Tag Archives: Topic: Economy

Washington Times: Such continuously high unemployment is a central aspect of the declining standard of living for middle class Americans in the Obama era. During the recession that Obama (mostly) inherited, the real median income of American households fell 3.2 percent. During the “recovery” over which Obama has presided, the real median income of American households has fallen an additional 6.7 percent.

AP: Unemployment in France is 10 percent, but nearly 23 percent for those under the age of 25 . . . In Spain, youth unemployment is over 52 percent; it’s 34 percent in Italy.

Heritage Foundation: A survey by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) in July revealed that small businesses’ top three concerns were taxes, regulations, and poor sales. A quick look at these top three small business struggles shows they have every reason to be demoralized . . .

NCPA Policy Digest: The persistent inability of the Fed to stimulate aggregate demand makes it difficult to escape the reality that the U.S. economy is stuck in a liquidity trap.

NCPA Policy Digest: For instance, if a pipeline in Phoenix were to burst and prevent supplies to the city, Phoenix could not look to Tucson for supplies because there are different EPA standards for the blend of fuels they each use.

Star Parker at the World Net Daily: Akin has served six terms in Congress with a consistent, unblemished conservative record. The fact that leaders of his own party joined hands with liberals, thereby legitimizing them, and body slammed Akin microseconds after his unfortunate and easily disabused remark, shows there’s more going on. What’s going on is these influential Republicans don’t want any kind of discussion about abortion. This campaign, in their view, is supposed to just be about the lousy economy.

Financial Times: Drafts of the party platform, which it will adopt at a convention in Tampa Bay, Florida, next week, call for an audit of Federal Reserve monetary policy and a commission to look at restoring the link between the dollar and gold.

The Hill: The Pew Research Center found that median income for the middle class dropped by 5 percent, in the first decade since World War II where family incomes declined across the board. In a decade that saw both recession and a financial crisis, median wealth for the middle class dropped even more sharply, by some 28 percent.

Bloomberg: . . . Americans have had fewer babies each year since the 2008 financial meltdown, with births falling to a 12-year low in 2011, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The low birth rate and reduced immigration resulted in the smallest gain in population since World War II, which may hurt spending on everything from Huggies diapers to pregnancy kits, child care and education.

AP: A voting member of the Federal Reserve’s policy committee is cautioning that the Fed’s power to fix the U.S. economy is limited now. Jeffrey Lacke . . .

Conservative Home Tory Diary: When the Government first flirted with the idea of relaxing Sunday trading laws my colleague Paul Goodman was very unimpressed. Is this the most anti-Christian government in British history?, he asked. But it’s not just churchgoers who don’t like the idea. By 52% to 36% most Britons oppose further deregulation of Sunday opening.

Christian Institute: The Government is to consider making extended Olympic Sunday trading hours permanent, but critics are concerned about the impact on families.

NCPA Policy Digest: New reports suggest America is not only hurting economically under President Obama, but also on a dangerous road to fiscal decline and growing dependence on government, says Investor’s Business Daily. Here are just a few recent reports about the alarming growth in dependency . . .

Yahoo Finance: a Chinese business magazine said a state bank has provided $1 billion in loans to help companies with listings abroad move them to domestic exchanges . . . The withdrawals follow accusations of improper accounting by some companies and a deadlock between Beijing and Washington over whether U.S. regulators can oversee their China-based auditors. Some Chinese companies say they are pulling out of U.S. markets because a low share price fails to reflect the strength of their business. Withdrawing also eliminates the cost of complying with American financial reporting rules.

CNSNews: report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that lifting the ban on federal oil drilling in certain areas could increase U.S. petroleum reserves by 30 percent, including an estimated 8 billion barrels of oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

NCPA Policy Digest: The cost of tuition alone has soared from 23 percent of median annual earnings in 2001 to 38 percent in 2010.

Washington Times: . . . You have warned that civilizations fail and the reason they fail is plain. “When civilizational virtues are eroded from within, people lose the capacity to defend the good things those habits enabled previous generations to achieve,” you explain, and cite ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and 1930s Germany as examples. Millions are afraid the United States is heading down the same doomed path. Is that indeed a danger, and what do Americans need to do to pull a U-turn back in the right direction? Sirico: While I do not wish to overstate the crisis we as a nation and a culture are facing, it is, I believe, quite apparent things are seriously off-kilter. Nor is this an observation from one side of the political spectrum — it is a general sense people have.

Weekly Standard: A new chart set to be released later today by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee details a startling statistic: “Over 100 Million People in U.S. Now Receiving Some Form Of Federal Welfare.”

NY Times: President François Hollande is vowing to impose a 75 percent tax on the portion of anyone’s income above a million euros ($1.24 million) a year.

AP: The University of Virginia, a top-ranked law school, hired 17 percent of its 377 graduates in 2011. The school has a 95 percent rate of fulltime employment in positions requiring bar admission. Subtract those graduates whose salaries are being paid by their alma mater, and it drops to 78 percent. “It’s a Ponzi scheme, in almost a literal sense,” said Paul Campos, who teaches at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. “You’re taking money from current students and paying it to unemployed graduates.”

Christian Post: Jimmy LaSalvia is the executive director and co-founder of GOProud, a Republican group of straight and gay conservatives who advocate for conservative principles but support same-sex marriage. He feels the main reason party officials are not touting the same-sex marriage issue is that most Americans are more concerned about the economy.

Findlaw: The days of tax-free shopping on the Internet may be coming to an end. Congress seems poised to pass an Internet tax law, the Marketplace Fairness Act, that allows states to force online companies to tax their customers.

AP: After a final day of partisan battles over drought relief and cybersecurity, members of Congress streamed out of the Capitol looking forward to five weeks of vacation and a fall fraught with decisions on the political and economic future of the country.

CNBC: The government’s most widely publicized unemployment rate measures only those who are out of a job and currently looking for work . . . or that count, the government releases a separate number called the “U-6,” which provides a more complete tally of how many people really are out of work. The numbers in some cases are startling.

Guardian: America’s largest car firm made $1.5bn in the second quarter of 2012, with European division reporting operating loss of $361m

Jim DeMint at Our nation was born from the idea of “no taxation without representation”—that citizens should not be taxed by governments in which they have no political voice. Yet now lawmakers in Washington want to overturn that bedrock principle in order to extract more revenues from American consumers. The Marketplace Fairness Act recently introduced in the Senate would require online retailers to collect and pay sales taxes to states where they have no physical presence or democratic recourse.

CNSNews: President Obama is trying to prevent thousands of layoff notices from going out a few days before the November election, Sen. Jame Inhofe (R-Okla.) said on Tuesday.

Wall Street Journal: Some schools are having so much trouble filling their seats that they are negotiating scholarships, accepting some applications long after formal deadlines, and offering up other perks to entice the best prospective students.

Heritage Foundation: Yesterday, the Senate narrowly voted (51-48) to raise taxes on 1.2 million small businesses, which will likely kill more than 700,000 jobs at a time when nearly 13 million Americans are out of work. Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Jim Webb (D-VA) joined all Republicans in bipartisan opposition to the tax hike.

NCPA Policy Digest: With regard to wealth insecurity, Rank finds that workers between the ages of 25 and 60 experience vast changes in income over time, and that this exposes them to a wide variety of economic conditions . . . By age 60, nearly 77 percent of Americans will have lived in a household earning more than $100,000 for at least one year.

NCPA Policy Digest: Many suburban communities have long made it difficult, or impossible, for homeowners to convert underused space — barns, garages and basements — into rental apartments. But across the United States, homeowners are pressing for changes in zoning laws to allow rentals while home builders report a rise in demand for houses with in-law suites or quarters with separate entry, says the Wall Street Journal.

National Law Journal: The median starting salary has dropped by 17 percent since 2009, according to NALP, and the average salary has decreased by 16 percent.

Cong. Ron Paul: The true evil of inflation is that newly created money benefits politically favored financial interests, especially banks, on the front end. Over time, however, the net result of monetary inflation is always the devaluation of savings and purchasing power. This devaluation discourages saving, which is the key to capital accumulation and investment in a healthy economy. Inflation also tends to hurt seniors and those living on fixed incomes the most.

Trial Insider: It appears two U.S. Senators’ criticism of spending for a Maui judicial conference in August by the the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals paid off. The court announced it was calling off its 2013 conference set for Monterey, Calif. and pushing it back to 2014. | Related post at How Appealing with a new letter to the court and additional coverage.

The Hill: Nearly half (47 percent) of likely voters believe it is impossible for them to become wealthy in the course of their lifetime, according to a new poll for The Hill.

Arthur B. Laffer and Ford M. Scudder at the Wall Street Journal: The United States faces an economic collapse thanks to massive tax increases on Jan. 1, and continued deficit spending for years on end.

National Law Journal: The dismal job market for newly minted lawyers has influenced how most law school administrators approach their course offerings, with 76 percent of the institutions surveyed by the American Bar Association reporting that they’ve modified their curricula to adapt.

Findlaw: Law firms have long been the training ground for new attorneys while in-house positions are generally for associates with several years of experience. The rationale is that new graduates don’t have the practical skills to dive into legal practice. In-house counsel don’t have time to provide training on both how to be corporate counsel AND how to practice corporate law. But that problem might be solved as more law schools focus on practical coursework.

AP: “I believe that if you understood who I truly am in my heart, and if it were possible to fully communicate what I believe is in the real, enduring best interest of African-American families, you would vote for me for president,” Romney will tell the NAACP’s annual meeting, according to excerpts of his speech that were released early by his campaign.

Politico: “It is interesting that when it comes to outsourcing that this president has been outsourcing a good deal of American jobs himself by putting money into energy companies, solar and wind energy companies, that end up making their products outside the United States,” Romney said. “If there’s an outsourcer in chief, it’s the president of the United States, not the guy that’s running to replace him.”

LA TIMES: The city’s fiscal crisis has been years in the making, compounded by the nation’s crushing recession and exacerbated by escalating pension costs, lucrative labor agreements, Sacramento’s raid on redevelopment funds and a city reserve that is tapped out, officials said.

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy has published some frightening numbers.

BBC: The number of new UK graduates working in jobs like cleaning or bar work has almost doubled to 10,000 in five years, according to government statistics.

PR Newswire: In 2010, U.S. businesses with paid employees numbered 7.4 million, a decline of 36,800 establishments from 2009, marking the third consecutive year of decline, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In comparison, between 2008 and 2009 there was a decline of 168,000 establishments. These findings are from County Business Patterns: 2010 . . .

KGW.com: In opting to become the nation’s largest city to seek federal bankruptcy protection, this river port of 290,000 took a rare financial step of last resort after struggling with the economic downturn, soaring pension costs and contractual obligations.

Detroit News: The Treasury Department estimates the taxpayers will lose enormous sums in the auto bailout — more than $20 billion. That is more than Michigan spends on public education, more than the federal government spends on NASA, and more than America gives in foreign aid. None of these losses were necessary to keep General Motors and Chrysler in business. The entire net cost of the bailout came from subsidizing the United Auto Workers’ pay and benefits.

The Hill: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called on companies to issue hundreds of thousands of layoff notices to workers threatened by an impending $500 billion in automatic defense cuts to highlight the danger of sequestration.

National Law J. on Law.com: Slightly more than half of the class of 2011 — 55 percent — found full-time, long-term jobs that require bar passage nine months after they graduated, according to employment figures released on June 18 by the American Bar Association.

Wall Street Journal: Members of the law-school class of 2011 had little better than a 50-50 shot of landing a job as a lawyer within nine months of receiving a degree, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of new data that provides the most detailed picture yet of the grim market for law jobs.

NCPA Policy Digest: A silent victim of the last two recessions, teen unemployment has hit record levels since 2001. This trend is especially noticeable during the summer months, which are a traditional time of the year when teens head to work in droves, enabled by freedom from school and openings in seasonal employment. Recent labor statistics, however, suggest that this pattern has been largely disrupted, says the Sacramento Bee.

National Law Journal: The American Bar Association and NALP are not “indispensible absent parties” to a proposed fraud class action brought by 12 recent graduates against the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, a federal judge has ruled.

AP: Asia’s millionaires outnumbered North America’s for the first time last year

NCPA Policy Digest: According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), the annual cost of complying with federal regulations has exceeded $1 trillion since around 2005.

Elizabeth Marquardt at Family Scholars: The United Nations is apparently atwitter over the fact that more parents — or, let’s be real, single mothers — are abandoning infants in so-called “baby boxes” at hospitals across Europe.

AP: Here’s a look at the 10 states with the lowest funding percentages in 2010, according a new report from the Pew Center on the States . . .

AP: At least 21 states, including Arizona, Michigan and Ohio, are putting parts of their surpluses into reserves . . .

NCPA Policy Digest: This concern, that current joblessness woes signal permanently higher structural unemployment, would have drastic implications for the health of the economy if found to be true.  However, several other theories remain for why the current fragile recovery may not be an indication of larger problems.

Mirror of Justice: Along with the bleak jobs picture, the class of 2011 emerged with a mountain of debt. The debt is every bit as high at Catholic law schools as anywhere else. Here is the average debt for 2011 graduates of Catholic law schools . . .

Findlaw: Nearly one-third (32 percent) of lawyers interviewed for the quarterly Robert Half Legal Hiring Index plan to hire full-time legal staff during the third quarter of 2012, while just two percent anticipate staff reductions.

AP: Fewer than three in 10 American teenagers now hold jobs such as running cash registers, mowing lawns or busing restaurant tables from June to August.

Investors.com: Private-sector jobs are still down by 4.6 million, or 4%, from January 2008, when overall employment peaked. Meanwhile government jobs are down just 407,000, or 1.8%. Federal employment actually is 225,000 jobs above its January 2008 level, an 11.4% increase. That’s right, up 11.4%.

NY Times: The median family, richer than half of the nation’s families and poorer than the other half, had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010, down from $126,400 in 2007, the Fed said. The crash of housing prices explained three-quarters of the loss. This vast loss of wealth was compounded by a loss of income, as the earnings of the median family fell by 7.7 percent over the same period.

LA Times: Congressional GOP leaders launched an orchestrated round of attacks on President Obama’s assessment that private companies are doing “fine” in the sluggish economy, essentially ridiculing the White House’s assertion that it is the public sector that needs government support to keep teachers, firefighters and other employees on the job.

Findlaw: Of the 2011 graduates who found jobs, only 65.4% landed jobs that require bar passage — an all-time low in the NALP survey.

Kay S. Hymowitz at LA Times: The single-mother revolution has been an economic catastrophe for women. Poverty remains relatively rare among married couples with children; the U.S. census puts only 8.8% of them in that category, up from 6.7% since the start of the Great Recession. But more than 40% of single-mother families are poor, up from 37% before the downturn. In the bottom quintile of earnings, most households are single people, many of them elderly. But of the two-fifths of bottom-quintile households that are families, 83% are headed by single mothers. The Brookings Institution’s Isabel Sawhill calculates that virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates.

The Hill: A dismal May jobs report is being perceived as a possible game-changer in the presidential battle between President Obama and Mitt Romney, with Republicans saying the numbers provide further proof that the economy isn’t improving.

CNBC: America’s millionaire population declined last year for the first time since the financial crisis, according to a new report.

Heritage Foundation: One year ago, the state of Wisconsin adopted sweeping reforms that curbed collective bargaining rights among government workers, brought the state’s pension system into line, and empowered those workers to choose whether or not to pay union dues. A firestorm of opposition erupted among public sector unions. But despite all the rhetoric, the reforms did not spell doomsday for government workers.

CNBC: Home prices fell in the first quarter to new post-crisis lows, but prices were up in March from February for the first time in seven months.

NCPA Policy Digest: Federal regulations cost hundreds of billions — perhaps trillions — of dollars every year over and above the costs of the official federal outlays that dominate the policy debate.

Bloomberg: Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) is considering cutting as many as 25,000 jobs, or 8 percent of its workforce, to reduce costs and help the company contend with ebbing demand for computers and services, people briefed on the plans said.

The Hill: President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) clashed during a White House meeting on Wednesday, with the Speaker telling the president that he was “not going to allow a debt ceiling increase without doing something serious about the debt,” Boehner’s office said.

NY Times: Hundreds of millions of dollars meant to provide a little relief to the nation’s struggling homeowners is being diverted to plug state budget gaps.

NCPA Policy Digest: But a new Gallup study reinforces what people intuitively know: recessions do not hurt everyone equally. Specifically, this economy has been particularly harmful to young people (ages 18-29), who have even bleaker job prospects than their more-experienced counterparts.

AP: The U.S. trade deficit rose in March at the fastest rate in 10 months. A rise in consumer goods lifted imports to a record level, outpacing a solid gain in U.S. exports.