Free Republic

President Obama on Friday will sign a two-month extension of highway funding into law, the White House said. The measure prevents a sudden halt in infrastructure funding that was slated to begin May 31. But White House press secretary Josh Earnest criticized the stopgap bill as a punt and urged Congress to pass a long-term measure to fund road projects. “It’s the president’s view that the era of short-term patches ... must come to an end,” Earnest told reporters. Earnest noted it was the 33rd temporary fix for highway funding since 2008. The uncertainty caused by that approach has led...

The 2016 presidential-campaign season will bring all sorts of familiar proposals to create jobs in the U.S., but candidates who really understand today’s global economy should highlight a more surprising possible engine of new employment for Americans: China. China’s middle class continues to grow, reaching an estimated 630 million people by 2022. Those consumers want better health care, world-class education and a cleaner environment. China itself will eventually be able to provide those services, but meanwhile, the Internet makes it possible for China to create and sustain American jobs. Take health care. In 1994, a Chinese university student named Zhu...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has signaled in a letter to President Obama that his state might not comply with a forthcoming rule limiting carbon emissions from power plants. The likely GOP presidential candidate told Obama in the May 21 letter that he has "deep concerns regarding our ability to develop a state plan to comply with" the proposed Environmental Protection Agency targets. The implicit threat makes Walker the highest-profile governor to consider endorsing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's strategy of undercutting the regulation through states refusing to submit a compliance plan, though he ultimately stopped short of doing so. "The...

The elephants in the room lumber about, undisturbed by politicians or people of vision. The hard issues of the economy are well known. Politicians, bureaucracies, CEOs and trade union leaders have dealt the the issues of productivity, unemployment, competition from east and west, the collapse of industries through the decades of the 20th, and now the 21st, centuries. Yet these are harder now. Intelligent systems, robotic manufacturing, driverless vehicles, online services, all carve deep into established trades. In the post-war decades, every time a new technology came along, the feared bonfire of jobs didn’t happen — or only briefly and...

[Note from Scott Ott: The presidential primary process doesn't help us to decide who's qualified to bear the party standard, and to serve as chief executive, but rather who’s disqualified. It’s just our way of crushing the hopes and dreams of anyone who dares poke head from hole. Because you already know all of the reasons why every candidate, and potential candidate, has no right to expect the nomination, I'm going to write an utterly one-sided series on why each one should get it. If you’re concerned that I’m not providing fair and balanced analysis, I’m sure the folks in...

MACKINAC ISLAND, MI -- Mike Rowe made dirty jobs look cool. Can he do the same for the tool and die industry? The state today at the Mackinac Policy Conference annouced a partnership with Rowe and his foundation, mikeroweWorks, to produce videos that show students skilled trades are sustainable, good career paths. Rowe's videos, targeted to middle and high school students, will highlight industries like tool and die, health care, construction and welding. "Closing the skills gap is not about creating opportunity. It's about making sure that people understand all of the opportunities that currently exist," Rowe said Wednesday. "Michigan...

The Department of Justice on Wednesday said it will not make an emergency request to the Supreme Court to lift an order blocking President Obama's executive action on immigration. Instead, the administration will focus on the appeal of the injunction itself at the 5th Circuit, which is expected to proceed in July. "The Department has determined that it will not seek a stay from the Supreme Court," Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said. Rodenbush said the "best way" to win the case is "to focus on the ongoing appeal on the merits of the preliminary injunction itself. That appeal has...

The Dallas Fed says factories churning out equipment and products in Texas slowed their output this month to levels unseen since 2009 when the nation was still mired in a recession. Texas manufacturing activity in May edged lower for the third month in a row as the effects of the oil slump continued to ripple through the state. About 28 percent of the state’s manufacturers reported a slowdown, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ monthly survey on Tuesday. “We are seeing all industries hold cash,” a fabricated metal manufacturing executive said in the survey. Others said refineries are...

Exclusive — Walker: We’d Be Sending in Navy to Stop Illegals if They Were Swarming Our Sea Ports Like They Do Southern Border [SNIP] ".........Since former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush—one of amnesty’s biggest proponents—has now backed off his previous support for citizenship for illegal aliens (he wants to give them amnesty via legal status), that means Rubio is the only candidate who still stands with the AFL-CIO and their brothers in the Chamber of Commerce wanting to give illegal aliens full blown American citizenship. That means Walker, the anti-special interest union battler, has an even better opportunity to fight Rubio—who’s...

Of those running for president, who will give this speech? “Ladies and Gentlemen, my administration will implement a series of economic policies to cause the economy to grow at an average rate of 4 percent or more a year. Growth of 4 percent-plus per year will create jobs at a faster rate than the growth in the labor force and provide hope for those who had despaired of finding a good job again. At a growth rate of a little over 4 percent per year, real incomes for all of our citizens will double in only 17 years. (At the...

An Econ 101 course explains what the classical economist David Ricardo introduced in the early 1800s as the concept of comparative advantage. To summarize: It's not beneficial for countries to produce everything they want to consume. Instead, they should produce what they can at a lower opportunity cost, thereby wasting fewer relative resources and advancing specialization so all parties involved can benefit from trade. Free trade provides more opportunity for people to prosper. Without free trade since World War II, a Peterson Institute for International Economics study finds, an average American household would have almost $13,300 less in income per...

BUTT FIRST, THIS SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: MOTUS IS TAKING A SUMMER SABBATICALAs many of you know, the care and maintenance of a daily blog is rather labor intensive. And while I love the work and adore all of my colleagues here, the hours are long, and the days are short. I’m not complaining, butt I again find myself with a raft of half done and not-yet-started and projects that can no longer be deferred.Therefore, just like last year, as of today I will be starting my  Summer Semi-Sabbatical. Butt as a famous cowboy once said, “I don’t know how to quit...

Every time the liberal media discovers that the racial composition of any particular company or industry does not reflect the population of the United States, immediately millions of gallons of ink (or digital ink) are shed as the media frantically searches for signs of inherent racism. Just look at this recent article worrying that not enough black directors were making Super Bowl ads. But in a curious article in the New York Times, the Times mentions an enormous racial disparity only second-handedly, and doesn't seem concerned about the nature of it, because the recipients of it are not white, but...

Last week my colleague Simon Maloy caught us up with the latest on Kanses Gov. Sam Brownback’s famous Arthur Laffer “petri dish” experiment, in which he slashed taxes and government programs in order to usher in a Republican free market economic utopia. The experiment looks like it’s blowing up the lab: [T]he Brownback/Laffer tax scheme hasn’t goosed the Kansas economy and it doesn’t look like it will any time soon. It has succeeded marvelously, though, in redistributing wealth to the top of the income ladder, while, at the same time, screwing over the people at the bottom. While the rich...

At the top of the list is Raleigh, North Carolina. The city’s residents earn a median base salary of $50,000, higher than many of the cities on this list, while median home values remain a relatively modest $198,400. Chamberlain notes that the factors that put Raleigh at the top of the list can be a model for other metros. The city has long been attractive to major companies like IBM and Cisco. But now, Raleigh is gaining popularity among technology companies as well, who value the pipeline of talent provided by the city’s location among several major universities in the...

[full title] GOP’s demonic new crusade: Right-wing zealots look for even crueler ways to treat the poor like garbage Happy Memorial Day! But if you’re in Wisconsin, and relying on food stamps, remember that Republicans don’t want you to have ketchup on your hamburger. They’d probably rather you didn’t have a hamburger at all, but Wisconsin farmers and ranchers have clout, and so proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program made room for Wisconsin products. But they still don’t want you to have “crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish.” Or ketchup. Or spaghetti sauce. Really. For now, that’s...

".....Roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs. They are about 30 percent more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics.The Labor Department counts half a million fewer public sector jobs than before the start of the recession in 2007...understates just how much the government’s work force has shrunk.... because it fails to account for the normal growth in the country’s population: Factor that in, she said, and there are 1.8 million fewer jobs in the...

BRISTOL, Va. -- Alpha Natural Resources announced this afternoon that it's idling the mining and processing operations at Rockspring Development Camp Creek underground mine in Wayne County, West Virginia, which will mean the loss of 439 jobs. Employees were notified today about the idling "based on the mine operator's current assessment of market conditions,"according to a news release issued by Alpha Natural Resources. Last week, three other Alpha-affiliated mine operators announced reductions in work force "due to sustained weak market conditions and government regulations that have challenged the entire central Appalachian coal industry. A total of 71 employees were affected...

Wise words from Warren Buffett. The Oracle of Omaha predicts how the rush to sharply raise the minimum wage will end. (Spoiler: badly for the people the policy purports to help.) And Buffett also offers a smart alternative to help low-income workers: In my mind, the country's economic policies should have two main objectives. First, we should wish, in our rich society, for every person who is willing to work to receive income that will provide him or her a decent lifestyle. Second, any plan to do that should not distort our market system, the key element required for growth...

Why Scott Walker FLip-Flopped. One of the few intelligent and worthwhile things that John Maynard Keynes contributed to society is the following quote “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?” Governor Scott Walker’s information has recently changed. Remember that Governor Walker had the guts to back down the Progressive Establishment in The Democratic Party of Wisconsin. It thus comes as no surprise that he also has the guts to take on the increasingly progressive and less pro-American pro-immigration caucus in the GOP. Walker explains his qualms concerning this headlong rush to replace domestic American...