Wages & Prices

During a discussion of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump indicating that he was willing to negotiate over both taxes and the minimum wage, and possibly end up raising taxes on the wealthy, CNN's Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room praised the GOP candidate for having a willingness to compromise, unlike "some very conservative Republican hardliners."

In case you didn't get the message the first or second time around, the Washington Post wants you to hear it again: Cool your complaints about the weak U.S. economy, because it's your fault. To be clear, the problem is primarily with the Post's headline — "The economy’s real drag: Us" — than with Robert J. Samuelson's content, which at least gave American consumers credit for having "sobered up…

On Monday, all three network morning shows covered the violent May Day rioting that broke out across Seattle on Sunday. However, the NBC, ABC, and CBS broadcasts made sure to tout how “the march began as a peaceful demonstration for the rights of workers and immigrants.” No liberal labels were used to characterize the protesters and the reporters avoided explaining the Communist roots of the day.

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait admires Bernie Sanders’s willingness (eagerness?) to raise taxes so as to “finance the kind of social benefits American liberals would prefer.” That’s why Chait is disappointed that Sanders opposes Philadelphia’s proposed three-cents-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened drinks, revenue from which would fund citywide pre-kindergarten and other programs. In a Tuesday…

In Slate’s weekly “Political Gabfest” podcast, CBS News political director and Face the Nation host John Dickerson proclaimed that Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal is “a stupid issue” unlike the debate over a $15 minimum wage because that’s “the central question of the campaign, which is how do you help people with wages.”

On April 1, the Associated Press, in an online video which I covered in an April 2 NewsBusters post, interviewed three California business owners about the impact the state's just-passed $15-per-hour minimum wage would have on their businesses. Though the video was headlined "Small Businesses React to Calif. Wage Increase," the owners interviewed weren't representative of the whole state in any…

Has Newsweek just admitted to something the rest of the press knows but won't acknowledge? In promoting its insufferably fawning portrayal of California Governor Jerry Brown, the weekly magazine tweeted that Brown is "arming California to meet an economic recession head-on." Recession? What recession?

The government reported this morning that seasonally adjusted March housing starts and building permits fell by 8.8 percent and 7.7 percent, respectively, far worse declines than analysts and economists predicted. After the report, the business wires at least communicated the facts accurately, but continued to insist almost to the point of editorializing that there's no reason to be worried…

Today's report from the government on retail sales was awful — "unexpectedly" so, according to both Bloomberg and Reuters. Following on the heels of a 0.4 percent seasonally adjusted decline in January and a flat February, March sales fell by 0.3 percent. Two of the three main U.S. business wire services blamed the American people, not the worst post-recession economy since World War II during…

Did you know that Tuesday was “Equal Pay Day,” the day that a woman’s pay supposedly catches up to a man’s from the previous year? Well don’t worry, Andrea Mitchell has got you covered. Mitchell brought on Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and Hollywood star Patricia Arquette to bemoan the plight of the oppressed and push their new congressional study.

On Tuesday, shortly after Governor Jerry Brown signed California's $15-an-hour minimum wage legislation, the Associated Press's Michael R. Blood and Don Thompson called the move "a victory for those struggling on the margins of the economy and the politically powerful unions that pushed it." As seen in a NewsBusters post on March 31, it's definitely a win for union members whose wages are set…

CNN's State of the Union host Jake Tapper scored the lone Sunday morning talk show interview with Hillary Clinton and, unfortunately, Tapper failed to ask her about either Benghazi, the e-mail scandal, or the Clinton Foundation and instead discussed Black Lives Matter protesters, a $15 minimum wage, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and a contested convention.

New York Times San Francisco bureau chief Thomas Fuller embraced a major shift toward European-style social policy in that city in Wednesday's “No Pay Cuts for New Parents in San Francisco – City Becomes the First in the Country to Approve Six Weeks of Fully Paid Leave.” As shown by that headline, the Times got really excited about the local liberal ordinance, with a full story on the front of…

Perhaps this is why the press has been reluctant to cite economists who are predicting that sharp increases in state minimum wages like the $15-per-hour minimums just passed in California and New York will reduce employment: They're with many of their lefty brethren who don't care whether jobs are lost. So they must believe that no one else should care either. At the Washington Post's WonkBlog…