Free Republic

There are various dueling popular narratives about what drives economic growth in a city or region. One narrative focuses on business climate factors such as taxes and regulation. Others stress the importance of locally available talent or affordable housing and commercial property. But the reality is that economic growth is multi-factorial. There’s no single component that drives every outcome. Places have to pay attention to many things, not just one. Consider, for example, the recent announcement that the investment management firm AllianceBernstein will relocate its headquarters and more than 1,000 jobs from New York City to Nashville. If talent were...

The DNC has voted not to accept any donations from fossil fuel companies. From HuffPost: The resolution ― proposed by Christine Pelosi, a party activist and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter ― bars the organization from accepting contributions from corporate political action committees tied to the oil, gas and coal industries. The executive committee voted unanimously to approve the motion. “We talk about how climate change is real and climate change is a planetary emergency, what we need to do is stop taking money from the institutions that have created this crisis,” said RL Miller, president of the super...

For a nation accustomed to instant gratification, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a winner.Before President Donald Trump even signed the bill, companies were announcing employee pay raises, bonuses, and increased investments to grow their businesses and bring operations back from overseas.Among the first out of the gate was AT&T, which said it would give $1,000 bonuses to more than 200,000 nonmanagement employees and make an additional $1 billion investment in the United States. Boeing put $100 million toward training, education, and other workforce development. Walmart expanded paid parental leave and boosted starting wages to $11 an hour.Then in...

The Trickle-Down Mythmaking Begins Several companies gave out raises after tax cuts passed Congress. But that was probably already going to happen anyway. After Congressional Republicans passed their $1.5 trillion package of tax cuts on Wednesday, a number of companies responded by announcing raises or bonuses for their workers. Comcast said it would give $1,000 bonuses to more than 100,000 workers. Fifth Third Bancorp said it would give out bonuses and boost its minimum wage, with the cut giving the bank, in its words, “the opportunity to reevaluate its compensation structure and share some of those benefits with its talented...

Thanks to our society’s narrow standards of beauty, women are expected to have no body hair whatsoever (except, of course, on their head). But after being fed up with how much time it took to shave, one fitness blogger decided to throw away her razor and embrace her natural beauty instead. In a YouTube video that has now been viewed more than 460,000 times, Morgan Mikenas revealed that she hasn’t shaved her legs or armpits in over a year! “The purpose of this video is not to shame people who do shave,” Mikenas wrote in the video's info section. “I...

WASHINGTON, Oct 10 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said he has prepared an "economic-development" measure that would punish companies that globally outsource jobs. The bill would provide economic incentives for companies, Trump said in an interview published on Tuesday, and reward firms that maintain jobs in the United States, and deliver punitive measures against those that move operations offshore. "It's both a carrot and a stick," Trump said. "It is an incentive to stay. But it is perhaps even more so - if you leave, it's going to be very tough for you to think that you're going to...

The secret group of left-wing foundations and millionaire donors to an anti-Trump “resistance” group has been revealed to include the left-wing W.K. Kellogg Foundation, according to a report.

California's $54 billion plan to fix roads and fund highway improvements cleared a major hurdle late Thursday, passing in the state legislature and setting the stage for what could become a massive spending spree. Positive comments last week from analysts about the state transportation plan sent shares of several construction-related companies sharply higher. Some of them continued to trend higher this week and with passage in both houses of the legislature it's possible they could rally Friday. Analysts have suggested beneficiaries of the state spending could include Summit Materials, a construction materials producer, and AECOM, an engineering firm. Summit's stock...

Much has been written about the United Airlines fiasco which occurred on Sunday involving passenger Dr. David Dao. As you are well aware, United needed to find room on the flight for some of its employees, so the airline “re-accommodated” Dao by dragging him out of the plane and injuring him in the process. Hopefully, United will learn from their egregious blunder.But let’s not act as if they’re the worst company in America. Here are five companies which are worse than United.After bloodthirsty Planned Parenthood, clearly the worst of all, these are in no particular order.Planned ParenthoodYou can’t get...

Trump warned companies of “retribution or consequences” for leaving the U.S. Donald Trump warned U.S. companies of “retribution or consequences,” such as a massive tariff, if they leave the country. In a series of early morning tweets Sunday, Trump said companies with offshore factories would face a 35% tax on products they want to sell back in the U.S. “The U.S. is going to substantialy [sic] reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will...

Almost all of the companies in the S&P 500 (^GSPC) have announced their quarterly earnings, and now Wall Street’s number crunchers are finalizing their conclusions as to what actually happened during the last three months of 2015. Unfortunately, it’s become an increasingly challenging task to understand the true financial performance of the big publicly traded companies because of the widening of something called the “GAAP gap.” Don’t worry: this topic isn’t as scary a concept as it sounds. In a nutshell, there’s a standard known as generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, which encourages some uniformity in how companies will...

Here's a story you'll be hearing about a lot this year. Chinese companies have been buying up foreign businesses -- including American ones -- at a record rate, and it's freaking out lawmakers. There is General Electric's sale of its appliance business to Qingdao-based Haier, Zoomlion's bid for the heavy-lifting-equipment maker Terex Corporation, and ChemChina's record-breaking deal for the Swiss seeds and pesticides group Syngenta, valued at $48 billion. Most recently, a unit of the Chinese conglomerate HNA Group on Wednesday said it would buy the technology distributor Ingram Micro for $6 billion. And the most contentious deal so far...

AT LEAST six of Britain's 10 biggest multinationals -- including Shell, British American Tobacco (BAT) and Lloyds Banking Group -- paid no UK corporation tax in 2014 despite combined global profits of more than £30bn. The disclosure comes as the Tories are embroiled in a row over a deal with Google that allowed it to pay just £130m in corporation tax since 2005. The other companies that paid no UK corporation tax in 2014 were Lloyds, brewer SABMiller and drugs company AstraZeneca. BP and drugs company Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) declined to reveal how much UK corporation tax they paid,...

Most folks probably think of the State Transportation Infrastructure Bank as just that – a bank that finances major highway and bridge projects. S.C. Rep. Chip Limehouse, R-Charleston and a member of the Infrastructure Bank (STIB) Board of Directors, described the bank, created by the Legislature in 1997, as a “funding arm” in a recent (Charleston) Post & Courier story. But in addition to providing funding to the state Department of Transportation and local governments, STIB in recent years also has assumed the role of a general contractor or project manager, paying millions of dollars directly to certain companies for...

In the wake of two videos allegedly showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of aborted fetal body parts, Republicans in Congress are working to ensure that Planned Parenthood is stripped of its federal funding. However, it’s not only the government that fills Planned Parenthood’s coffers. According to 2nd Vote, a website and app that tracks the flow of money from consumers to political causes, more than 25 percent of Planned Parenthood’s $1.3-billion annual revenue comes from private donations, which includes corporate contributions. 2nd Vote researched the corporations and organizations to find which supported Planned Parenthood and found that more...

It's not about finding workers; it's about finding the right workers.According to the latest supplemental survey from the New York Fed's manufacturing and business leaders surveys, employers in the New York area are facing two main problems: finding workers who can show up on time and workers who can hold a conversation.The survey showed that in April, 65% of manufacturing employers had difficulty finding punctual workers and 60% had trouble finding workers with interpersonal skills.Among business leaders, a broader survey group, 42% had trouble finding punctual workers while about 48% had trouble finding workers with interpersonal skills. These results also...

Do you dream of earning a six figure paycheck? If so, Glassdoor has compiled its newest report identifying America’s 15 Highest Paying Companies, in which the median annual total compensation starts at more than $140,000. This report evaluates salary and compensation information shared by employees over the past year on Glassdoor. The ranking of companies by median total compensation takes into account annual base salary, cash and stock bonuses, commissions and other forms of financial income. Check out the top 15 companies below, along with insights from Glassdoor Chief Economist Dr. Andrew Chamberlain explaining why these companies pay so well....

Companies like Netflix and Google aren't just fun places to work. They're also two of the highest-paying employers in the US. Glassdoor, an online jobs and careers community, just released a new report which identifies the 15 companies with the highest median total compensation — which includes base salary and other forms of income, such as commissions, tips, and bonuses — as reported by US-based employees on the Glassdoor website over the past year. Turns out the average employee at the No. 1 company, New York-based law firm Skadden Arps, rakes in over $180,00 a year. That's nearly four times...

Recently, I have been having a bit of a back-and-forth with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich about labor markets (his, mine, his). While Secretary Reich stands out for obvious reasons, he is hardly alone in terms of criticizing my past columns about jobs and labor markets (if you want to join in, see my positions, for example, here, here, and here). Basically, the two main issues are that many people want jobs to serve as a delivery mechanism for social welfare benefits while I (and other conservatives) would prefer to keep the two separate and that liberals seem to have...

<p>Not only is the American population aging, businesses in the U.S. also are growing older.</p> <p>Older firms are increasingly controlling the largest market share in different sectors of the economy, according to a paper by the Brooking Institution’s Robert E. Litan and Ennsyte Economics’s Ian Hathaway. By 2011, the portion of U.S. businesses aged at least 16 years reached 34%, compared to 23% in 1992. Moreover, those mature companies went from employing only 60% of private-sector workers in 1992 to employing nearly three quarters of the private-sector labor force in 2011.</p>