Competition.

In a Senate hearing earlier today, Rand Paul rightly went on the rhetorical rampage in defense of Apple and their completely rational and legal attempts to minimize the amount of money that they pay in taxes (if you haven’t listened to his epic free-market rant yet, I definitely recommend it). Why, for instance, is it [...]

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Longest recession evah.

With no signs of recovery in sight for many of the eurozone’s member countries, the currency bloc’s collective economy has hit a new low with depression-esque conditions percolating across part of the region and Germany’s number-one economy only ‘growing’ by a stagnation-level 0.1 percent. Ouch, via Reuters: Falling output across the bloc meant the 17-nation [...]

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'Murika.

There was a time in our history when the American-made beer selection was nothing to get excited about, and indeed, at which the long-established foreign brewers of the old world would disdainfully turn up their noses. Thanks to a cut in the federal excise tax on beer produced by smaller brewers in 1976, however, those [...]

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It's time.

Over the past few years, along with the huge raft of federal support the wind industry receives via tax credits, payouts, regulations, and initiatives, it’s also been all the rage for states to set up their own wind-friendly subsidies and renewable portfolio standards to help out the wind industry so that politicians at all levels [...]

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Lame duck.

Not the first poll this week to show Republicans suddenly ahead of The One on guns, either. The latest NYT/CBS poll had them up 44/41 when respondents were asked who they trusted more to make the right decisions on gun control. Those numbers were significant because they showed a reversal in public opinion. Here’s Pew’s [...]

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An educational field trip, if you will.

As I mentioned earlier this week, President Obama is visiting Texas today to mark the beginning of yet another of his (now infamous) “pivots” to jobs and the economy, talking up all of the reasons why the government needs to do more to “stimulate” the economy so we can keep spending and centrally planning our [...]

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Bureaucracies gone wild.

The other day, I mentioned the disheartening case of Uber cab and New York City’s many rules and regulations governing their business model, which just so happen to allow established cab companies and their associations plenty of recourse for rent-seeking rather than coping with the competition brought on by Uber’s arrival on the scene. Most [...]

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Oh joy, rapture.

Just what we’ve all been waiting for! At last, yet another pivot to “jobs,” because every other time President Obama has gone out campaigning — oops, I meant, jobs-touring — he’s been so effective at producing wonderful, real-world economic results, and definitely not merely creating an opportunity to air his many grievances about those obstructionist [...]

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Dagger.

As I mentioned last night, the frighteningly complicated tale of Uber cab’s troubles in New York City is, sadly, just one type of example of the many regulatory and specially-interested impediments that are wreaking havoc on our struggling economy because of the tendencies of big-government overreach at all levels — local, state, and federal. Especially [...]

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Gallup: Job situation improving.

Yesterday’s ADP employment report was a bust, but two other indicators out this morning ahead of tomorrow’s April jobs report look a little more promising.  Weekly initial jobless claims dropped to their lowest level in five years at 324K, a level that has correlated to significant job growth in the past: In the week ending [...]

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Big miss.

Just before the ADP employment report was released this morning, I asked Business Insider’s Joseph Weisenthal to give me his prediction — a rather unfair request in retrospect, since the report was due in 2 minutes at that point. He graciously offered his prediction anyway: @edmorrissey Hrm. I’ll go weak. 120K vs. expectations of 150k. [...]

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"...hope to hire at least 1,500 workers."

Last fall, Hostess tried to readjust their struggling business model and keep the company (along with its 19,000-strong workforce) going strong by closing a few factories and downsizing workers’ wages and benefits — and the bakers’ union to which a big chunk of the Hostess workforce belonged didn’t like that all. Their resulting strike turned [...]

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Twice as bad as expected.

On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will give its initial estimate of 2013Q1 GDP growth, and the news is not likely to be bright after seeing the durable-goods report for March.  Orders dropped 5.6% from February, twice as much as economists’ estimates, and capital-goods orders tanked: New Orders. New orders for manufactured durable goods [...]

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Reforms.

Many of the wildly debt crisis-laden EU countries are currently railing against the oh-so-draconian, unacceptably harsh, and practically inhumane “austerity” budgets toward which their years of state-sponsored profligate living are now herding them, but up in Scandinavia, things are taking a slightly less dire turn. A couple of months back, Mary Katharine highlighted the steps [...]

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Bad news bears.

Le sigh. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank are in the midst of their spring meetings, and found themselves obliged to ever-so-slightly revise their projections for global economic growth in their latest report: In a periodic update to its economic projections, the fund said on Tuesday that it expected global growth of about 3.3 [...]

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Stall tactics.

The Environmental Protection Agency and their eco-zealot fans have been all kinds of pumped at the prospect of slapping some greenhouse-gas regulations on new power plants (a major maneuver in that war on coal they’ve been attentively waging), but last month, they hinted that they were leaning toward putting a hold on the proposed rule, [...]

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Ninety-nine problems.

Not that it ever left, of course, but things do seem to be going especially poorly lately. Greece’s unemployment rate rose to a new record high of over 27 percent (ouch), multiple countries are struggling to meet their budget targets, and the troubles just keep coming in from all sides: Europe’s finance ministers meeting in [...]

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Godspeed, graduates.

It’s a rough job market for anyone looking for work as we continue to just barely break stagnation levels in the Slowest Recovery Ever, but the picture is particularly bleak for the fresh-faced youths looking start careers. According to a new economic report, the situation is going to be “extremely difficult” for the crop of [...]

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Unexpectedly.

What happens when the President of the United States spends six weeks and millions of dollars spinning horror stories about the economic impact of a 2.3% reduction in government spending?  If you guessed “people spend less money,” you’d be right — and better at economic projection than media economists.  To only their apparent surprise, retail [...]

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So they say.

The March jobs report saw the civilian labor force shrink by another 496,000, bringing the participation rate down to 63.3 percent — America’s lowest rate since the era of Jimmy Carter. Ouch. Almost immediately after the awful news, the White House trotted out their chief economist Alan Krueger, who tried to defend and explain away [...]

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Oh, good.

In another clip from CNBC this morning, take a gander at the White House chief economist Alan Krueger affirming that, why no, this morning’s awful jobs report does not mean the White House is going to be reassessing their economic approach. And hey, why should they? Backing off of failed progressive policies for the good [...]

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Plus, Ramirez on hope and change and the food-stamp economy.

Via Daniel Halper at The Weekly Standard, CNBC’s Jim Cramer dimly sees that today’s jobs report isn’t about the sequester or the end of the payroll tax cut. “Look, I’m struggling here,” said Cramer. “I’m struggling to find anything good about it. I’m trying to figure out exactly how worried we were three, four weeks [...]

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Labor force drops 496,000.

The new jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics came in well under even pessimistic expectations.  The US economy only added 88,000 jobs in March, while nearly a half-million people left the work force: Nonfarm payroll employment edged up in March (+88,000), and the unemployment rate was little changed at 7.6 percent, the U.S. [...]

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Weekly jobless claims jump to 385K.

Tomorrow the BLS will release the official jobs report for March 2013, so once again we look to ADP and Gallup for predictive indicators.  ADP, which uses its extensive payroll-service data to estimate job growth in the private sector, usually comes in higher than the BLS, and that may mean a relatively poor report tomorrow, [...]

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