The Economy

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…