Free Republic

Editor's Note: This column was authored by Travis Nix. With about 8.4 percent of Americans unemployed, our country needs real relief. March’s CARES Act did a fine job of keeping the economy on life support, but now Americans need an economic recovery package that actually creates jobs. And that’s certainly not going to come in the form of the $3 trillion bill that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently demanded.  Yet there is another bill that could truly lend a hand to hard-working Americans.Aptly titled the CREATE JOBS Act, the proposal introduced by Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Martha McSally (R-AZ) would stimulate the economy by...

As Washington has been frozen in debate about whether to pass massive new economic stimulus legislation, something interesting has happened in the real world. In the real world, Americans sent a message to politicians saying they can take of themselves just fine, thank you. The Bureau of Labor Statistics report for the month of August just came in saying the U.S. economy is surging forward in strong recovery mode. The economy created 1.4 million new jobs, and the unemployment rate dropped to 8.4% -- not pretty compared with the 3.5% rate in February, before COVID-19 hit. But compared with where...

In 2016, Donald Trump promised to bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States. At the time, President Obama ridiculed the idea, saying, “What magic wand do you have?” Turns out Trump had a good one. In the first 30 months of the Trump Administration, U.S. manufacturers added 499,000 jobs, expanding by 4 percent. In the last 30 months of the Obama-Biden Administration, manufacturers added only 185,000 jobs, which equated to a mere 1.5 percent – a net difference of 314,000 jobs.Now Joe Biden is promising to bring back manufacturing jobs. Will anyone in the media ask him about his...

In March, just as the country was shutting down due to COVID-19, the overwhelming surge in unemployment filings came as a hard pill to swallow for our nation. With companies of all sizes hit by the fallout from COVID-19, many Americans began scrambling for their next paychecks. As with all historical economic slumps, minorities and young workers experienced a significant impact. A recent report by Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi identified the hardest-hit industries. These include “leisure and hospitality (16.9 million people), transportation (5.7 million), employment services (3.7 million), mining (662,000), and travel arrangements (222,000).” Because 17.6 percent of Hispanic...

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris debuted as a joint ticket at an event in Delaware on Wednesday, and on the whole, I think the presentation -- reportedly delayed by local power outages -- was mostly effective.  Each candidate praised the other to the hilt, as is customary, blasted their opponents with sharply-worded attacks, and urged voters to join the effort to oust the incumbent administration in November.  Harris, a former prosecutor, argued that the case against President Trump and Vice President Pence is "open and shut," but when it came time to make that case, she advanced two central arguments...

The most recent jobs report found that nine of the 10 states with unemployment rates above 14% are in liberal blue states. Ranked from highest to lowest, they are Nevada (25.3%), Hawaii (22.6%), Michigan (21.2%), California (16.3%), Rhode Island (16.3%), Massachusetts (16.3%), Delaware (15.8%), Illinois (15.2%), New Jersey (15.2%) and Washington state (15.1%). I call this the "blue-state jobs depression." The states with the lowest unemployment rates are all conservative red states: Nebraska (5.2%), Utah (8.5 %), Wyoming 8.8%, Arizona (8.9%), and Idaho (8.9%). It is hardly shocking news. Liberals are anti-business, and their policies are especially hostile to small...

Henry Olsen, a scholar from the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., has a well-deserved reputation for on-target analysis on politics and elections. Olsen just published a column in the Washington Post titled "Trump may be down, but he is not out. At least not yet." The bottom has fallen out of President Donald Trump's approval ratings. Most recently, Gallup reports his approval at 39%, down 10 points from the month before. According to Olsen, by conventional analysis, the outlook for a Trump victory in November is not good. "Presidents who polled this poorly less than five...

American cities are burning. Civil unrest is beyond a boiling point. Racial tensions are flaring up from coast to coast. Riots are everywhere. A familiar and often repeated narrative from the media is a likening of today’s America to another tumultuous time in our shared history, that of 1968. In ’68, a pivotal presidential campaign was underway against the backdrop of a divided America. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, coupled with a growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, had America appearing to tear itself apart at the seams. In this election year, there does indeed...

Seventy-five years ago this month, Germany surrendered, ending the European theater of World War II. At the war's beginning, no one believed Germany would utterly collapse in May 1945. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, German invaders were on the verge of capturing Moscow. Britain was isolated. London had barely survived a terrible German bombing during the Blitz. A sleeping America was neutral, but it was beginning to realize it was weak and mostly unarmed in a scary world. But by 1943, a booming U.S. economy was fielding vast military...

Last Sunday, Mother's Day, made me think how my mom warned me, as a young teen: "Work hard! Or you'll freeze in the dark!" Sometimes, the warning ended, "Or you'll starve in the cold." She grew up during the depression. She and her peers were sensibly worried about freezing in the dark. The message scared me, and I worked hard in school. When I got my first job, I always put some pay in a savings account, even when (OK, it was long ago) I made only $132 a week. I feared a bad future, and I wanted to make...

As Americans debate how to reopen our society in the wake of COVID-19, we seem to be breaking down into three groups: first, those who believe the virus isn't particularly serious and desperately want to reopen everything as soon as possible (a small minority of Americans, by polling data); second, those who believe the virus is extraordinarily serious and want everything to remain closed as long as possible (a significant minority of Americans); and third, those who believe the virus is extraordinarily serious, that the economic damage brought about by COVID-19 is extraordinarily serious and that we will have to...

In an effort to capitalize on the lessons learned from the current pandemic, the plain folk of America are beginning to demonstrate and demand change. They're tired of politicians and experts locked in inaction. Their changes might be summarized in 10 new and compelling commandments to guide America's future. There's been no mountain top conclave to confirm one direction, but their collective voice might just provide plain spoken guidance for our future. Here are 10 post pandemic commandments they just might rally behind to make America great again: 1. Life is difficult, unsafe, and has always carried risk. None of...

That same article we read every May, the one where we talk about the record number of travelers who are about to hit the road, the quote from the AAA expert, the mention of gas prices, that article will be different this year. More importantly, underneath the numbers we’ll read are a thousand points of darkness, anecdotes of pain and loss. We’re still not yet fully awake to that reality, we’re still operating in the gap between the economic actions we’ve taken and the true and coming economic fallout. However, to those service industry workers that keep our cities the...

The accumulating death toll from COVID-19 can be seen minute-by-minute on cable news channels. But there’s another death toll few seem to care much about: the number of poverty-related deaths being set in motion by deliberately plunging millions of Americans into poverty and despair. In the first three weeks since governors began shutting down commerce in their states, 17 million Americans filed for unemployment, and according to one survey, one quarter of Americans have lost their jobs or watched their paychecks cut. Goldman Sachs predicts that the economy will shrink 34 percent in the second quarter, with unemployment leaping to...

Unlike the tens of millions of Americans who have lost their jobs, America's cultural elites, in politics, government and media, are doing just fine during the coronavirus shutdown. Some of the politicians are paid well enough to hoard gourmet chocolate ice cream in their expensive kitchen freezers, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, rightly dubbed by Republicans as our very own Nancy Antoinette. "I enjoy it," Pelosi said of her chocolate stash on "The Late Late Show" in the most tone-deaf media interview of the year, with her country out of work and people low on food. "I like it better...

If the Malevolent Donkey Party was actively seeking to plunge the country into an economic tailspin, while still maintaining some level of deniability to the credulous suckers out there, exactly what would it be doing differently? It would be pretty much doing exactly what it is doing right now – shilling for the bat-gobbling ChiComs, delaying needed assistance to keep America working, and generally trying to keep us all locked in the dark in perpetuity. It’s fair to assume that you intend the expected consequences of the actions you take, and the consequence of the actions the Democrats are taking...

The new unemployment numbers are out and there's really no way to butter this biscuit, folks. Unless America's economic engine is restarted, we will be plunged into a Great Depression. Since the global pandemic hit our shores, more than 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits. And the only way to stop this economic death spiral is for every freedom-loving citizen to embrace their constitutional rights, take to the streets and demand that their state leaders reopen this nation. As I wrote in "Culture Jihad: How to Stop the Left From Killing a Nation," the time has come for...

We are a few days away from a rendezvous with some tough conclusions about COVID-19. A number of concurrent developments are coming to a head. Most will bring light where so far there was only heat. Greater information about the virus might cause as much acrimony as conciliation. Some experts will be discredited, others reaffirmed. Antibody testing is expected to get under way shortly. Soon, several representative studies will give the country an accurate idea of how many Americans have been infected in the past few months. With a more trustworthy denominator to compare against known deaths, we will finally...

President Donald Trump is hinting at a second task force responsible for getting Americans back to work. Appoint it now, Mr. President. Don't wait until the virus peaks. This second task force should prepare the country to reopen, with new tools to fight the virus. The president's top epidemiologist, the esteemed Anthony Fauci, insists "the best tool we have" is "physical separation." But mandating that people stay home is costing Americans their jobs and will force businesses into bankruptcy. The nation needs an alternative strategy. A chorus of government health officials and academics, like Harvard's Marc Lipsitch, want the shutdown...

“Give me a stay-at-home order out of an abundance of caution for I certainly would prefer that over you giving me death” – Patrick Henry’s lesser-known and decidedly more cautious brother, Frank War is the sacrificing of lives for the preservation of your country’s way of life. Sometimes it’s for the preservation of your civilization. Today, pundits and politicians alike tell us that we are facing our gravest challenge since World War II: the fight to destroy the Coronavirus. To that noble end, we are to hole ourselves up in our homes, and shutter our restaurants, schools and businesses. We’re...