Free Republic

uw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, has said that Brits “need to accept” that they are poorer as a result of higher inflation. Price hikes have outpaced wage growth over the past two years and contributed to the tightest squeeze on living standards in recent memory.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67% of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter. That would represent a quantum leap for the United States — where just 5.8% of vehicles sold last year were all-electric — and would exceed President Joe Biden’s earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold here by 2030. It would be the federal government’s most aggressive climate...

Chicago's incoming liberal mayor has raised eyebrows by blaming the city's poverty problems and surging crime rates on businesses that don't pay tax. Brandon Johnson, a former union organizer who was elected on Tuesday, said Chicago doesn't have money to solve its problem because '70 percent of large corporations in the state of Illinois don't pay a corporate tax'. 'It's that type of restraint on our budget that has caused the type if disinvestment that has led to poverty, of course that has led to violence,' said Johnson, who didn't give the source for his claim. The 47-year-old Cook County...

Since the early days of Henry Ford, Michigan was the proud symbol of America’s industrial might. But then, starting in the 1970s, things went south — in part because of the might of the unions that ran the state’s political machine. That’s when Michigan transitioned into the sad symbol of closed factories: the American “Rust Belt.” Flint, Michigan, became a ghost town. From the 1970s to the early 2000s, Detroit lost nearly half its population. Whole neighborhoods were bulldozed, and homes were selling for less than $10,000 as poor and minority residents fled the area's crime, lousy schools, high unemployment,...

Poverty in America is so bad that some people can barely afford their cell phones. In much of the rest of the world, poor people starve to death, or die of what in America are ordinary, survivable diseases or injuries. In America, injustice is so bad that many lawyers appointed by the court cannot get their clients acquitted of the crimes they committed, and must settle for a plea bargain. Elsewhere, to be accused is to be found guilty and imprisoned in hell-hole cellars, innocence being irrelevant to the courts of so-called justice. In the U.S., police sometimes bruise a...

A recent study showed that the 10 neediest cities in the U.S. have a few things in common. The most glaring commonality of this list is that eight out of the top ten cities had a Democrat at the helm at the time the survey took place.Wallethub.com released the tragic list showing which cities are starting 2023 with a thud. They used 28 indicators including poverty, hunger, homelessness, etc.There are not a lot of surprises in this list of 182 towns across the U.S.Detroit comes in as the neediest town in America. Motor City has been dying for decades. Corruption...

Over the last year, the green tyranny bureaucracy of the EU has managed to nearly destroy Western Europe's energy relationship with Russia, leaving the continent desperate for energy inputs to keep its power grid functioning. Now, the food supply of Europe is under direct assault via multiple schemes that seem designed to end affordable food at the same time electricity is becoming unaffordable for businesses and residential households alike."Germany bans farmers from properly fertilising land to serve EU green agenda," declares Breitbart.com. "As of Thursday, the use of nitrate fertilisers has been greatly restricted for large swathes of farmland in...

The media and other Democrats come up with all sorts of ways to reduce inflation, but they ignore the elephant in the room. First, they have a slush fund where they raise taxes, hand out mass subsidies to their political contributors and they falsely call it the Inflation Reduction Act. The only potential to reduce one component of inflation is down the road on prescription drug prices, which haven't been rising very fast compared to other necessities like food, gas, utilities, and housing. Most of the poor already get their drugs for free so it doesn't help them, now or...

Child poverty in the United States fell by 46 percent in 2021, a record low achieved largely by expanding the child tax credit, according to new data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. The data shows 5.2 percent of children were in poverty in 2021, down significantly from the 9.2 percent of impoverished children the previous year.

The wave of violence unleashed during harshly repressed anti-government protests has left some 220 people dead. What had been a vibrant tourism industry has been devastated, with ripple effects on the broader economy in a country that was already one of the poorest in the Americas. Business closings have left 200,000 people jobless, and unless the crisis ends soon, some 1.3 million of Nicaragua's 6.2 million people "risk falling into poverty," according to a study by the Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (Funides).

As food inflation worsens, a sense of desperation is seizing the minds of the American people, and some of them are lashing out in acts of violence against workers at grocery stores and other food retail locations. America is now seeing a shocking rise in retail location violence that seems destined to only get worse. Joe Biden’s catastrophic economic and energy policies have led to a 400% increase in the price of fertilizer, a 100% increase in the price of diesel fuel, supply chain disruptions and food production shortfalls. Even infant formula has been in a supply chain crisis, and...

For all of the myriad cultural, technological, and moral problems we face, few things would guarantee the undoing of the founders’ experiment in self-government more surely than continuing to pile on the burden, to ourselves and our posterity, of runaway debt. Thomas Jefferson described fiscal profligacy as a precursor to inevitable misery and suffering, the first in a stampede of apocalyptic horsemen. “[T]he fore horse of this frightful team is public debt,” he wrote. “Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.” This wretchedness will only be more keenly felt as interest rates rise. Too much debt puts...

Speaking with Vanity Fair, the musician recalled how they had once found a hole in her side of the mattress while living in Los Angeles. Instead of buying a new one, she said, Musk suggested that they bring over the mattress from her home instead. "Like, bro wouldn't even get a new mattress," she told the publication. "Bro does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line," Grimes said, per Vanity Fair. "To the point where I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film us,...

The Biden administration said Tuesday that it’s prepared to cancel an order for COVID-19 antibodies next week because it needs more money — and that the US could run out of vaccine booster shots if Congress doesn’t approve $22.5 billion in new funds. Republicans, meanwhile, say billions remain unspent from prior bills.

CNN’s recent article, “Life can be tough for kids in many anti-abortion states,” tries to suggest that pro-life states are harming children by making it more difficult to end their lives in abortion. Pulling from a dizzying array of statistics, the article attempts to show that some of the states with the strongest pro-life protections have “poor outcomes” for children compared with other states. But the piece has a glaring oversight: death should be considered a poor outcome. What the article is actually advocating for is killing vulnerable human beings so that they cannot become poor or disadvantaged. Must one...

Last month, The Washington Post editorial board called for the U.S. government to intervene in Haiti. It’s hard to fathom what this nation has endured in the last year alone: high profile kidnappings, political violence including the assassination of its president, devastation from natural disasters, gang violence, new allegations of horrific abuse by U.N. troops … the list seems unending. Some nations are able to achieve a level of stability that allows them to navigate crises like these. Haiti has not. In fact, its instability seems to make it a breeding ground for more calamity. Billions of dollars in foreign...

In recent years, long-term trends in economic inequality have attracted growing attention from social scientists, which also reflects civil society’s increasing awareness of the deepening economic disparities. In this context, particular attention has been paid to the share of the total income or wealth earned/owned by the top of the distribution – usually the top 1%, 5% or 10% among individuals or households. The share of the top richest is both interesting per se (as it is informative of “how rich” the better-off are), and as an indicator of the overall trends in economic inequality. New time series of wealth...

The number of Americans living in poverty increased for the first time in five years in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic cost millions of Americans jobs and income, the U.S. Census Bureau said Tuesday. But federal stimulus payments approved by Congress and the Trump administration helped keep more than 5 million Americans out of poverty, the bureau said. Last year, 11.4 percent of Americans — or 37.2 million people — were living in poverty, a threshold that stands at $26,246 in yearly income for a family of four. That share was up 1 percent, or 3.3 million people, over the...

Sen. Marco Rubio is circulating a memo aimed at emboldening Republicans to fight a measure that would distribute even more taxpayer money to nonworking parents.In a sign of the times, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, is circulating a memo aimed at emboldening Republicans to fight a measure that would distribute federal money to nonworking parents, worsening “poverty traps” by extending the new child allowance through the budget reconciliation bill. Rubio’s memo also criticizes the media for characterizing Democrats’ proposal as an “expanded child tax credit” when the money “goes to parents with zero tax liability, or who are simply not working...