This past Saturday, my wife Deb and I drove out to the Giant supermarket in Groveton, a neighborhood in the southeastern part of my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia. We were not going to go food shopping. We were going to stand on line at a food bank for federal workers who are ...read more
With relentless misinformation from the likes of Ted Cruz, Fox News and the conservative media machine, you may be under the impression that President Obama has been a complete disaster for jobs in America. Obamacare, socialist government expansion, and handouts to the poor have ...read more
On Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest mortifying statistics on President Barack Hussein Obama's war on jobs, which showed that in February, the unemployment rate ticked down to 5.5 percent, while the economy added 295,000 jobs. Even with the jobs ...read more
Unless you enjoy looking really stupid, you can't logically blame the president for the $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009 and then refuse to give him credit for reducing the deficit to $500 billion at the end of this year. Likewise, you can't shout, "Where are the jobs, Mr. ...read more
Sounds like a certain someone is back on the baby blues. Either Limbaugh is high as a kite, or he's just so desperate to find a reason why the unemployment numbers have reached the lowest point since 2008 that he's resurrected one of the most ludicrous conspiracy theories in ...read more
Last week, America got some good news in the form of a jobs report that showed, among other things, a dip in the unemployment rate to 5.9%, the first time it has been below 6% since July of 2008. In remarks at an Indiana steel plant on Friday, President Obama took a bit of a ...read more
The September jobs report contained great news for the economy, as the unemployment rate fell below 6% for the first time since our current crop of first-graders was born, but Republicans still found the cloudy lining. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy ...read more
During his Reddit AMA on Friday, the incoming host of NBC's Meet the Press, Chuck Todd, was asked about President Obama's legacy. Todd's answer wasn't terrible: He broke an important ceiling — he’ll always be America’s first black president. That is not an insignificant legacy. ...read more
The political news of the day is the just-released June jobs report, in which a better-than-expected 288,000 jobs were added, bringing the unemployment rate down to 6.1%, its lowest level since just before the 2008 economic meltdown. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Total ...read more
The Daily Banter Headline Grab from Huff Post: Despite constant budget fights in Washington, the U.S. economy managed one of the best months for job gains in the past year in February, driving the unemployment rate to its lowest level in more than four years. But the job ...read more
The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From Huff Post: The U.S. House of Representatives will convene on Sunday in a last-minute effort to avoid the steep spending cuts and tax cuts scheduled to take effect at the end of the year. But Sunday will already be too late for long-term ...read more
The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From the WaPo: The unemployment rate dipped and job creation remained steady in November, as the U.S. economy shrugged off any major impact from Hurricane Sandy and showed surprising resilience in the run-up to the fiscal cliff. The November ...read more
This is likely to make the post debate poll numbers even more confusing. From the Guardian: Barack Obama's hopes of holding on to the White House have received a major boost from new figures showing that the US unemployment rate has dropped below 8% for the first time since he ...read more
The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From The AP: WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent last month, dropping below 8 percent for the first time in nearly four years and giving President Barack Obama a potential boost with the election a month away. The ...read more
By Ben Cohen: The field of economics is often referred to as a 'junk science', mostly because it tries to explain human behavior in mathematical terms. This is almost impossible - humans are emotional and irrational, thus predicting their behavior accurately is harder than ...read more
The number of people seeking U.S. unemployment benefits fell to a four-year low last week, suggesting employers kept hiring in March at a healthy pace. Weekly applications dropped 6,000 to a seasonally adjusted 357,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. That's the fewest ...read more
The US economy created 227,000 jobs in February, while the unemployment rate stayed at 8.3%, the lowest level in nearly three years. The Labor Department report also showed that job-creation figures in December and January were even stronger than first estimated. President ...read more
Bob Cesca asks for a reality check: When has deficit reduction ever stimulated economic growth during a difficult recovery, and especially considering the disturbing economic indicators we're experiencing today (sluggish GDP, high unemployment, housing crisis, etc)? Never. ...read more
Richard Wolff describes the economic reality facing most people living in post-crash America: The combination of high unemployment and high home foreclosures assures a deeply depressed economy. The mass of US citizens cannot work more hours – the US already is No 1 in the ...read more
by David Glenn Cox Last winter I wrote a story about the number of people who were dying in house fires after having their utilities turned off. I began to do some research on the growing numbers of tent cities springing up across America. How, I wondered, will ...read more
