Free Republic

A Global Pandemic Go To Waste The coronavirus relief bill congressional Democrats are pushing has all the hallmarks of Obama’s 2009 stimulus package: welfare funding disguised as relief. So it turns out the real reason congressional Democrats blocked a Senate coronavirus spending bill on Sunday wasn’t because they were concerned it favored corporations over individuals or because they wanted more direct aid to families and small businesses. It was because they want to use this crisis as pretext for passing a bunch of Democratic policies that have nothing to do with the pandemic.On Monday, right around the time Senate Democrats...

At the end of 2009, the total federal debt was $12.3 trillion—a staggering amount of money. Now, it stands at an astonishing $23.1 trillion. That’s roughly $180,500 of debt for every U.S. household. It is important for Americans to understand how we got here, and what lawmakers can do to bring back fiscal sanity. Poor Handling of the Financial Crisis The federal government entered the 2010s with sky-high annual deficits. This had two primary causes. First, the Great Recession reduced incomes and profits, which meant a sharp decrease in tax revenue. A slow economic recovery kept tax revenue relatively low...

The Great Recession has officially been over for a decade. For many Americans, there’s little reason to celebrate. Many people’s finances haven’t recovered from the recession’s blows, according to a new survey by personal finance website Bankrate.com. “There are still tens of millions who are struggling to even get back to where they were before the economy took a turn for the worse,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.com. More than half of Americans who were adults amid the Great Recession said they endured some type of negative financial impact, Bankrate found. And half of those people say...

The stock market is rebounding on the news that the Federal Reserve is considering an interest rate decrease, but some commentators are spinning this as a sign of economic calamity.“We are closely monitoring the implications of these developments for the U.S. economic outlook and, as always, we will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion, with a strong labor market and inflation near our symmetric 2 percent objective,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday.Experts widely interpreted this as an indication that the Fed may soon implement a rate cut after raising rates steadily over the entire course of Donald...

I recently had the opportunity to read "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin, a prodigious tome dealing with the circumstances surrounding the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. I was taken aback by some of its provocative assertions. America joined World War I largely to help a few bankers profit off the war (despite a long-standing Monroe doctrine that prohibited our involvement in European affairs) The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was supported by international financial interests in order to destabilize Russia and steal the wealth of the Russian people; and So-called "foreign aid" is merely a...

Henry Paulson, a Republican who was U.S. Treasury secretary during the 2008 financial meltdown, on Friday called a Donald Trump presidency “unthinkable” and said he will vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Paulson joins a growing list of establishment Republicans who say they will not cast a ballot in the Nov. 8 election for Trump, the party’s presumptive nominee and a political neophyte whose populist rhetoric runs counter to many long-held Republican principles. […] “I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton, with the hope that she can bring Americans together to do the things necessary to strengthen our economy, our environment and...

Until we entered the Great Recession, most economists regarded Keynesian economics as a relic of the past. You could still find it discussed in some introductory textbooks. But, as University of Chicago economist John Cochrane points out, it wasn’t on the syllabus in any of the leading graduate schools. Then came the most serious downturn since the Great Depression and something living economists had never seen before: interest rates that were near zero and in some cases negative. Keynes himself speculated that the economy could become stuck in a liquidity trap – where monetary policy is ineffective and only fiscal...

Why is our recovery from the Great Recession so sluggish and so slow? Economists are increasingly focusing on Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment: the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as ObamaCare. Although generally thought of as a measure to insure the uninsured, health reform is affecting the entire labor market in negative ways. As I wrote previously, the employer mandate to provide health insurance will cost almost $6 an hour for family coverage. This health minimum wage (on top of the money minimum wage) raises the cost of labor and will almost certainly discourage hiring. There are two ways that...

Memorial Day weekend drivers will continue to take a hit as gasoline prices remain high. May 20 marks the 1,245th straight day that the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline costs more than $3 a gallon, according to AAA data. That’s nearly three-and-a-half years above $3 a gallon.

Subprime Scandal: Newly released memos from the Clinton presidential library reveal evidence the government had a big hand in the housing crisis. The worst actors were in the White House, not on Wall Street. During the 1990s, former Clinton aides bragged that more aggressive enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act pressured banks to issue riskier mortgages, lending more proof the anti-redlining law fueled the crisis. A 2012 National Bureau of Economic Research study found "that adherence to that act led to riskier lending by banks," with "a clear pattern of increased defaults for loans made by these banks in quarters...

California’s minimum wage would rise to $10 an hour within three years under a bill passed Thursday by the state Legislature, making it one of the highest rates in the nation. Washington state currently has the top minimum wage at $9.19 an hour, an amount that is pegged to rise with inflation. Some cities, including San Francisco, have slightly higher minimum wages. The state Senate approved AB10 on a 26-11 vote and the Assembly followed hours later on a 51-25 vote, both largely along party lines. Gov. Jerry Brown indicated earlier this week that he would sign the bill, calling...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The U.S. economy grew in the fourth quarter - but just barely - instead of contracting for the first time in three and a half years, the Commerce Department said Thursday. The U.S. expanded at a 0.1% annual rate in the last three months of 2012, better than the initially reported 0.1% drop but well below the third quarter's 3.1% pace.

The Department of Labor's WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) website may have been exempt from layoff notices related to the fiscal cliff, but it still provides a sufficiently (bleak) complete picture about the real nature of layoffs and business cycle in general in America's busiest city. Which is why it was precisely using the WARN website that we learned that one of New York's most historic steakhouses, "NY's Prime Steakhouse since 1927" Gallagher's, located on 52nd street, and which survive the great depression, is shutting down on January 16. Surely neither the surging price of meat, nor the ability...

Monetarists from across the world can mostly agree on one thing. The US Federal Reserve caused the Great Recession. Fed chair Ben Bernanke kept policy far too tight after the US economy buckled in early to mid 2008. He allowed a collapse in the money supply to run unchecked, causing avoidable disasters at Fannie, Freddie, Lehman, and AIG later that year. Call it the "Bernanke Depression" if you want, a term gaining traction in elite circles. The indictment is a little unfair. The European Central Bank was worse. It raised rates into a deflationary oil shock in August 2008, and...

The U.S. economic recovery hasn't felt much like one even for people who managed to find new jobs after being laid off. Most of them have had to settle for less pay. Only 56 percent of Americans laid off from January 2009 through December 2011 had found jobs by the start of this year, the Labor Department said Friday. More than half of them took jobs with lower pay. One-third took pay cuts of 20 percent or more. … The report provides an illustration of the job market's persistent weakness well after the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009....

Today’s youth, both here and abroad, have been screwed by their parents’ fiscal profligacy and economic mismanagement. Neil Howe, a leading generational theorist, cites the “greed, shortsightedness, and blind partisanship” of the boomers, of whom he is one, for having “brought the global economy to its knees.” How has this generation been screwed? Let’s count the ways, starting with the economy. No generation has suffered more from the Great Recession than the young. Median net worth of people under 35, according to the U.S. Census, fell 37 percent between 2005 and 2010; those over 65 took only a 13 percent...

Behind the weak job growth numbers and the uncertainty about the economic recovery, small-business owners see shrinking consumer confidence sapping demand for their products and services. Many small firms say they are barely staying afloat and won't hire until they see signs of more stability in the marketplace. That sentiment doesn't bode well for efforts to push the economy forward. Small business, the conventional engine of job growth, has been particularly active in the last two years in driving the recovery from the Great Recession. But it may not be able to sustain its efforts. "There is no reason for...

49.1%: Percent of the population that lives in a household where at least one member received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2011. Cutting government spending is no easy task, and it’s made more complicated by recent Census Bureau data showing that nearly half of the people in the U.S. live in a household that receives at least one government benefit, and many likely received more than one. The 49.1% of the population in a household that gets benefits is up from 30% in the early 1980s and 44.4% as recently as the third quarter of...

The New York Times op-ed page and the left-wing echo chamber. When Joe Nocera was given a regular op-ed column in the New York Times, there was kind of a collective “uh-oh” among people who have watched the gradual slide of that page into Krugmanism and ideological irrelevance. I was one of them, but thought there might be some hope. Some of his columns in the Times business section had suggested a glimmering of a willingness to consider other points of view and even facts.At first, I was disappointed. As he said in today’s column, he called my dissent from...

Barney Frank's legacy will not include the prostitution ring that took place at his Washington D.C. townhouse in 1989, without his knowing, according to Barney. He was reprimanded by the House of Representatives in 1990, but Massachusetts, the home of American witchcraft, reelected him - too many times. Barney Frank's legacy will not be that he was the first "Out" gay to become part of the United States Congress. Frank will also not be known, either as the brother of Clinton wonk Ann Lewis, nor for his stammering and stuttering. He will also not be famed for the excessive regulation...