Mike Rowe, the popular host of Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel and frequent voice behind ads for Ford, Caterpillar, Motorola and Lee’s Jeans, learned how thin his popularity is among some of his fans when he touched the third rail of retailing: Walmart. In his voiceover of Walmart’s ad appearing during the Olympics, Rowe announces the retail giant’s plans to
Because the budget deal signed into law last week didn’t extend federal unemployment benefits, some 1.3 million people won’t be getting their $1,166 monthly checks, starting in January. By June another 1.9 million will be cut off.
Keynesians are sputtering nonsense about the need to extend benefits. President Obama called it an
This article first appeared at McAlvany Intelligence Advisor:
In gearing up for the 2014 Senate election in Tennessee, the Tennessee Alliance Tea Party & Liberty Groups announced in its newsletter last week that current Senator Lamar Alexander was ripe for extinction:
On Wednesday the New York City Council voted 45-3 to pass the New York City Earned Sick Time Act, a bill which will require employers with more than 20 employees to
Quoting the results of a poll funded by a lobbying group known as the Small Business Majority, the Central Valley Business Times (CVBT) of Stockton, California, announced that a majority of small business owners now support raising the minimum wage. The Times iterated the hoary refrain that such a raise
Capital Bikeshare pick up near Pentagon City Metro St, Pentagon City, Arlington, VA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
City planners in Atlanta, Georgia, are getting excited about starting a bike-sharing plan, pointing to a study that suggests it might just work there. The article from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was revealing:
Despite metro Atlanta’s car-centric reputation, bike advocates believe [that] reduced gas costs, connections from buses and trains to jobs centers and the opportunity to burn a few calories while seeing the city on two wheels would prove appealing if bike-sharing goes mainstream. (emphases added)
“Car-centric” may just be an understatement. Fodor’s Travel Intelligence outlines the hazards facing travelers to Atlanta which is laced with heavily travelled interstate highways populated with
Once in a while along comes an article so trenchant, so profound, so simple, that it just takes my breath away. Forget all about plowing through Human Action or Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, or certainly Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged! Gary DeMar, a talented and gifted student of economic theory has boiled it all down for us.
Thank you, Gary!
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With the national average price of gasoline hitting the highest level in history for this time of the year, the impact of that increase reaches far beyond the pocketbook of the average worker driving off to work in the morning. For every 25-cent increase in the price of gas (which has increased almost 70 cents per gallon in the last year, and by nearly 30 cents in just the last month), consumers are forced to spend an extra $3 billion that
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When Anthony Mason, CBS News’ senior business correspondent, visited the Treasury Room, he called it the location of “essentially the American credit card machine.” It’s where traders buy and sell United States’ treasury bills, notes, and bonds in order to finance government operations. Mason’s revelation was profound: “I found that room kind of spooky. If we can’t [sell] those IOUs—which keep the government running on a day-to-day basis—then we can’t run the country anymore. We [won’t] have the money.”
CBS then went on to review the repetitive and increasingly tiresome litany of disasters that await if those IOUs can’t be sold:
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When CNBC announced that the number of workers filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell last week while private employers added new jobs in May, this was “further evidence [that] the labor market was improving.” In more muted fashion, the Associated Press called it a “slow-motion recovery,” but a recovery nevertheless.
This was in line with Vice President Joe Biden’s prediction back in April that the economy would be adding between 250,000 and 500,000 jobs “in the next couple of months.” Similar sentiments were echoed by President Obama on Wednesday in a speech at Carnegie Mellon University:
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With great fanfare, the Obama administration celebrated its first policy victory of the year—the $17.6 billion jobs bill. Eleven Republican Senators helped push the bill through the Senate, 68-29.
The economically flawed and unconstitutional law provides employers an exemption from Social Security tax withholding through the end of the year on any employees added to the payroll who have been unemployed for at least 60 days. And if the employees stay on that payroll for at least a year, the employers would receive an additional $1,000 tax credit. In addition, the law spends $20 billion on federal highway construction and other public improvement projects.
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Just when the headline news about the economy was beginning to look good and the talking heads were beginning to sound good, along came a barrage of bad news that was so bad that it couldn’t be covered up. Gallup began with the news that in January nearly 20 percent of the U.S. workforce “lacked adequate employment”, which was worse than the numbers reported by the Labor Department. According to Reuters, these “findings appear to paint a darker employment picture than official U.S. data,” with about 30 million Americans “underemployed.” And Gallup misses the mark by at least 2 percent, according to John Williams of ShadowStats.com.
If Will Rogers didn’t say “Those who don’t read the papers are uninformed; those who do are misinformed,” he probably should have.
Witness this headline from The Wall Street Journal: “Jobs, Spending Bode Well for Growth.”
Compared to this from Bloomberg: “Orders for Durable Goods in U. S. Unexpectedly Fall.”
Or this from APNews: “Jobless claims off, spending up in sign of rebound.”
Finally, to confound the confusion, see this from the Denver Post: “Good news raises hopes that recovery won’t fizzle.”
How does one make any sense of it all? Dr. Kenneth McFarland (named America’s Number One Public Speaker by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce in 1965) once quipped that he had read so much about the harmful effects of tobacco and alcohol that he just decided to give up reading!
There is another option: dig deeper.
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