Wages & Prices

A week ago, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Wendy's, the fast-food chain, announced "plans to install self-ordering kiosks in 1,000 of its stores — about 16 percent of its locations — by the end of the year." Although company officials observed 18 months ago that such a move would be inevitable if the trend towards laws demanding far-above-market minimum wages continued, both J.D. Malone's…

There is little question in most academic research that increases in the minimum wage lead to increases in unemployment. The debatable issue is the magnitude of the increase. An issue not often included in minimum wage debates is the substitution effects of minimum wage increases. The substitution effect might explain why Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, a national network of business owners and…

Things became awkward during CNN’s The Future of Obamacare debate Tuesday night, as Senator Bernie Sanders appeared to become a little irritated with a small business owner who admitted to him that she was not providing health care for her employees. Texas salon chain owner La Ronda Hunter explained to the senator that because of Obamacare’s mandates she could not expand her business and could…

It appears that on Monday night CBS wanted to follow in NBC’s lead, from earlier that morning, and highlight the super bowl ads that pushed the liberal agenda. “The 1984 Wendy's super bowl ad finding its way into the presidential campaign. Well this year, in something of an end reverse, politics found its way into the Super Bowl ads,” hyped anchor Scott Pelley, while reporter Don Dahler touted, “…

On Monday’s NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer and substitute co-host Maria Shriver led a panel discussion reviewing some of Sunday night’s Super Bowl commercials and gushed over the “social awareness” of ads that pushed liberal agenda items like environmental activism, equal pay, and illegal immigration.

Republican members of Congress met in Philadelphia last weekend for what was called a retreat. It might have been more accurately labeled an advance. Perhaps not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt's first term has so much been done by so few that will potentially impact so many (to paraphrase Winston Churchill in a completely different context).

You would think that the establishment press and the rest of the opposition to Donald Trump's administration might be able to capitalize substantively (shrieking fundraising letters don't count as "substance") on Kellyanne Conway's shaky reference to "alternative facts" about a week ago. (She should have said, "I have different, more defensible estimates than you do," because she did.) So far…

A January 24 item in the East Bay Times, which serves the San Francisco East Bay area, wondered: "What’s behind the spate of recent restaurant closures?" While it didn't ignore the problem, the article made only glancing references to current and planned increases in state and city minimum wages. Preliminary year-end statistics at the U.S. government's Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Bay…

The FBI reported that the total number of homicides in 2015 was 15,696. Blacks were about 52 percent of homicide victims. That means about 8,100 black lives were ended violently, and over 90 percent of the time, the perpetrator was another black. Listening to the news media and the Black Lives Matter movement, one would think that black deaths at the hands of police are the major problem. It…

Now even the price of razors is sexist, according to one Huffington Post UK editor. Associate Women’s Editor Jenavieve Hatch applauded a British supermarket chain Tesco for lowering the price of women’s razors to that of men’s on Jan. 3, cheering, “More of this, please!”

Here’s a story that you can’t make up, folks. In an attempt to fact-check President-elect Donald Trump on his claim of Sprint bringing jobs back to the United States, Wednesday’s The Last Word turned to none other than ObamaCare architect and deception artist Jonathan Gruber for two segments to inform MSNBC viewers where Trump went wrong and struggled with facts. 

President-elect Donald Trump has warned companies that they are not going to leave the United States anymore "without consequences." He has lived up to his threat by pressuring Carrier to give up its planned move to Monterrey, Mexico, in exchange for a taxpayer handout. It is a safe bet that other U.S. companies will be descending on Washington looking for handouts in the name of "fair trade" and…

Another day another leftist freak-out over an appointment by President-Elect Donald Trump from the Big Three networks. The liberal outrage Thursday was over Trump’s selection of fast food CEO Andrew Puzder to head up the Labor Department. “Continuing on the workers' front, Mr. Trump named as his new labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, a fast-food chain CEO and anti-regulation crusader who says…

Readers who have spent any time reading economic dispatches from the establishment press since the presidential election have likely noticed that its business journalists have taken to praising the alleged wonders of the economy President Barack Obama is passing on to President-Elect Donald Trump. Current reality renders the praise completely undeserved, but of course that's not stopping them…