Free Republic

U.S. retail sales fell sharply last month as gas prices plummeted and auto sales slowed. But excluding those volatile categories, Americans stepped up their spending a bit. Retail sales dropped 0.8 percent in January, the Commerce Department said Thursday, following a 0.9 percent decline in December. The dollar value of gas station sales plunged 9.3 percent, the largest drop in six years. Auto dealer sales also fell for the second straight month. Outside those categories, sales ticked up 0.2 percent after a flat reading in December. The modest gain suggests Americans are still cautious about spending their windfall from lower...

Since January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate. Today, BLS reported that the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate for June was 7.6 percent, the same it was in May. In December 2008, the month after Obama was first elected and the month before he was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.3 percent. In January 2009, it climbed...

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio declared in an exclusive Newsmax TV interview that the nation’s middle-class consumers will be hardest hit by President Barack Obama’s proposed tax increases. “When you raise taxes, the money has to come out of the private economy,” Rubio, the first-term GOP senator, tells Newsmax. “It’s coming out of a business somewhere, whose taxes are going to go up. … What we need to make clear to people is that these taxes that the president’s proposing to raise is going to hit a lot of small businesses and mid-sized businesses that pay on their personal rate.” …