National Debt

Over at the Associated Press, Andrew Taylor, contrary to the wire service's usual practice, referenced a pre-official Congressional Budget Office report to tout the federal government's "improved" budget deficit. The CBO estimates that the deficit, which won't become official until the Treasury Department releases its final Monthly Treasury Statement of the fiscal year in the next week or two,…

Promoting the new season of his ABC sitcom Last Man Standing, actor and Republican Tim Allen joined Thursday’s Hannity on Fox News Channel (FNC) to blast the federal government over reckless spending, the national debt, and a culture of political correctness that he tries to rebuke on the show where he plays “a very smart Archie Bunker.”

Imagine if, in 1987, a Federal Reserve official could have pointed to a poorly performing economy and said, "Gee, this supply-side economics hasn't worked out very well." The press would surely have treated the story as a front-page item and ensured that it got air time on the Big Three networks' then-dominant nightly news broadcasts. Of course, there was no such credible report, because the…

The lead story in Friday's New York Times takes the left-wing, Krugman-esque position that "conservative" Germany has been"selfish" and unfair to debt-laden Greece in demanding strict conditions on the bankrupt socialist country in return for an international bailout: "But in negotiating a new deal this week to bail out Greece, Germany displayed what many Europeans saw as a harder, more selfish…

MSNBC host Chris Hayes devoted a segment during Monday’s All In to commenting on the financial crisis in Greece and chose not to attack the left-wing government or any of the previous governments for their spending habits, but rather laid blame at the feet of “morally monstrous” European banks and others in the Eurozone for grinding “Greece into misery” in “a sadistic exercise in sheer will to…

In their coverage Monday night of the debt crisis in Greece, ABC and NBC refused to label the current Greek government as socialist, far-left, or even left-wing with ABC neglecting to even explain why Greece has found itself in such a precarious position as they stand to possibly default on their billions of dollars in debt and/or leave the Eurozone. In contrast to both networks, the CBS Evening…

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…

So when is a recession not a genuine recession? Apparently when it's "technical." Unfortunately, the term "technical recession" appears to be well on the way to devolving into what has long been considered the real definition of a recession for the purpose of discounting its validity.

In a report on the upcoming Greek elections, an unbylined Friday afternoon Associated Press report dusted off words seldom seen in their dispatches, using the term "radical left" twice and the word "radical" separately once for good measure. The almost never seen terms — virtually invisible in decades of descriptions of longtime radical leftists like Fidel Castro, the late Hugo Chavez or lefty…

In the 1980s and ’90s, journalists passed along expert predictions of the world as they thought it would be in 2015. Now that the New Year has finally arrived, it might be fun to recall a few of those forecasts: starvation due to overpopulation, troops keeping women out of abortion clinics, and a U.S. government drowning under massive revenue surpluses.

Old habits die hard at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press — especially when those old habits help Dear Leader's regime look better, or less awful, than it deserves. It's been eight days, but it's still worth a look. On November 13, the government released its Monthly Treasury Statement for October, showing that Uncle Sam ran a $122 billion deficit. In his coverage of that…

Far be it from me to talk a leftist columnist out of an ignorant, self-satisfied position which might, if anything, cause his fellow travelers to hit the accelerator a little less aggressively in future political campaigns. At the Atlantic on Monday afternoon, Richard Reeves, policy director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, claimed that the left shouldn't be …

An unbylined "Q&A" column at the Associated Press yesterday began with the following false declaration: "The $4 trillion experiment is over." That just isn't so. Maybe the Federal Reserve is done building up its debt holdings — that is by no means certain — but the "experiment" known as "quantitative easing," or "QE," won't be over until the Fed fully unwinds those balances. In the meantime…

Josh Lederman's report this morning at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, treats President Barack Obama's return to Chicago as a trip down memory lane: "Obama got glimpses of a simpler time when his life was for the most part, normal: the unpaid bills on his desk, the volunteers who pitched in on his first Senate campaign, the day he marched in seven Fourth of July parades."…