Free Republic

Corporate America can learn a lot from a chicken burrito. As many companies struggle to boost prices without alienating consumers, they may want to study Mexican-food chain Chipotle, which has managed to do both. Companies including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc (CMG.N), Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and PepsiCo (PEP.N) have shown they're able to take advantage of quality, trendiness, and, in the case of Pepsi's snack foods, market dominance, to maintain high prices or even raise them faster than the inflation rate, now at about 2.1 percent in the U.S. Chipotle raised chicken-dish prices by 5 percent this year after leaving them...

Obama's Treasury Department is blaming TARP payments and other accounting quirks to explain the jump in the US deficit. But actually, it's more. AFP: "The Treasury reported a deficit of $829 billion for the October-March period, compared with $717 billion a year earlier, as revenue rose a sluggish 6.9 percent as the economic recovery slowly gained pace. The Treasury argued that the pace of increase in the deficit was deceptive because of large one-off reductions in expenditures made during the first half of fiscal 2010, compared with previous and subsequent periods. "Those included a $115 billion reduction in funds spent...