Free Republic

New York Times senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin twisted himself into a pretzel to protect the failing Biden administration's economic agenda again — this time suggesting American furor over the poor state of the economy is more about perception than reality. Irwin’s recent article had a condescending headline: “Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs. They Also Think the Economy Is Awful.” He pointed to the decreasing unemployment rate, how workers allegedly have the “upper hand” in the labor market, and Americans “sitting on piles of cash” to cast doubt on the “scathing” resentment of the economy. He stated that...

New York Times senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin bent himself into a pretzel spinning the atrocious Bureau of Labor Statistics report showing the economy only added 194,000 jobs in September. Following the release of the abysmal job growth report Oct. 8 at 8:30 a.m., Irwin had the nutty spin: “The New Jobs Numbers Are Pretty Good, Actually.” Irwin had a much different reaction earlier on Twitter that undercut the gaslighting in his article. He tweeted immediately at 8:30 a.m. after the BLS report dropped: “+194k on payrolls, a big miss. But unemployment rate way down to 4.8%.” He tweeted one...

... This year, American workers and their employers owe a combined 12.4 percent on Social Security payroll taxes for income up to $132,900 (rising to $137,700 in 2020). They owe nothing on earnings above that level. Some Democrats in the thick of the presidential race and on Capitol Hill now seek to change or eliminate that cap — potentially placing a new double-digit tax on high earners, with several plans focusing on earnings above $250,000. ... The result would be a large tax increase on high earners, even before other changes a Democratic administration might contemplate, such as increasing income...

The September jobs numbers are the 2018 United States economy in a nutshell: Even when an economic report is bad these days, it’s actually pretty good. When the latest numbers first were broadcast at 8:30 a.m. Friday, it looked like a big disappointment. Employers added only 134,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, well below the levels of recent months and well below what forecasters had projected. But even apart from the usual warnings about statistical error and randomness (the true rate of job creation could turn out to be either much higher or much lower), the numbers are a...

It is true that a trade deficit subtracts from a country’s gross domestic product. G.D.P. measures the value of goods and services produced within a country’s borders, so when a country is selling less stuff abroad than it buys from abroad, the country is making less stuff, and as a result there are fewer jobs. This piece of the Trump theory of trade is true. Read the rest in the link.

The Geography of Trumpism NEIL IRWIN and JOSH KATZ MARCH 12, 2016 When the Census Bureau asks Americans about their ancestors, some respondents don’t give a standard answer like “English” or “German.” Instead, they simply answer “American.” The places with high concentrations of these self-described Americans turn out to be the places Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has performed the strongest. This connection and others emerged in an analysis of the geography of Trumpism. To see what conditions prime a place to support Mr. Trump for the presidency, we compared hundreds of demographic and economic variables from census data, along with...