Category Archives: Free Market

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, January 12, 2021: 

Thanks to enormous gains at Newsmax, specifically gains of viewership of Greg Kelly’s “Greg Kelly Reports” seen during the critical evening hour, Fox News has been forced to reshuffle its programming. This is the first such change for Fox since 2017.

The biggest change is that, starting Monday, September 18, Martha MacCallum’s “The Story” will move to a mid-afternoon slot. It will be replaced by what Fox News calls “a rotating group of FOX News opinion hosts … entitled [sic] ‘FOX News Primetime’.” A permanent host for the new program will be named sometime in the future, depending on how the new show’s anchors perform in light of the surging competition from Newsmax.

And that competition is fierce.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, November 30, 2020:

When Ben Shapiro, founder of the Los Angeles-based conservative website Daily Wire, announced in September that he and his company were leaving for Nashville, he made a noisy exit. He wrote:

We’re leaving because all the benefits of California have steadily eroded — and then suddenly collapsed….

 

All the costs of California have steadily increased — and then suddenly skyrocketed….

 

Nearly every public space in Los Angeles has become a repository for open waste, needles and trash….

 

Looters were allowed free reign … during the Black Lives Matter riots….

 

To combat these trends, local and state governments have gamed the statistics, reclassifying offenses and letting prisoners go free.… In July, the city of Los Angeles slashed police funding, cutting the force to its lowest levels in over a decade….

 

California’s top marginal income tax rate is now 13.3%; legislators what to raise it to 16.8%….

 

California has the worst regulatory climate in America….

 

The state legislature is dominated by Democrats. California is not on a trajectory toward recovery; it is on a trajectory toward oblivion. Taxpayers are moving out — now including my family and my company. In 2019, before the pandemic and the widespread rioting and looting, outmigration jumped 38%, rising for the seventh straight year. That number will increase again this year.

 

I want my kids to grow up sate. I want them to grow up in a community with a future, with more freedom and safety that I grew up with.

 

California makes that impossible. So, goodbye, Golden State. Thanks for the memories.

Shapiro took nearly all of his company’s 75 employees with him. And they’re not alone. In July, Joe Rogan, host of The Joe Rogan Experience, announced he was moving to Texas, citing the need for “a little more freedom” and decrying “the traffic … the economic despair … [and] the homelessness problem that’s accelerated radically” in Los Angeles over the last decade.

A locally prominent developer, Paul Petrovich, is headed for

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, September 18, 2020:  

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy says he doesn’t hold a grudge against anyone making more than a million dollars a year in his state.

It’s just that he needs their money more than they do. It’s their duty to “sacrifice”: “We do not hold any grudge at all against those who have been successful in life. But in this unprecedented time, when so many middle-class families and others have sacrificed so much, now is the time to ensure that the wealthiest among us are also called to sacrifice.”

Murphy made the announcement on Thursday, adding that he expects the two-percent increase — from 8.75% to 10.75% on incomes of a million and up — will raise $390 million this year alone. He’s using his state’s $10 billion shortfall in revenues as an excuse.

He expects the increase to fall on about 16,500 residents, assuming that they stand still for the plucking.

Most are likely to stand still for the shearing, but

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, September 4, 2020:  

The recovery of the U.S. economy from the coronavirus pandemic shutdown continues to outpace forecasters’ expectations. On Friday the Labor Department reported that nonfarm payroll employment rose by 1.4 million in August, exceeding forecasters’ predictions of 1.2 million. In its separate household survey, the department reported that nearly 4 million people returned to work.

The increase in employment pushed the unemployment rate down from 10.2 percent last month to

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, July 27, 2020: 

Bookings for durable goods orders — those designed to last at least three years — jumped another 7.3 percent in June, following May’s 15.1-percent surge. Economists were expecting a 6.9-percent increase.

Behind the jump were orders for motor vehicles and parts, which leapt 85.7 percent in June following May’s 28.8-percent gain.

The two-month rally suggested that

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, July 17, 2020: 

Speaking on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday afternoon, President Trump celebrated his administration’s success in rolling back regulations that were stifling the economy under the previous administration:

Before I came into office, American workers were smothered by a merciless avalanche of wasteful and expensive and intrusive federal regulations.

He has promised that, if elected, his administration would roll back two regulations for each new one proposed. But his administration has greatly exceeded that promise, he said, by rolling back nearly eight regulations for every new one enacted. Said the president: “What an incredible achievement!”

Sounding like a politician on stump the president ticked off a few of the regulations that his administration has either softened or removed altogether: the rollback of vehicle emissions standards which reduce the cost of a new car by an estimated $2,200; cutting the time for environmental assessments from four and a half years to just one year; and the deregulation of prescription drugs.

He also allowed incandescent lightbulbs to be sold again: “I brought them back. They have two nice qualities: they’re cheaper and they’re better. They look better. They make you look so much better. That’s important to all of us.”

Overall, said the president, his administration’s success in rolling back regulations is adding an estimated $3,100 a year to each household’s income. He added: “The previous administration added over 16,000 pages of heavy-handed regulations to the federal register. That’s why nothing got done. Under my administration we have removed nearly 25,000 pages of job-destroying regulations, more than any other president by far in the history of our country.”

That may explain why the economic bounce back from the COVID-inspired lockdown continues to exceed expectations and has put to rest any conversation about the shape of the recovery. It’s clearly a “V.” According to various sources: