Personal Finance

The New York Times reported last weekend that one line of attack American Crossroads and other Republican-leaning groups are likely to use against Hillary Clinton is that she’s far too wealthy to relate to average Americans. Regarding such criticism, Steve Benen says, in effect: Bring it on. Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the TRMS blog, argued in…

All three major broadcast networks covered on their Thursday evening newscasts the June 2015 jobs report, but it was ABC’s World News Tonight that neglected provide any further details and/or context beyond the unemployment rate and number of jobs added and omitted how hourly wages remained flat and the labor force participation rate sunk to its lowest level in 38 years. While CBS and NBC…

There may no better illustration of how much harm the economy has inflicted on the American people during the Obama era than a March 2015 Harris survey commissioned by American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. The AICPA's Thursday press release reported that "a majority of American adults (51 percent) have delayed at least one important life decision in the last year due to financial…

Writing for Salon, political theorist Sean Illing dismissed wealthy people as entitled and vile, primarily using the California drought as an example. The headline of the article reads, ‘Rich people are the f**cking worst: The 1 percent’s vile new war on us all’. Illing started his piece with the ominous statement that rich people “rarely tell you how you how they really feel about poor people.” 

The hosts of Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect dove into the latest New York Times piece about 2016 Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio on Tuesday and came away with the conclusion that the story concerning Rubio’s personal finances is both “dangerous” and “totally legitimate.” Halperin declared “The New York Times has shoved Marco Rubio down deep into the barrel” and gushed to John…

Jeremy Peters, the New York Times' designated critic of Republican presidential hopefuls, played the money card on Monday's front page, over a headline that reached back to the 2012 campaign: "G.O.P. Hopefuls Now Try to Woo the 47 Percent." In Peters' previous front-page stories on the GOP field, he has variously accused them of being ignorantly anti-science (in a misleading report on the…

All three major broadcast networks took time during their post-Oscars stories on Monday night to mention actress Patricia Arquette’s calls for “wage equality” and “equal rights for women,” but it was the CBS Evening News that went one step further by devoting a whole segment to the topic and used loaded statistics to craft a one-sided argument to prop up Arquette’s rant. Anchor Scott Pelley noted…

In a reversal of a key proposal from his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama moved on Tuesday to drop the plan to tax 529 college-savings accounts after outcry from members of both parties and a direct appeal on Air Force One from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). When it came to the networks covering this backtracking by the President on this deeply unpopular idea…

It's amazing how any reporter can cover the deepening economic crisis in Venezuela without saying a word about how the country got there. But Associated Press reporter Hannah Dreier was up to the task. In a bizarre, sickening November 20 report on how its people are having to get "creative" in the face of chronic shortages of basic goods to get by, she acted as if those shortages — and the over…

On Saturday, Erika Rawes at USA Today's Wall Street Cheat Sheet engaged in some impressive gymnastics as she discussed the middle class and identified seven things its members "can't afford anymore" (the headline) or that "a larger percentage of people have trouble paying for" (the content). It's a sloppy list. One of the items — debt — isn't a "thing" at all, but rather the result of buying too…

Which is the more important statistic: A 36 percent decline in U.S. median household net worth since 2003, or a 43 percent decline in that same statistic since 2007? The average person would certainly be more concerned about the latter, which represents an annual drop of about 7 percent compared to the less than 4 percent per year seen in the past decade. But apparently if you're a reporter…

There were two pieces of significant economy-related news today. The first was that the Conference Board's index of leading economic indicators increased for the fifth straight month, this time by 0.3 percent, while May's increase was revised up to 0.7 percent. The second was that the University of Michigan's preliminary June reading on consumer confidence came in at 81.3, a decline from May.…

In an extended screed against the horrors of income inequality, HBO’s John Oliver ripped into his adopted home country for its inaction on this supposedly devastating issue. The British-born Last Week Tonight host showed clip after clip dedicated to furthering his point, stating with sarcasm that the “roaring 20s were famously the party that never ended,” in reference to the looming depression…

At the top of the 9 a.m. ET hour on Wednesday's NBC Today, weatherman Al Roker suggested in jest that his colleague David Gregory deserved to be punched in the face by former President Bill Clinton after the Meet the Press moderator asked Clinton in a recent interview about wife Hillary being "out of touch." Roker joked: "You know, I'd give anything if after David finished the question, Bill…