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The US Treasury Department must publish a report listing the financial assets of Iran’s leaders, under a bill that passed the US House of Representatives this week. The bill, which passed by a vote of 289-135, must still pass the US Senate before President Trump can decide whether or not to sign it into law. This legislation previously was stymied when President Obama declared that he would veto it if it got to his desk. Leading the charge for the Iranian side was Maxine Waters…

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is asking the public to weigh in on whether it should keep or scrap a controversial Obama-era rule that speeds up union elections. Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have been pushing the NLRB to roll back the rule, which allows elections to be held in as few as 10 days from the filing of a petition. Opponents have dubbed it the “ambush election rule,” claiming it gives employers little notice of an election and almost no time to discuss the issues with their workers. “The rule is heavily, heavily slanted to...

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.....The struggling sandwich chain has seen customer traffic plummet a whopping 25 percent over the past five years.... In a Nov. 30 memo to franchisees that revealed the stomach-churning drop, Subway’s owners promised $25 million to boost marketing this spring for the company’s 44,000 locations and to bring back a limited-time, $4.99 footlong sandwich promotion..... ....the crucial footlong deal — aimed squarely at the McDonald’s dollar menu — is in danger because of a revolt by franchise owners, who fret that doubling down on discounts will further shave their already thin profits. More than 400 of them have signed a...

U.S. retail sales increased more than expected in November as the holiday shopping season got off to a brisk start, pointing to sustained strength in the economy. The Commerce Department said on Thursday that retail sales rose 0.8 percent last month. Data for October was revised to show sales gaining 0.5 percent instead of the previously reported 0.2 percent rise.

When Ronald Reagan slashed tax rates in America in the 1980s, the obvious direct effect was more prosperity in America.But the under-appreciated indirect effect of Reaganomics was that it helped generate more prosperity elsewhere in the world.Not because Americans had higher income and could buy more products from home and abroad (though that is a nice fringe benefit), but rather because the Reagan tax cuts triggered a virtuous cycle of tax competition. Politicians in other countries had to lower their tax rates because of concerns that jobs and investment were migrating to America (Margaret Thatcher also deserves some credit since...

Bob Iger (R), CEO of Walt Disney Co. and Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp. Disney to buy 21st Century Fox assets in a deal worth more than $52 billion in stock 54 Mins Ago | 03:52 Disney on Thursday announced a deal to acquire many parts of Twenty-First Century Fox for $52.4 billion in stock. The company will get Fox's movie studios, network Nat Geo, Asian pay-TV operator Star TV, stakes in Sky and Hulu and regional sports networks. The acquisition bolsters Disney's plans to become a dominant streaming service platform, making it a bigger threat to...

It's that time of year again, when millions of Americans travel to visit friends and family for the holidays. The experience will be a headache for many, thanks in part to the government's security theater, though also due to unfriendly airline practices. But believe it or not, it can get worse.22 High-profile public relations disasters, often dealing with overbooked flights, show that the airline industry has room to improve customer service. However, it has improved on many metrics since the industry was deregulated in 1978, most notably on affordability. Even taking into account recent fee increases, the post-deregulation cost of...

About a year into President Donald Trump's first term, the jury for much of the country and for most of the major media has returned its verdict: Trump is a failure. Trump is incompetent. Trump cannot lead. Trump has no legislative victories. Even former President Jimmy Carter said he had never seen a president so maligned in the media. Meanwhile former President Barack Obama all but compared Trump to Hitler. Trump endures a nightly beating from the cast of late-night comedians who take turns calling Trump racist, sexist, dumb, inarticulate, overweight, overwrought and, of course, clueless. His reported consumption of...

Pilot Yousef Dajah widely praised in Jordan after he told his passengers that their Amman-NY flight path would take them over “Jerusalem, capital of Palestine”; “He knew there were many Americans on the flight, but he did it anyway,” says co-pilot.The pilot of a Royal Jordanian fight enjoyed praise in his country after he announced to passengers on the in-flight PA system that the plane was flying over “Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine” and along the Palestine Mediterranean coast. His announcement on flight RJ216 from Amman to NYC was greeted with enthusiastic applause by the passengers and a recording of...

Captain’s Decisions, Shipping Company’s Poor Safety Oversight Led to Sinking, the NTSB Says The deadliest shipping disaster involving a U.S.-flagged vessel in more than 30 years was caused by a captain’s failure to avoid sailing into a hurricane despite numerous opportunities to route a course away from the hazardous weather, the National Transportation Safety Board announced during a public meeting Tuesday.

Apple is pouring $390 million into an American company that helps power AirPods and FaceID -- an investment that will create 500 jobs in Texas. The money will come from a $1 billion fund that Apple established earlier this year to boost U.S. manufacturing jobs. Apple says the cash will help Finisar, a chip maker, restart a 700,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Sherman, Texas, by the second half of next year. The new plant will create 500 "high-skill" jobs. Finisar produces "vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers" (VCSELs), which power some Apple's newest features, including Face ID, Animoji, Portrait mode selfies and AirPods. The...

A decision on Wednesday that the Bundestag’s 709 members get a pay raise next June when average wage trends are calculated drew criticism from a tax austerity lobby group as well as the outer edges of the political spectrum. The Federation of Taxpayers (BdSt), which leans toward supporting businesses, said the planned rise gave the “wrong signal” while Germany remained without a new federal government in the wake of its September 24 election. The system of automatized adjustments designed to answer criticism of self-service and first practiced in July 2016 gives a newly constituted Bundestag only three months into its...

Fed up with the NFL’s ongoing national anthem protests, one fan has attempted to strike back by filing a suit against the New Orleans Saints in the hopes of recouping the thousands of dollars he spent on season tickets to the team’s games. Louisiana resident Lee Dragna filed a suit in a district court Monday “seeking a refund for the tickets as well as attorney’s fees, claiming the protest by some players against police brutality and racial injustice has prevented him and his family from enjoying the games,” reported the The New Orleans Advocate. Despite spending $8,000 on season tickets,...

Wall Street Journal: The Prairie State lost a record $4.75 billion in adjusted gross income to other states in the 2015 tax year, according to recently IRS data released. That's up from $3.4 billion in the prior year. Many of the migrants were retirees who often flock to balmier climes. But millennials accounted for more than a third of the net outflow in tax returns. While Florida with zero income tax was the top destination for Illinois expatriates, the Illinois Policy Institute notes that Illinois lost income and people on net to all of its neighbors – Wisconsin (6,000 people...

The number of Americans severely behind on payments on federal student loans reached roughly 4.6 million in the third quarter, a doubling from four years ago, despite a historically long stretch of U.S. job creation and steady economic growth. In the third quarter alone, the count of such defaulted borrowers—defined by the government as those who haven’t made a payment in at least a year—grew by nearly 274,000, according to Education Department data released Tuesday. The total number of defaulted borrowers represents about 22% of the Americans who were required to be paying down their federal student loans as of...

GOP leaders on Wednesday agreed on a final tax cut plan that would lower the corporate rate to 21% and drop the top individual rate to 37%, according to a Republican source briefed on the deal. Earlier House and Senate versions of the measure would have lowered the corporate rate to 20%, but in reconciling the two plans, leaders needed to nudge up the corporate rate in order to pay for benefits elsewhere.

American Democrats are following Bernie Sanders in embracing single-payer health care on the Canadian model. But when they get sick, our neighbors to the north increasingly find that the only way to get “free” medical care is to wait for weeks or months. The Fraser Institute’s new report, “Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada” in 2017, documents the problem. The Vancouver-based think tank surveyed physicians in 12 specialties across 10 provinces and found “a median waiting time of 21.2 weeks between referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment.” This is worse than 2016’s wait...

Senior Republican negotiators were close to reaching a deal Tuesday to reduce the tax rate for high-income households from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, blowing past political concerns about aiding the rich in order to ease passage of a $1.5 trillion tax package.

The Federal Communications Commission took a big step in November toward undoing the 2015 Open Internet Order and its vague, over-broad regulations by proposing the Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIFO). This order is expected to pass this week in a party-line vote. In an era of debilitating partisanship, it’s almost shocking to recall that a Republican Congress and President Clinton worked together in the ’90s to establish the permissionless regime that enabled both internet providers and large tech companies to transform our economy. The visionary agreement codified in the 1996 Telecommunications Act declared it “the policy of the United States”...