Free Republic

Last week's column discussed the political trade-offs made by black politicians and civil rights organizations that condemn whole generations of black youngsters to failing schools (http://tinyurl.com/6mmlsf). Similar political trade-offs in labor markets condemn many blacks, particularly black youths, to high rates of unemployment and reduced economic opportunities. Let's look at this, starting with a few historical facts. Today white teen unemployment is about 20 percent, while that for blacks is about 40 percent and more than 50 percent in some cities. In 1948, the unemployment rate of black 16-year-old and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent, while that of whites was...

The American middle class, like the American economy in general, is ailing. Labor-force participation has hit a 35-year low. Median household income is lower than it was five years ago. Only the top 5 percent of households have seen their incomes rise under President Obama. Commuters are paying more than twice as much for gas as they were in 2008. Federal payouts for food stamps, unemployment insurance and disability insurance have reached unprecedented levels. Meanwhile, the country is still running near-record budget deficits and is burdened by $17 trillion in aggregate debt. Yet the stock market is soaring. How can...

The jobs report looks good. The jobs report wasn’t as bad as anticipated. There are fewer people working, but that’s okay - the unemployment rate still dropped last month. Are you fed up with the U.S. federal government’s “spin” and constant efforts to convince you that the labor market isn’t as bad as it seems? At the beginning of each month, the U.S. Department of Labor tabulates the number of employment positions that were created the month before. Journalists and pundits are always eager to publicize what has come to be loosely known as the “jobs report,” with headlines that...

The solitary sign in the middle of the throngs who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial Wednesday raised the salient issue that went largely unmentioned by the speakers at the podium: jobs. In the photograph that ran across the front page of the Washington Post Thursday morning, a black woman held up a large placard that said "We Still Have A Dream: Jobs, Peace, Freedom." That sign spoke volumes about that one issue that still plagues the African-American community whose jobless rates are off the charts. It's especially heart wrenching that a job came first on the list, above peace and...

President Barack Obama went to Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., this week to rearticulate his vision for the American economy and to reassure the American people that, yes, he knows what he is doing. The president's prodigious political skills are always on display, even in the most challenging circumstances. He can take dismal reality and spin a positive and optimistic picture that will inspire his supporters. And no matter how many facts may contradict the claims of the president's vision, that vision never changes and there never seems a moment when he doubts he is right. The president reminded the...

We have all heard about liberal media bias, but this is just over the top. When the president begins looking to reporters for advice and approval of his policies, you know there is a problem! And not only is President Obama flaunting his positive reviews from the media a problem, but the fact that these reporters are giving their opinions seriously calls their professionalism into question. In his speech that lasted over an hour yesterday, President Obama said reporters praise his economic proposals as “great and tell him that they are “all good ideas”. The speech which droned on for...

Whether or not you shop at Wal-Mart, you’ve already benefitted from the mega-retailer’s ceaseless efforts to cut prices. A 2005 study found that the nationwide expansion of the store had driven down everyone’s cost for food-at-home, commodities and overall consumer products. Competition among retailers drives down prices for all shoppers. Meanwhile, by one estimate, Wal-Mart saved consumers at its stores a quarter of a trillion dollars in 2006. And that was several dozen price cuts ago. But you need to live near one to benefit directly. And in our nation’s capital, many residents could be denied the opportunity to shop...

What Egyptian citizens must recognize is that political liberty thrives best where there's a large measure of economic liberty. The Egyptian people are not the problem; it's the environment they're forced to live in. Why is it that Egyptians do well in the U.S. but not Egypt? We could make the same observation about Nigerians, Cambodians, Jamaicans and many other people who leave their homeland and immigrate to the U.S. For example, Indians in India suffer great poverty. But that's not true of Indians who immigrate to the U.S. They manage to start more Silicon Valley companies than any other...

WASHINGTON - The White House decision to delay the implementation of Obamacare's business mandate for one year sent shock waves through political circles here. The Obama administration tried to cloak its decision in soothing rhetoric about giving small businesses more time to provide health insurance benefits for employees who work more than 30 hours a week that was set to begin next January. "We believe we need to give employers more time to comply with the new rules," Obama's senior White House political fixer Valerie Jarrett wrote in her blog on Tuesday night. "This allows employers time to ...make any...

Back in 2008, a black conservative friend, a college professor, said he voted for then-Sen. Barack Obama for president. "Obama," he said, "is post-Jesse Jackson. No more race card. And, with a black president, young blacks will start hitting the books a lot harder. They will see that racism is no barrier to the highest possible achievement." I saw but one possible silver lining. When Obama's tax/spend/regulate policies fail to achieve the expected results, many blacks will do some soul-searching. "I always thought our 'plight' had to do with the President really not caring about us," some black voters will...

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. -- Ronald Reagan Those who attack American culture and tradition should recall that historically, freedom and prosperity are the aberrations, not servitude and poverty. Our nation's success is not a happy accident or part of...

If you are a regular reader of this column, you know, unfortunately, there is a consistent theme that derives from the Left’s constant attempt to develop new rationale to extract money for the ever-expanding cost of government. President Obama dropped his latest stink bomb on hard working Americans with the release of his delinquent budget. He is coming after your 401 (k). This was a shocking development to us, but apparently this idea has been floating around the “Leftist-sphere.” While researching the proposal we read a column from the Brookings Institute touting the proposal to cap the amount of money...

As President Obama joined four ex-presidents for the dedication of a facility honoring his immediate predecessor, comparisons were unavoidable. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were teenagers during the depression. The childhoods of Bill Clinton and the honoree, George W. Bush, spanned the 1950s. Generational and political differences jump out from any perusal of these five presidencies. But on a cool, sun-splashed morning in Dallas, there was harmony all around for the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. But as soon as the kind words of the morning were concluded, I dove back into the messy remains of...

Breaking news: some of America’s largest corporations have begun to report declining profits. For those that are offended by highly profitable corporations, this should be really great news. But nobody is celebrating. In fact, the sagging profits reports are thought to be such a bad thing that some believe they sent the Dow sliding downward last week, for fear that a global recession has arrived. If profits are such a terrible thing, why aren’t we relieved by their decline? For the record, I have no idea whether or not a recession is eminent. And to the extent that economic activity...

Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that agents for the Internal Revenue Service are bypassing warrants and sifting through the email and other electronic communications of American citizens. Those documents disclosed that "agents were told they didn't need a warrant to root through emails, texts or Facebook pages of people (the IRS) is investigating," according to Fox News. Despite the fact that IRS email surveillance is a clear affront to privacy and civil liberties, last week, the IRS categorically stated that it has done nothing wrong. The agency denies countrywide accusations that it is violating the...

What happens when the U.S. Secretary of Labor visits a church in Charlotte? If an incident earlier this month is any indication, faulty political promises and destructive economic policies continue to spread. It took place on April 3rd. Acting U.S. Labor Secretary Seth Harris made an appearance at a Baptist Church in North Carolina’s largest city, along with Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx. He was visiting to promote President Obama’s proposal of elevating the federal minimum wage requirement from the current $7.25 to $9.00 an hour. Harris and Foxx gathered in a large room within a Baptist church building. They sat...

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama's failed job policies are facing bitter criticism from African-American leaders who say black unemployment has grown worse under his presidency. After four years of holding their tongues and remaining quiet in the face of sharply rising black unemployment and record poverty, political leaders from the Congressional Black Caucus to the NAACP have begun to open fire on the White House. Obama won 96 percent of the black vote in 2008 and about the same percentage in 2012, despite a worsening jobless crisis among African-Americans. At 14 percent for adults and 43.1 percent for 16-to-19-year-old teenagers, blacks...

What parts of America have been growing during these years of sluggish economic growth? Answers come from comparing the Census Bureau's just-released estimates of metropolitan area populations in July 2012 with the results of the Census conducted in 2010. The focus here is on the 51 metro areas with populations of more than 1 million where 55 percent of Americans live, most of them of course not in central cities but in suburbs and exurbs. Two growth champs stick out -- Austin and Raleigh. A half-century ago, neither of them amounted to much. The counties now in metro Austin had...

Republicans don't care. Or at least that's the perception of us. President Barack Obama's convincing re-election in November despite a climate of high unemployment, stagnant economic growth and waning American influence around the globe has caused a great deal of soul-searching for the Republican Party. One of the conclusions some of us have come to is that our problem is not the message or the messengers but our own detachment from the needs of struggling working families and our lack of vision and policies that address them. I was struck reading a recent article in which our presidential nominee, after...

There are three major factors that stand in the way of entitlement reform and the other responsible budgetary measures that must be taken to avert an eventual national financial catastrophe, and they have a common source. The first is that too many American people remain, amazingly, in the fog about the scope of the problem. The second is that a certain political ideology refuses to substitute a designated driver for the intoxicated entitlement state, which is driving the American bankruptcy bus. The third is that the leader of this noxious ideology has a further conflict of interest precluding a solution...

There's a secret lurking behind all that weeping and wailing over those across-the-board cuts in federal spending now going into effect -- and beginning to filter through the economy: They're working. The emphasis in the news continues to be on the economic repercussions of Washington's meat-ax approach to reining in the federal debt. "But lost in the talk of Washington's dysfunction," to quote a story from the New York Times over the weekend, "is this fact: On paper at least, President Barack Obama and Congress have reduced projected deficits by nearly $4 trillion over a decade -- the widely embraced...

Sequester cuts had barely gone into effect last week when the uber-liberal MoveOn.org started shrilly whining that conservative barbarians were destroying the country. “Tea Party and austerity-obsessed billionaires have finally gone too far,” screamed the organization that was launched in 1998 with heavy-duty financial support from one of the Left’s own billionaires -- George Soros. The group electronically wailed that “Tea Parties” in cahoots with “billionaires,” were holding “kids” and “poor families” politically hostage in the battle over government spending. In a sense, MoveOn.org is correct. There definitely are “hostages” being held captive in the very real debt crisis in...

Let's work through an example. Suppose 100 yards of fence could be built using one of two techniques. You could hire three low-skilled workers for $15 each, or you could hire one high-skilled worker for $40. Either way, you get the same 100 yards of fence built. If you sought maximum profits, which production technique would you employ? I'm guessing that you'd hire one high-skilled worker and pay him $40 rather than hire three low-skilled workers for $15 each. Your labor costs would be $40 rather than $45. Suppose the high-skilled worker came into your office and demanded $55 a...

Remember back in 2011 when radio broadcaster and end-of-the-world prognosticator Harold Camping predicted the world’s end on October 21 yet the day passed with nary a sign of Armageddon? Last year, the ancient Mayans and a few North American self-proclaimed prophets like Warren Jeffs had various dates in December pegged for the end. Imagine the surprise of their true believers when the sun came up the next day. Did they feel relief? Disappointment? Skepticism (somewhat overdue) toward their leaders? Some no doubt have left the cult while others wait in trepidation for their prophet to predict a new date of...

The Pentagon’s budget occupies center stage in the sequestration drama. Defense spending comprises approximately 18 percent of the 2013 federal budget, but it accounts for 50 percent of federal spending cuts stipulated in the sequestration agreement. Why is there such a disproportionate impact on the defense budget? The primary reason is that neither party has the stomach to address the elephants in the federal budget—the three entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) that together account for 48 percent of FY 2013’s federal expenditures. Is there waste and inefficiency in the Pentagon budget? Of course there is, but this is...

Last week, Conservative pundit Ann Coulter told me and a thousand young libertarians that we libertarians are puss- -- well, she used slang for a female body part. We were in Washington, D.C., at the Students for Liberty conference, taping my TV show, and she didn't like my questions about her opposition to gay marriage and drug legalization. "We're living in a country that is 70 percent socialist," she says. "The government takes 60 percent of your money. They take care of your health care, your pensions ... who you can hire ... and you (libertarians) want to suck up...

Here's the latest example of head-splitting cognitive dissonance in Washington: President Obama used his State of the Union address to crusade for a revitalized U.S. manufacturing sector. But while he pays lip service to supporting businesses that build their products on American soil, Obama and his left-wing operatives are hell-bent on driving a key sector of the U.S. manufacturing industry six feet under: the American firearms and ammunition industry. The White House is pushing new government spending to "spur economic growth," protect manufacturing plants and "create good-paying jobs" to help America's middle class. Yet across the country, with aggressive...

Of course President Obama does not hate poor people, nor does the most avid tea partier. Few (if any) policies are intended to harm the poor; in fact, most policies are intended help the poor. Unfortunately, good intentions do not always equal good results; such is the case with minimum wage. Obama claims simply raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour “could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank, rent or eviction, scraping by or finally getting ahead.” It’s not that simple, though. “In the real world, setting a floor under the price of labor creates...

WASHINGTON -- President Obama's second term wish-list -- his ideas for jump-starting the job-starved economy -- looked a lot like his warmed-over, half-baked proposals of the past. With rare exceptions, Obama's fifth State of the Union address was a costly laundry list of more big government programs aimed at his party's political base. More job-training programs? There are 47 different federal job-training programs right now, costing $18 billion a year, according to the General Accountability Office. And 51 other programs offer job-training assistance. With the unemployment rate rising last month to nearly 8 percent and likely heading higher, and economic...

It seems the liberal media are more concerned about Sen. Marco Rubio's midspeech sip of water than about President Obama's State of the Union commitment to double down on his disastrous policies. What will it take for once-reasonable people to become alarmed at the state of this nation's fiscal condition, its stagnant economy and its egregious unemployment? Is there no number of irresponsible liberal policies from an extremist liberal president that will exceed their willingness to tolerate? Do liberal media -- and rank-and-file Democrats, for that matter -- believe that this recklessness can go on forever? Knowing President Obama's capacity...

“We need a balanced approach.” How many times have you heard that poll-tested line from Obama? Unfortunately, the President’s rhetoric doesn’t match his actions. Only four weeks after raising taxes on the majority of Americans, the President wants to raise taxes again. Predictably, his definition of balance means more taxes right now in exchange for soaring rhetoric about cutting spending that is backed only by accounting gimmicks and broken promises. No issue is a greater threat to our economic prosperity than government overspending – a lopsided imbalance that has led to over $146,000 in debt per American taxpayer. In the...

We've heard another State of the Union speech, and my president said grand things like: "Think about ... a future where we're in control of our own energy ... I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China ... I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury poisoning ..." Actually, he said that in 2012. I write before this year's speech, but he says basically the same thing every year: With more spending, government can fix everything. But I have this dream -- one where my president walks to the podium, and he...

I haven't been able to pilfer an advance copy of the president's State of the Union address, but I hereby offer some guesses as to what he'll say tonight. The president will assert, against the evidence, that the state of our union is strong. He will boast that during his first term, we averted another great depression, achieved history-making reforms of health care and banking, saved the auto industry and began to conclude two wars. He will caution though, that we face great challenges. Obama will acknowledge that our economy is not as vibrant as it could be and will...

American society’s schizophrenic attitudes about business could be the subject of a book. (Perhaps multiple volumes.) For example, in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, we heard constantly about the need to create jobs and bring down unemployment. And yet, media coverage and Hollywood depictions of business only reinforce the popular fiction that business owners are little more than greedy exploitative bloodsuckers (whose enterprises apparently exist for the sole purpose of being gouged for taxes to be spent by profligate lawmakers with no sense of their own fiscal responsibility). Regrettably, this is typical. But our culture’s conflict...

When I was in grade school, I remember going to birthday parties at the local bowling alley. Before the games would begin, the workers would install bumpers inside the gutters in order to prevent gutter balls and avoid "failure." When I was growing up, it was common for sports teams to award trophies to all the players so no little kid would have his or her feelings hurt at the end of the season. Today, there are school districts which no longer give out "F'" grades, and hundreds of high schools have removed class ranks so that my generation...

Some people say they do their best thinking while in the bathroom. But The Economist recently took that notion one step further, photo shopping Rodin’s The Thinker on top of a toilet and asking, “Will we ever invent anything this useful again?” Perhaps not. “The unsung hero of human history was, of course, the Brain of Drains, the Hub of Tubs, the Power of Showers, the Brewer of Sewers,” author W. Hodding Carter writes. “The humble plumber.” And it’s true. Indoor plumbing has helped humankind prevent communicable disease and thus saved countless lives. The 21st century isn’t promising such life-changing...

Guatemala -- Where is that, you ask? Generally this column comes to you from Washington, D.C. or New York City. Occasionally it comes from London or Paris. Today it carries the dateline of a seaport in Guatemala, and if it were written a day ago or two days hence it would carry the dateline of Belize. It is freezing up north. The inclement weather has driven me to tropical parts. Global warming sounds more and more agreeable to me and, frankly, if you have your wits about you, to you, too. The frozen remains of palm trees have supposedly...

In the days of the late Mike Wallace, "60 Minutes" was known for hard-hitting, aggressive journalism that asked the questions viewers wanted answered and held the powerful accountable. The Jan. 27 program on which Steve Kroft interviewed President Obama (at his request, no less) and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fell far short of that high standard. It was the kind of softball toss you might have expected if Oprah Winfrey or Barbara Walters had conducted the interview. The president said of Clinton, "...a lot of the successes we've had internationally have been because of her hard work." Kroft...

The New York Times mobile app sent me a breaking news update Wednesday morning: "U.S. Economy Unexpectedly Contracted in Fourth Quarter." Based on high government third-quarter spending and government policies and politics occurring during the fourth quarter, the slowdown should come as no surprise. The third quarter final gross domestic product growth was 3.1 percent. That relatively high number (compared to full year 2011 at 2 percent) was driven primarily by an increase in inventories and an increase in government spending. While the growth number was hailed by many as a reason to cheer, it had to have been...

Imagine a day President Obama enters Oprah Winfrey's public confessional: Oprah: As you know Mr. President, I was one of your supporters. This is a difficult interview for me. Americans have many questions. Let's begin by going back to the start of your second term. It was a time of partisan division--the fiscal cliff and the debt limit fights. The economic recovery was anemic at best. Your calls for unity in confronting those challenges were fervent. You talked about a "balanced" budgeting approach but, as we came to see, your "balanced" cuts weren't cuts at all. When the unfunded off-budget...

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman has approved his state’s portion of the Keystone XL pipeline, explaining that its revised route avoids areas that critics had earlier claimed were environmentally sensitive. The Alberta-to-Texas pipeline would create more than 5,500 Nebraska jobs during its construction period and support 1,000 permanent jobs through 2030. During the project’s lifetime, KXL would generate $950 million in labor income, $130 million in property, sales and other state and local taxes, and $679 million for the state’s gross domestic product, by bringing Canadian oil sands petroleum to Texas refineries.President Obama’s second term agenda, continued viability of Medicare and...

WASHINGTON - House Republican leaders seized the high ground this week in the furious battle to curb federal spending, forcing Senate Democrats to produce their first budget in nearly four years. It was a political high wire act, but House Speaker John Boehner pulled it off without a hitch. In one master stroke, he reunited most of his rebellious Republicans behind his budget strategy, and divided the Democrats. When the smoke cleared in the latest budgetary skirmish Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has dictatorially ignored previous House budgets, agreed to accept the GOP's limited debt ceiling suspension as...

The National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) Summary of Operations for fiscal year 2012, released last week, shows an agency that is significantly over-funded. In 2010, the Obama Administration increased the agency’s budget even though it previously operated with a fiscal year-end surplus. Now, the operating report reveals that the agency’s business continues to erode with the decline of unionization in the private sector making its increased appropriation even more unnecessary than it was in 2010. According to the report, issued by Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon, total case intake decreased by three percent; unfair labor practice case intake decreased by...

The Republican Party is picking up the pieces. Speaking of the ticket's loss for the first time since the election, Rep. Paul Ryan noted that many voters "don't think or know that we have good ideas" on fighting poverty and "helping people move up the ladder of life." It's not surprising that Ryan, who got his start working for Jack Kemp and William Bennett at Empower America, sees the world this way. Though it's a total secret to members of the press and the Democratic Party, conservative intellectuals have been grappling with the problems of poverty in America for several...

The re-election of Barack Obama hasn't done anything to make more jobs available to Americans, and there is no indication that it will. America now has 23 million people who want a full-time job but can't find one. Obama doesn't think American citizens or businessmen create jobs. His Jobs Czar, Jeffrey Immelt, recently said on a television interview referring to China, where he has outsourced General Electric's light bulb plants, "state-run Communism may not be your cup of tea, but their government works." In his first presidential debate last year, Obama claimed that passage of free trade agreements with...

WASHINGTON - If you thought President Obama's first term was one long, uninterrupted political brawl, the next four years will make that period look tame by comparison. If you need any evidence for this prediction, Obama's in-your-face, second inaugural address is Exhibit A. It was a speech tailored to make the hearts of liberal Democrats beat faster, cheering what some in the Washington news media called "Obama unbound." It was a speech that sent an unmistakable message to his party's base that this time around, it's no more Mr. Nice Guy. The gloves are off, these are my issues, and...

Thanks, California! Thanks for your monstrous spending and absurd regulatory overreach! America needs you. We need Connecticut and Illinois, too! We need you the way we needed the Soviet Union, as models of failure, to warn us what happens if we believe those who say, "Government can." Moving to California was once the dream for many Americans. Its population grew at almost triple the national average -- until 1990. Then big government, in the form of endless regulation and taxes, killed much of the dream. In the last decade, 2 million people left California. Many of them moved to Alaska,...

Rarely have second terms lived up to the hopes and expectations of presidents or their electorates. FDR's began with an attempt to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices and a second Depression of 1937. He was rescued only by the war in Europe in 1939 and the GOP's nomination of "the barefoot boy from Wall Street," Wendell Willkie. What can be called Harry Truman's second term was a disaster. In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atom bomb and China fell to Mao. In 1950, the Rosenbergs were convicted as atomic spies for Stalin and North Korea invaded the...

Although it certainly wasn’t Oscar material, I still love the 1989 film “Erik the Viking,” starring, among others, Tim Robbins, Mickey Rooney, Eartha Kitt and John Cleese. It’s a campy British comedy-fantasy about a band of misfit Vikings on a quest to reach Valhalla. In one scene, the motley mob finds its way to the island of Hy-Brasil, a happy, peaceful, sunlit land populated by white-robed, free-loving, uber-pacifist morons. You know, liberals. Through a series of immaterial events, the island begins to sink into the ocean. As it does, Erik and crew evacuate and re-board the ship while Hy-Brasil’s inhabitants...

“Land of the free.” It’s right there in our national anthem. As well it should be -- the personal liberties we enjoy are the envy of many around the world. But freedom is no accident. It requires constant vigilance. Takes economic liberty, an area where the United States has begun to slip quite a bit lately. How would you say the U.S. compares to other nations? No need to guess. We can pinpoint it exactly by using an annual guide known as the Index of Economic Freedom. Top three, you think? Top five? Nope. Last year at this time came...