Showing posts with label GDP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GDP. Show all posts

David Harsanyi: Stagnation, The New Normal

The only growth is in Obama's popularity.      So, U.S. consumer confidence unexpectedly plunged in January to its lowest level in more than a year. The U.S. economy unexpectedly posted a contraction in the fourth quarter of 2012 -- for the first time since the recession -- "defying" expectations that economic growth is in our future. If the    ... MORE

AP: GDP Shows Harsh Drop From Government Estimate

The continuing saga of hope and change.    Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — decreased at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 (that is, from the third quarter to the fourth quarter), according to the “advance” estimate    ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Official Lies

Let's expose presidential prevarication. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama warned that Social Security checks will be delayed if Congress fails to increase the government's borrowing authority by raising the debt ceiling. However, there's an issue with this warning. According to the 2012 Social Security trustees report, assets in Social Security's  ... MORE

Voters Kick The Fiscal Can Down The Road

by David Davenport.     After all the money (a campaign spending record exceeding $2 billion), hard work, negative campaigning and wall-to-wall advertising, Americans have voted to kick the can down the road.  They don’t want to take their medicine yet.  They want to continue to live in a suspended reality where government can keep growing and spending ... MORE

Robert Poole: The Libertarian Case For Mitt Romney

He will be significantly less bad than Obama.   Should libertarians like me declare a pox on both major parties’ houses by voting for the Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson? Or should we opt for the Republican Mitt Romney, who I think would be significantly less bad than the Democratic incumbent, Barack Obama? Over the decades since    ... MORE

Obama's Energy Policy Led To Higher Gas Prices

by Dave Juday.     At Tuesday night’s debate, President Obama said gas prices were under two dollars per gallon when he took office because the “economy was on the verge of collapse.” And that if Mitt Romney were elected he “could bring down gas prices, because with his policies we might be back in the same mess.” The inference of President Obama’s      ... MORE

Stella Paul: So This IS What "God Damn America" Looks Like

Jeremiah Wright watches dreams come true. Four years ago, our media overlords assured us that President Empty Chair was really Candidate Empty Pew -- a parishioner who sat for 20 years in Reverend Jeremiah Wright's nutty, hate-mongering church and never heard a single word. "God bless America?  No, no, no!  God d*mn America!" thundered      ... MORE

Investors.com: Better Off? Let's Count The Ways We're Not

No, the country is not making slow progress.      All weekend, Democratic party leaders kept fumbling their answer to a simple question: Are we better off than we were four years ago? There's a good reason for that: We're not. It wasn't until Monday that the campaign was able to figure out how to answer the question, with Obama's deputy campaign   ... MORE

Government Spending Cuts Are Bad For The Economy?

by Tyler Watts.      “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines,” laments the gruff air traffic controller played by Lloyd Bridges in the ribald disaster-spoof Airplane! Facing the tense situation of helping a nerve-wracked pilot safely land a large passenger jet, “Steve McCroskey” could get a performance boost by popping some pep  ... MORE

Why Free Enterprise Is About Morals, Not Materialism

by Arthur Brooks. It's not an easy time to be a free enterprise advocate in America. For years, we thought we had won. After all, almost no self-respecting public figures call themselves socialists anymore. With the advent of the New Democrats, even America's progressive party was on board with free markets and somewhat limited government. The Reagan  ... MORE

Peter Schiff: Economic Reality Bites

The hangover is setting in.   Many people became convinced that data releases earlier this year indicated that "recovery" in the U.S. was imminent. But as I have been saying for months, this evidence would ultimately be shown to be as reliable as sightings of Bigfoot. Lots of people claim to say they have seen it, some even produce plaster footprints, but in the ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Our Nation's Future

The fruits of Congressional overgrazing. Our nation is rapidly approaching a point from which there's little chance to avoid a financial collapse. The heart of our problem can be seen as a tragedy of the commons. That's a set of circumstances when something is commonly owned and individuals acting rationally in their own self-interest   ... MORE

Randall Hoven: In Search Of The Dreaded Austerity

In 2011, all government in the US spent 41.4% of GDP.   To paraphrase Indigo Montoya of Princess Bride: You keep using that word, "austerity." I do not think it means what you think it means. Defining austerity. My 1976 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary includes this definition of austerity: "lack of luxuries: enforced or extreme economy."  ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Devious Taxation

The dynamics of an uneven tax burden.  The Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation does a yeoman's job of keeping track of how much we're paying in taxes and who's paying what. It turns out that American taxpayers worked this year from Jan. 1 to April 17, 107 days, to earn enough money to pay their federal, state and local tax bills. That statistic requires   ... MORE

Veronique de Rugy: Taxation, American Style

The tax code is more progressive than you think.   Americans often tout the contrast between the bloated, tax-funded welfare states of the Old World and our leaner, cheaper government. But the data reveal that the U.S. may be closer to Europe than we think. Contrary to common belief, the American tax system is more progressive than those of  ... MORE

Mark Steyn: The Sun Also Sets

National debt to enter its "sudden" phase. I was in Australia earlier this month and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you’re not ... MORE

Peter Ferrara: Obama Downgraded, Tea Party Vindicated

Only the national debt was stimulated. President Obama achieved the historic downgrading of America's credit rating the old-fashioned way. He earned it. He came into office with federal spending already near an historic peak, with a percent of GDP at 20.7 percent and having increased by one-seventh during the Bush years. One year earlier Bush had joined with then House Speaker ... MORE

Ira Stoll: Five Facts About the Debt

Setting the economic record straight. Five under-appreciated points about the federal budget and debt ceiling:  1. Whenever I need to get my bearings in the debate over the debt, the deficit, or the debt ceiling, I go to the web site of the White House Office of Management and Budget and download historical table 1.3. The story it tells, in very round numbers ... MORE