Wages & Prices

The press is mostly thrilled over yesterday's Employment Situation Summary from the government, which reported that the unemployment rate stayed at 4.9 percent and that the economy added 242,000 seasonally adjusted payroll jobs. President Barack Obama took the opportunity to take what CNBC's Jeff Cox described as "a victory lap ... in Friday remarks to the media." Well, why not? Obama was secure…

For all that the liberal media and politicians rake CEOs over the coals for being paid too much, it turns out there is a group of people getting paid even more. Turns out, the average college president is making $377,261 per year, more than twice the annual haul for the average CEO, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and CBSNews.com. Academia is known to be a bastion of liberal…

The Associated Press's choice of a headline to accompany business writer Stan Choe's Saturday morning report on the state of the economy — "MAIN STREET HOLDS UP AS WALL STREET STRUGGLES, FOR A CHANGE" — has a couple of interesting implications. Is AP celebrating the fact that Wall Street is struggling? Or does the idea that "Main Street" is holding up "for a change" mean that it hasn't been…

On Thursday, Venezuela's Supreme Court decided to grant Bolivarian socialist "President" Nicolas Maduro what an unbylined Associated Press report described as "broad decree powers" to deal with the economic crisis and humanitarian nightmare he and his predecessor Hugo Chavez created. Maduro's government now for all practical purposes has total control of that nation's economy, which in the…

In an extensive interview for Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley took a stroll with socialist Senator Bernie Sanders around his childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn but not before a surprisingly tough sit-down that hit Sanders from the right on tax increases, the minimum wage, and how his ideas would be guaranteed to be “dead on arrival” in Congress.

Disabled, divorced, with a degree, working several jobs yet making less than $10,000 a year. Struggling to pay bills. Unable to buy presents for her children. Waiting for her disability to come through. Dependent on her parents. That was the sad story that a woman told Bernie Sanders at an event in Iowa yesterday. On today's Morning Joe, after airing that clip, a visibly moved Mika Brzezinski…

As Friday's CNN Newsroom with Carol Costello devoted a segment to discussing the reasons so many young women are siding with Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential race instead of Hillary Clinton, Daily Beast columnist Keli Goff oddly claimed that Hillary Clinton has been a "victim of her own success" as she theorized that there is less hunger for electing a woman President because it has…

You could have set your watch to it. When a leftist local, gubernatorial or presidential regime enters its final year after demonstrating its corruption, incompetence and inexcusable disrespect for law and procedure to that point, someone in the press will directly or indirectly excuse them by saying that the entity that person is running is "ungovernable," or that "its best days are behind it…

On Wednesday, Amber Phillips at the Washington Post's The Fix blog impressively took President Obama to task for his over-the-top bragging about the nation's mediocre (and likely getting worse) economy. She noted that "the biggest knock on the Obama economy ... is that the recovery has been very good for the wealthy and certain sectors and not so much for the middle class and everyone else." Hear…

The Brookings Institution, the leftist think tank, is wailing and gnashing its teeth over its finding that in many metro areas, "income inequality," their favorite bogeyman, is being "driven by declining incomes" among their poorest residents. The problem isn't so much that the rich are getting richer as it is that the poor are getting poorer. As a result, "Inequality is higher today in most…

On Saturday, after one of the worst year-opening weeks for the stock market in many years, Myles Udland at BusinessInsider.com complained that "The stock market is having a nightmare start to 2016 and it's all the Fed's fault." This sentiment is apparently widely held in the media. At NationalInterest.org on Tuesday, Christopher Whalen wrote that "the Fed created the current unstable market…

In October 2013, late-night PBS talk-show host and author Tavis Smiley told Sean Hannity at Fox News that "The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category." On Monday, on the eve of what has been said to be President Barack Obama's final State of the Union address, Smiley was…

When it comes to raising the minimum wage, networks minimize balance and maximize bias. After a year of protests clamoring for a $15 minimum wage, Christian Science Monitor reported that 14 states and several cities increased minimum wages or planned to in 2016. Several more cities and states are expected to consider a $15 minimum wage with ballot or legislative initiatives, according to USA…

Establishment press pundits often wring their hands over how supposedly far to the right the Republican Party and conservatives in general have moved since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, that flaming moderate, to the point of claiming that Reagan would never be accepted by today's "wingnuts." They seem to actually believe this amusing nonsense. In a classic example demonstrating where the real…