On Saturday mornings, I make eggs and bacon for my four children and wife—usually a dozen eggs and most of the package of bacon—before shoveling the kids into the car, hopping into the driver’s seat, and pretending my minivan is a Mustang so that we get to catechism class on time. By the time I…
After the Great Depression, Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover for 30 years—and with great success. Even though Hoover’s policies were anything but market-oriented—he greatly raised spending, taxes, and tariffs in response to the 1929 Wall Street crash—Republicans took the fall for Hooverism. It…
On Friday, the government reported that the economy added 215,000 jobs last month, and that the unemployment rate remained a low 5 percent. That could support a decision by the Federal Reserve Board to raise its key interest rate in September. But the absence of inflation and of a significant…
Prices matter. They are the economists’ canary in the coal mine, an indicator of what is to come. Not necessarily as grim an indicator as when we have here a dead canary, but a pointer that cannot be ignored. When oil prices plummeted, analysts paid attention, hunting for causes and effects. Wages…
The economy might, but only might, be slowing. In March we added only 126,000 jobs, the lowest increase since December 2013, barely enough to absorb new entrants into the workforce. Almost all measures of the health of the labor market -- the unemployment rate, the number of workers jobless for…
Sometimes -- not often, but sometimes -- anecdote is more revealing than data. Especially when the data are subject to major revisions, which is the case with most monthly economic data. This is one of those times. Last week’s jobs report -- 295,00 new nonfarm jobs in February -- was a bit more…
A new chart from the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee shows a startling fact: Almost 1 in 4 Americans between the ages of 25-54 (or prime working years) are not working.
First time claims were expected to be come in at 303,000. The actual number was 298,000. As Shobhana Chandra of Bloomberg reports:
The latest jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Here's a rather harsh assessment of the last four years under the Obama administration's economic policies:
On February 4 the Congressional Budget Office dropped a bombshell. Analysts there found that Obamacare’s structure will create an enormous implicit tax on work, such that people on the lower end of the economic scale will have an incentive to quit their jobs or scale back to part time to maximize…
The celebration of work and the working man and woman feels a little forced this year. Union have, as Kevin Bogardus of The Hill reports:
Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican, is marking Labor Day with a statement lamenting the decline in America’s workforce and the strident push toward passing an immigration bill.
A Census Bureau report released on Tuesday says that the number of households with children under 18 with at least one unemployed parent increased by 33 percent between 2005 and 2011 from 2.4 million to 3.2 million. In addition, home ownership among households with children under 18 declined by 15…
The latest jobs numbers from the the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:
The unemployment rate ticked up, according to new numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Today's big number is non-farm payrolls. And, thus, the unemployment rate for the previous month. The economists surveyed by Reuters called for 145,000 jobs and an unemployment rate at 7.6 percent.
The White House appears sanguine about a jobs report that one of its former economic advisors has described as a "punch to the gut."
The newly released October jobs numbers reveal that, since President Obama signed Obamacare into law in March 2010, we have now gone 31 consecutive months in which fewer than 59 percent of Americans have been employed. The Obama administration’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles such…
With the latest jobs report, it is now the case that "Under Obama, Food Stamp Growth [Is] 75 Times Greater Than Job Creation," according to statistics compiled by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee. "For Every Person Added to Jobs Rolls Since January 2009, 75 People Added To Food…
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the biggest change in employment over the last month affected black workers. In September, the unemployment rate for blacks was 13.4 percent. In October, that number jumped to 14.3 percent, an almost a full percentage point change, according to the…
The unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is now 7.9 percent:
A new chart from the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee details the fact that, since January 2009, for every person added to the labor force, 10 have been added to those not in the labor force. Here's a chart showing the dwindling labor force:
This morning's jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is being met with skepticism. The report found that, from August to September, the unemployment rate dropped from just above 8 percent to 7.8 percent.
In one of President Obama's TV ads, Bill Clinton says that the key question in this election is which candidate can figure out how "to return us to full employment." But as the federal government's own figures show, Obama might want to start by first figuring out how to get us back to the level of…
If the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary policy gurus hoped that Friday’s jobs report would give them solid guidance as to how to set future monetary policy they were sorely disappointed. The jobs situation neither deteriorated sufficiently to justify another round of easing, nor improved…
President Obama likes to say that he inherited a terrible economy but has gotten it headed in the right direction. But the employment figures released today by the federal government’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics tell a decidedly different story. During the final month of the 2008-09 recession,…
The unemployment rate increased to 8.3 percent, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On C-SPAN's Washington Journal recently, a Democratic member of Congress, Rosa DeLauro, said that the increase of food stamps usage has to do with the "rough economy" and the fact that real unemployment is higher than 8.2 percent. The 8.2 percent number is the one offered by the federal Bureau of…
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke told a congressional committee today that "the reduction in the unemployment rate seems likely to be frustratingly slow":
A new chart set to be released by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee details an alarming fact: In the last three months, more Americans have joined disability than have found a job:
Last week I wrote a long exegesis on microtasking and the future of temporary, remote workers. I only dabbled in microtasking on Amazon's Mechanical Turk exchange, but reader D. Bush uses it often and writes in about her experience:
For 280 consecutive months before President Obama took office — a span of more than 23 years — the portion of Americans who were employed always exceeded 60.0 percent (according to official tallies from the Bureau of Labor Statistics). In marked contrast, last Friday’s jobs numbers show that, under…
A surrogate for President Obama's reelection campaign, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a member of the president's cabinet, says that "we've turned the corner" on the economy:
The Republican National Committee has released this web ad, which hits President Obama--because, under his leadership, "Hispanics are left suffering disproportionately under his economic policies," according to an RNC press release.
Charles Krauthammer seeks a full-time research assistant for one or two year tenure. Send resume to job@charleskrauthammer.com.
President Obama, speaking this afternoon in Cleveland, seemed to celebrate the unemployment rate of 8.1 percent, and said it "typically take[s] countries up to ten years to recover from financial crises of this magnitude."
The latest Mitt Romney campaign web advertisement asks, "Has there ever been a president so out of touch with the middle class?"
Much has been made of Barack Obama’s comment Friday morning that the “private sector is doing fine.” The mockery is well-deserved.
At this point in 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was running for reelection, the Yankees’ 24-year-old Mickey Mantle was on his way to winning the Triple Crown, 37-year-old Jackie Robinson was playing in his final season in the big leagues (eventually helping Brooklyn edge the Milwaukee Braves…
Everybody is worried about the nation’s dismal employment situation, and that worry has prompted news organizations, pundits, market watchers, and others to focus intently upon any and all economic metrics that gauge the problem. On the first Friday of every month, the non-farm payroll report from…
The federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes monthly tallies for the employment-population ratio. That stat shows something rather straightforward: Among those who are living in America and are free to pursue employment, what percentage are employed? (The bureau excludes those…
We all suspected this was the case, but you're always surprised when one of the most powerful Democrats in the country just comes out and demonstrates the extent to which his party is beholden to public sector union campaign cash:
When even the New York Times is forced to confront reality, you know things are bad:
John Merline of Investor's Business Daily interviews Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot. Marcus tells IBD that Home Depot "would never have succeeded" as a retail business if it were founded today because of the regulatory burden. Here's a taste of the interview:
For the last year or two, USA Today has really been doing some terrific analysis on the federal workforce, and as you might expect, much of what they've discovered is pretty damning. The latest:
White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee on Friday cautioned against overreading a dismal June unemployment report showing just 18,000 jobs added. Don’t “read too much into any one monthly jobs report,” he said.
On Sunday, I noted that an estimate from President Obama’s own economists shows that the economic “stimulus” has cost taxpayers $278,000 per job and that, without the “stimulus,” 288,000 additional jobs would have been added or saved over the past six months. Yesterday, the White House fired back.…
Talking Points Memo (and the rest of the left) are in a tizzy over John Boehner's comments yesterday about the effect of GOP budget cuts on federal workers: