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“I’ve had enough of what they call shrinkflation," Biden said. "It's a rip-off.”President Joe Biden has a message for snack companies: Knock it off with shrinkflation. On Sunday, just ahead of the Super Bowl, Biden posted on X (formally known as Twitter), sharing a video aimed at snack companies, saying that they are shrinking the size of their products without also reducing costs to consumers. It’s a practice the president bluntly called a “rip-off.” “When buying snacks for the big game, you might have noticed one thing,” Biden said. “Sports drink bottles are smaller, a bag of chips has fewer...

Legal pot sales in California shrank last year, falling 8% compared with 2021. This is the first time cannabis revenue has dropped since the sale of cannabis became legal in 2018. Customers purchased $5.3 billion worth of legal pot products in 2022, according to data released Wednesday by the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration. That represents an 8% drop, or a decrease of $473 million, from what customers purchased in 2021. The falling sales come as the legal cannabis industry faces multiple headwinds, including competition from a booming illegal market, crashing wholesale prices and yearslong licensing delays. Hirsh...

Kjerstin Laine. Courtesy of Kjerstin Laine Like millions of student-loan borrowers, Kjerstin Laine is in loan-relief limbo. For Laine, a 30-year-old who has over $110,000 in student debt, the $20,000 in forgiveness she's set to get from President Joe Biden's plan is just a drop in the bucket. As a first-generation college student whose debt has shaped the trajectory of her career, she fears her balance will balloon even more after pandemic-era payment pauses end and interest starts accruing again. "I never miss a payment, always on time, and yet my balances never go down," Laine told Insider. "I don't...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly three dozen House Democrats are pushing the administration to get tougher with Saudi Arabia, calling it a bad strategic partner after it has refused to help ease the world’s oil supply crunch during Russia’s Ukraine invasion. Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat and senior member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the Committee on Rules, led lawmakers in a letter asking Secretary of State Antony Blinken for a “recalibration” of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for...

Yogi Berra called and he says he’s got Deja Vu like it’s the 2008 financial crisis all over again.In 2008, formerly staid and respectable mortgage lenders found themselves at huge risk from stupid government policies forcing them to lend to people who could not pay back. Never fear, they had spread the risk in the secondary market, which should have had a stabilizing effect, but ended up more like a circular firing squad with banks toppling like dominoes.History does not repeat, but it rhymes:In 2021, staid, respectable, and conservative insurance companies suddenly found themselves at huge risk from bad government...

Updated 14 hours ago President Trump's former top health official said Tuesday that health insurance costs would likely go up as a result of Trump-backed Republican legislation removing the federal requirement that everyone have health insurance. Congressional Republicans eliminated the individual insurance mandate, which was part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, as part of a tax overhaul they passed in December. Removing the mandate without passing other reforms could spur young, healthy people to pull out of the ACA's insurance market and stop paying premiums, driving up costs for those remaining in the “pool” of people with insurance, former...

Are liberals better at economics or are they just more adept at selling ideas that drive purely on emotion? Increasing the minimum wage is a perfect example. Raising it increases the living standards for those who struggle earning such a wage, and those who are against it–Republicans–are just anti-poor cretins who have no heart. The political campaign almost sells itself. Yet, we’re against it not because we hate poor people–that’s unadulterated nonsense. We’re against it because hurts workers, which is something that we’ve been saying ad nauseum, but alas, liberal intransigence and stubbornness on this issue has resulted in over...

LOS ANGELES — The nation’s second-largest city voted on Tuesday to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 from the current $9 an hour, in what is perhaps the most significant victory so far in the national push to raise the minimum wage. The increase — which the Los Angeles City Council passed in a 14-1 vote — comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages. The impact is likely to be particularly strong in Los Angeles, where, according to some estimates, more than 40 percent of the city’s work force earns less than...

Luis Lopez used to be a big fan of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Lopez, who owns an auto repair shop, gave $100 to Garcetti's 2013 campaign for mayor. He spread the word about Garcetti on the Facebook page of the local Chamber of Commerce, where he serves as executive director. Now, as the mayor fires up his bid for reelection, that enthusiasm is gone. Lopez doesn't like Garcetti's minimum wage proposal, or the way it was unveiled. He described Garcetti staffers as largely unresponsive on the topic and says he won't vote for him in 2017. "The way he...

Warm weather is coming, and with it the perennial student search for a summer job. Though often seen as an economic cure-all, minimum-wage requirements have the unintended consequence of decreasing economic opportunity for young workers and making that treasured summer job harder to find. Over half of those who earn at or below the minimum wage are between the ages of 16 and 24, many in the hospitality and leisure sector. Since the majority of those earning minimum wage are younger workers, increases in the minimum-wage rate affect them the most. Negative effects extend into the future, because young people...

Under current law, employers are required to pay time-and-a-half wages to employees working more than 40 hours a week only if they earn less than $23,660 annually. The Obama administration is intent on increasing - and likely more than doubling - that salary threshold, according to people briefed on the administration's plans. That change is likely to have significant impact on workers in retail and the food services industry, like a restaurant manger who earns $30,000 a year but works 60 hours a week. "We need a national wage floor that that rises each year, so that its purchasing power...

President Nicolás Maduro raised Venezuela's minimum wage Friday for the second time this year to help workers being battered by the world's highest inflation. Speaking at a May Day rally, the socialist leader said he is boosting the minimum wage and pensions for retirees by 30 percent, with two-thirds of the increase coming this month and the rest on July 1. He also said he would raise salaries for government employees and military personnel. The wage increase, while a welcome relief for many workers, fell short of expectations that the embattled Maduro might use Friday's celebrations to expand state control...

A Sacramento labor leader said Thursday he hopes the fate of a proposed $15 hourly minimum wage doesn't come down to a ballot-box battle. Fabrizio Sasso, executive director of the labor council, acknowledged that the ballot measure is a possibility. But he said the group is focusing for now on convincing the Sacramento City Council to adopt the minimum-wage proposal. An overwhelming majority of Sacramento residents favor the idea, he said. The labor group has set clear terms for the kind of council action it wants, however. Its leaders say a minimum-wage measure must: * Set a local minimum wage...

San Francisco is getting ready to raise its minimum wage to $12.25 an hour, a rate that will have the city joining Oakland as the locales with the nation's highest legally mandated pay for non-salaried workers. San Francisco's new minimum is set to go into effect on Friday. It was approved by voters as part of an initiative that will increase the minimum wage to $15 in 2018. The National Employment Law Project estimates that 142,000 workers will receive the higher wages.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has denied a request from Democrats to create a special open enrollment period under the Affordable Care Act for women when they find out they are pregnant. In a response to the March letter sent by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said the agency does not have “the legal authority to establish pregnancy as an exceptional circumstance” to create a special enrollment period. Lawmakers originally asked for the special enrollment period in an effort to address what they called a gap in coverage that could leave women without...

The nonprofit group Chrysalis provides work to those who struggle to get hired. The organization gives them jobs cleaning up neighborhoods, answering phones and maintaining buildings, along with training and other assistance to smooth their transition to their next jobs. Now city leaders appear poised to require Chrysalis and other charities to offer their disadvantaged clients something else — raises of at least $3 an hour. Unlike businesses that can pass along increased costs to customers, some nonprofits that rely on government grants worry that state and federal agencies will not increase that funding to offset the higher wages required...

In commemoration of Palm Sunday, dozens of churchgoers marched into a Logan Square McDonald's singing, chanting and demanding a $15 minimum wage for the workers behind the counter. About 80 congregants had gathered at the Logan Square Monument moments earlier to receive communion and to use the example of Jesus riding into Jerusalem a week before Easter to demand what they called a living wage for all low-wage workers. "Jesus was participating in street theater on Palm Sunday. On that day he was riding in on that donkey. He was saying business as usual will not continue here," said Marilyn...

Macy's CEO Terry Lundgren believes that raising the minimum wage would result in fewer jobs for Americans. "So if your costs go up by X million by taking an initiative like this, what are companies going to do? It doesn’t mean their sales are going to get better, it just means that you’re going to have to offset that expense and how are you going to offset that expense?" Lundgren asked. "The worst thing that can happen is we end up laying off people." Lundgren said that he thinks that reducing the corporate tax rate could help create more jobs.

Every 2012 contender attended college. They all graduated. They went to schools like the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Texas A&M, Morehouse, Penn State and Emory. But decades have passed since these Presidential candidates first stepped onto campus as freshmen. Is it time for an Econ 101 refresher course? America's Econ 101 professors say yes. In their view, the candidates continue to offer ideas and policies that wouldn't pass muster in their classes -- populated by 18 year-old college students. "There are so many economic 'misstatements' being made," said Jonathan Lanning, a professor at Bryn Mawr who is teaching two introductory...

The campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama now centers on "Joe The Plumber." Early in Wednesday night's final debate between the two candidates, McCain brought up Joe Wurzelbacher, an Ohio plumber who approached Obama at a campaign event last Sunday, to illustrate how the Illinois senator's tax policy would hurt small businesses. Wurzelbacher told Obama that his tax plan would prevent him from buying the plumbing business that now employs him. Obama said he plans to raise taxes on people making more than $250,000 a year while cutting taxes for everyone else. "He wants the government to take Joe's...