? Isn’t that all we heard before the elections?Well, in another post-election stunner, the Christian Science Monitor has chosen to share the truth with Americans, sadly almost two weeks after the nation went to the polls. In an article amazingly titled “A brisk rise in American wages; Pay rose faster than the…

Lou Dobbs must be perfecting his “Stewie Griffin" impression. “Victory is mine,” he seemed to gloat to viewers as with smug delight CNN populist gadfly and resident protectionist applauded the passage of six minimum wage increases in states ballot booths across the country. Before the election, Dobbs was quite active in pushing such an increase both on his show and in his book, “War on…

Just four days before the election, the network news shows downplayed reports of a major drop in the unemployment rate and the creation of 231,000 new jobs. CBS’s Katie Couric groused, “But do the jobs out there pay enough?” NBC’s Brian Williams declared, “That was below expectations,” and ABC’s Charles Gibson gave the issue a total of 15 seconds.That wasn’t the way the networks handled bad news…

I looked around when I heard someone crying, and there was Pollyanna bawling her eyes out. That's how depressing was the one-two punch of pessimism in Paul Krugman's and Bob Herbert's New York Times pay-to-peruse columns of today.Just in time for the elections, the pair paint a picture of America so dreary you half-expected the Google logarithm to place Prozac ads on the page. Krugman tries to…