The University of Michigan reported today that their index of consumer sentiment slipped almost three points from it’s thirteen-year high in January. The consumer expectations index dropped almost 5 points. Both the stock market and consumer confidence increased after the national election in November, but now the numbers seem to be softening. Consumers who expressed…
I have been promising for a few weeks to go into detail about how nutty Bernie’s tax proposals are, specifically when it comes to paying for medicare-for-all. Well, I finally saw the annoying and unofficial chart below one too many times, and I finally had my fill of watching liberals defend Bernie’s awful anti-liberal proposal….
The U.S. Department of Justice has been investigating whether individuals and entities involved in toxic, collateralized mortgage-backed securities can be charged with crimes. But, as yet, there have been no criminal convictions of high-level corporate officials directly linked to the practice. Michael Greenberger, former director of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Division of…
The problem is that you’re talking to people who sense that something is wrong, are angry about it and want to know where to place the blame. You are giving them a cabal of boogeyman bankers, corporations and allegedly bought politicians to bear the brunt of that resentment. You’re doing this through a fair degree…
The full text of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement has been released. For all those complaining about how this is a secret deal, you’ve got a lot of dry reading ahead. Here’s the link: TPP Full Text
It’s an established part of the big-box retail model that the boxes themselves be custom-built, cheaply constructed, and disposable. If retailers decide that they need a bigger space, it’s cheaper for them to leave the old one behind and build a new one. When Walmart, for instance, opened its wave of new, twice-the-size Supercenters across…
Senator Warren raises some important questions about an element of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) called Investor-State Dispute settlement, or ISDS. There are good answers. The purpose of investment provisions in our trade agreements is to provide American individuals and businesses who do business abroad with the same protections we provide to domestic and foreign investors…
One city neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn’t turn a profit. Numerous cities and school districts in…
What’s mostly going on here, though, is that frustrated liberals see in the Asian trade deal an opportunity to draw the line on globalization, period. No one thinks this deal is going to be the ruin of American workers, when all is said and done. What they think is that there has to be a…
For the next fiscal year, the new projection was $5.8 billion in revenues — short of the nearly $6.2 billion that legislative researchers had been assuming in their unofficial forecasts. The projected shortfall of $436 million is about 7 percent, and higher than the $282 million gap estimated unofficially. The new revenue projection for the…
Ohio’s first-term Republican Governor John Kasich said in a statement earlier this month that the renewable energy standards “are simply unrealistic and will drive up energy costs for job creators and consumers.” He made the case that the bill was a compromise from scrapping the RES entirely, and by “temporarily holding at our current level…
MINNESOTA and Wisconsin share much more than bone-chilling winters: German and Northern European roots; farming; and, until recently, a populist progressive tradition stretching back a century to Wisconsin’s Fighting Bob La Follette and the birth of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. But in 2010 these cousin states diverged. By doing so they began a natural experiment that…
Even as Congressional leaders and the president discuss a potential temporary solution to the current stalemate over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, the repeated cycle of lurching from crisis to crisis has significant and real costs to the U.S. economy. A new report, prepared by Macroeconomic Advisers, LLC for the Peter G. Peterson…
With days to go before the United States debt default deadline, Beijing aired its frustrations with the shutdown Sunday, saying it was time to consider a “de-Americanized” world order. With $1.28 trillion in U.S. Treasuries, China is easily the biggest foreign holder of American debt. China has also funneled billions of dollars into private American investments…
This isn’t all about the affordable care act. This is about the destruction of the federal government. This is about a few rich people who don’t have enough, and want the federal government out of their way so that they can have an ever larger slice of the pie – all while you get less….
Anyone who remembers the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. little more than five years ago knows what a global financial disaster is. A U.S. government default, just weeks away if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling as it now threatens to do, will be an economic calamity like none the world has ever…
The nation’s banks are reporting record profits, according to new numbers out Wednesday from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Most of the rest of us aren’t faring quite so well. Bank profits topped $40.3 billion in the first three months of the year, according to the FDIC, attesting to a strong recovery… in the…
Gov. Sam Brownback R will soon sign what he calls the “fabulous package” of sales tax hikes and income tax cuts passed by the Republican-dominated legislature over the weekend. The sales tax rate increase will apply to food as well as other purchases, making it even more targeted at the lower end of the…
The economy is holding up well in an age of austerity. “Housing prices rose faster over the past year than they have in the past seven, according to data out Tuesday. Consumer confidence hit its highest level in five years. The stock market rallied another 0.6 percent as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500, leaving…
Texas lawmakers sent Governor Rick Perry more than $1 billion in proposed business tax cuts shortly before the end of the biennial legislative session on Monday. The tax-cut package – the final piece of which was approved by the House and Senate late on Sunday – includes an extension of a business franchise tax…