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The Obama administration's proposed $10.25 tax on each barrel of crude oil produced in the United States would be one of the biggest tax increases on gasoline in history, a report released Thursday showed. Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, released a Congressional Research Service report showing historical increases in the federal gasoline tax in an attempt to put the oil tax in perspective. While the tax would be levied on oil companies, economists assume that oil companies would pass on the tax to consumers. The tax could add between 20-25 cents...

I have concluded that not doing fairly unto others ultimately could bring about another U.S. civil war. Please hear me out. See if you don’t agree it could happen unless the growing unfair political financial tide is corrected. The growing spread of wealth inequality has been underway for many years. It has come to pass even in a democracy and a so-called exceptional nation. I’m not a history major, but in my serious interpretation, another civil war appears to be a distinct possibility. Doing great and greater for the financially elite and less and less for others has come to...

A very happy and uncertain morning to all!!  Yesterday stock indexes went up slightly in mixed volume while gold/silver continued basing, and today futures seem mixed but this morning's before hours trade on the S&P had it knocked back down past yesterday's gains.Maybe these will help: 8:30 AM Initial Claims 8:30 AM Continuing Claims 10:00 AM Wholesale Inventories 10:30 AM Natural Gas Inventories --or possibly: Fintech Is Ending Money Management As We Know It - Barry Ritholtz, BV An Ambitious and Distinctive Anti-Poverty Agenda - Scott Winship, Forbes After 350K Layoffs, Worker Shortages in Oil - Nick Cunningham, OilPrice Has...

A friend once told a story involving German visitors who were staying at his house. One morning, he said, the Germans asked if they could take a day trip to the Grand Canyon. Bear in mind, they were in Michigan. “I don’t think you realize just how big America is,” the friend told his guests. The opposite is also true. Americans don’t realize how little the rest of the world is — at least economically — compared to the U.S.

We suspect Lloyd Blankfein will be receiving a call from The White House (or Treasury) very soon as Goldman Sachs' economists did the unthinkable in the age of political correctness - while investigating the state of under-employment in America, the smartest people in the room found that ObamaCare has led to a rise in involuntary part-time employment, estimating that "a few hundred thousand workers" have been forced to cut hours and has "created disincentives for full-time employment."Goldman's Jan Hatzius explains that they find mixed evidence to support the theory that the employer mandate under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has...

Americans today say they are generally optimistic about their futures, according to Gallup polling. But one group in particular -- poor white Americans -- has a shockingly dismal view of what the future holds for them. And this pessimism among poor whites goes a long way toward explaining the strange political moment we find ourselves in, one in which Donald Trump surged to the top of the Republican primary ticket by tapping into a deep vein of racial anxiety among the nation's working class. Carol Graham, a happiness researcher at the Brookings Institution, recently analyzed Gallup's data on life satisfaction...

f Donald Trump's presidential campaign were functional, this would be Economy Week for Team Trump. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee and his surrogates would be wielding the disappointing May jobs report as a cudgel to bash the lackluster "Obama-Clinton" recovery. After all, polls say jobs and the economy remain voters' biggest concern. And it's an issue in which Trump has a big lead over Clinton. A new Gallup poll gives the famed businessman a 10-point edge on "the economy" and a seven-point lead on "employment and jobs." But Trump isn't talking about the economy. Instead, he's attacking the Mexican heritage...

Egged on by anti-trade Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, primary election voters across the U.S. have been in an ugly mood toward global trade and particularly the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). At the same time, employers and business associations in Washington state, as elsewhere across the U.S., have voiced strong support for TPP. A recent Washington state poll for the Washington Council on International Trade (WCIT) by Elway Research showed majority support.   The future belongs to workers who develop higher-level, specialized skills. Here, NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars engage in a three-day workshop. Photo: NASA...

No one will remember 2006 as one of our nation's greatest years. But how are we doing now compared to then? By many measures, not nearly so well. The economy grew faster in 2006 than it has in any year since. That year, real gross domestic product increased by a modest 2.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That was down from the 3.8 percent growth of 2004 and the 3.3 percent growth of 2005. But real GDP has not grown by more than 2.5 percent in any year since 2006. The last recession began in December 2007...

Late last week the markets were shocked by a surprisingly bad May jobs report - the worst monthly report in nearly six years. The experts expected the U.S. economy to add 160,000 jobs in May, but it turns out only 38,000 jobs were added. And to make matters worse, 13,000 of those 38,000 were government jobs! Adding more government employees is a drain on the economy, not a measure of economic growth. Incredibly, there are more than 102 million people who are either unemployed or are no longer looking for work. Gold reacted to the report quickly and decisively, gaining...

A basic economic premise holds that when the price of something rises, people seek to economize on its use. They seek substitutes for that which has risen in price. Recent years have seen proposals for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Some states and localities, such as Seattle, have already legislated a minimum wage of $15 an hour. Nobody should be surprised that fast-food companies such as Wendy's, Panera Bread, McDonald's and others are seeking substitutes for employees who are becoming costlier. One substitute that has emerged for cashiers is automated kiosks where, instead of...

...“Had horses had an opportunity to vote and join the Republican or Democratic Party,” Leontief wrote, they might have been able to get “the necessary appropriation from Congress.”... ...what happens if the job market stops doing the job of providing a living wage for hundreds of millions of people? How will the economy spread money around... ...if the bottom quarter of the population in the United States and Europe simply couldn’t find a job at a wage that could cover the cost of basic staples? What if smart-learning machines took out lawyers and bankers? Or even, God forbid, journalists and...

If a year ago someone told me I would be an advocate of Donald Trump, I would have laughed, because everyone knew he was a joke with a toupee. But on August 27, 2015, at a rally in Greenville, South Carolina, when Mary Margaret Bannister pulled his hair, we learned he does not wear a wig. And in researching my upcoming book, "Trump The Press," I learned he is no joke. He has developed the leadership skills needed to lead the free world. In December 2014, Peter Economy of Inc. magazine wrote, "The Top 10 Skills Every Great Leader Needs...

The case for an Obama third term, a.k.a. a Hillary Clinton presidency, just suffered a major blow. Indeed, Friday’s jobs report (or lack-of-jobs report) is just the thing Clinton feared most when she launched her presidential bid: namely, that Obamanomics, which boils down to the bizarre notion that higher taxes, more regulation and class warfare actually work, would begin to fully implode while she was forced into defending it on the campaign trail — or risk losing the president’s endorsement. The sickeningly weak job creation during the month of May (just 38,000 jobs when economists expected closer to 150,000) doesn’t...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen made her usual bipolar remarks yesterday in a speech: Last week’s employment report was disappointing... ...Yellen... ...sounded like a politician and basically said nothing. I’m now going to tell you how Yellen’s comments will sound ... YELLEN: “Good afternoon everyone. FYI, this is a freakin’ OMG moment for us at the Fed. President Trump is bustin’ our cajones, and I’m pretty sure it’s because the Fed is being run by a dame. “The economy? I bet you want to know what the economy is doing. I could tell you this and tell you that. But...

VFW Commander to Obama: Don't Insult Vets' Intelligence By Jason Devaney | Friday, 03 Jun 2016 01:36 PM The Veterans of Foreign Wars organization is pushing back at President Barack Obama's assumption that the nation's veterans are easily swayed in their political opinions. "I don't know how many VFW Posts the president has ever visited, but our near 1.7 million members are a direct reflection of America," VFW National Commander John A. Biedrzycki Jr. said, reports Fox News. "We don't have confused politics, we don't need left- or right-wing media filters telling us how to think or vote, and we...

<p>The actor, economist and former Republican presidential speechwriter said that he thinks Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton "knows something" about economics, but that her rival Bernie Sanders is "willfully ignorant."</p> <p>Actor, economist and former Republican presidential speechwriter Ben Stein is slamming Donald Trump's economic knowledge.</p>

Today, June 5th, is the anniversary of the birth of John Maynard Keynes, once upon a time the great foe of the gold standard. Today also, coincidentally, happens to be the anniversary of the date celebrated of FDR’s “taking America off the gold standard.” These events are not mere historical curios. The current presidential campaign, and underlying political climate, shows we are finally, maybe definitively, emerging from the academic economists’ anathema on the gold standard... ...Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is on record as strongly appreciating the gold standard... ...The “interwar gold standard” in fact was a barbarous relic....

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-03/democrats-hope-jobs-report-is-a-blip-and-not-trump-s-bombshell

Governments around the world believe that to remain competitive in a global economy they must become smarter. In an attempt to boost its knowledge intensiveness, the UK government has just launched a plan to overhaul the university sector. It aims to transform universities by creating many more of them. The hope is that this will increase the number of people with degrees, and the UK will be a more competitive economy. The idea of the knowledge economy is appealing. The only problem is it is largely a myth. Developed western economies such as the UK and the US are not...