Free Republic

Many job seekers have dropped out of the labor force not because they've gotten discouraged, but by choice. The unemployment rate has been declining, in part because of a declining labor participation rate. A new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray and Christmas finds the biggest decline in labor force participation is among 16- to 19-year-olds. It's down to a record low 30.4 percent. But contrary to reports that job seekers have gotten discouraged and dropped out, many of them just don't want a job. Of the 11.6 million teens not in the...

As we’ve been talking about for months and months, billionaire San Francisco ex-hedgefunder Tom Steyer has been hinting that he’s going to go big in politics in 2014. He made it official Monday telling the New York Times that he’s going to spend big this year. Like $100 million big, making him one of the most significant outside forces in American politics.

The web site OpenSecrets.org has done a great deal of useful work. Especially helpful are its lists of high-dollar political campaign donor organizations. The web site's 1989-2014 and 2012-specific lists, to name just two, demonstrate that the hyperventilating on the left and in the establishment press about the eeeevil Koch Brothers is completely out of line: Imagine that. Koch Industries is way down in 59th place in the past 25 years and 77th place in 2012. This makes at least the following people look really dumb:

the top ten DNC donors outspent the top ten RNC donors by nearly 2 to 1 since 1989 ... The political left always accuses the Republican Party of being the “party of rich guys.” It’s a lie. ... C) Committed Democrat donors have outspent committed Republican donors by nearly $486 million since 1989 D) Overall, the top ten DNC donors outspent the top ten RNC donors by nearly 2 to 1 since 1989. E) The largest committed DNC donor group has outspent the largest committed RNC donor group by 67% since 1989 ... The arguments by Democrats that the RNC...

A student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada was forced to issue a formal apology for emailing a picture of President Obama kicking open a door–all because some students thought the image was somehow racist. Another student issued a formal complaint against Farnan for committing a “micro-aggression.” For those not up-to-date on the PC lexicon, “micro-aggression” is the latest phrase of choice for leftist radicals seeking to blame racism for common annoyances suffered by people of all races. Minority activists at the University of Michigan, for example, have insisted that trivial slights, such as “Having your opinion second-guessed in a...

President Obama is facing a deepening dilemma about whether to abandon cuts to Social Security in his next fiscal blueprint, which is due out in March. Obama touched the third rail of American politics last year when he proposed a new formula for Social Security and other entitlements that would result in benefits being cut over time. Now congressional Democrats and unions are ramping up their pressure on Obama to drop the proposal, which many fear could become an albatross for the party in the midterm elections. “We want the president to make very clear that he is going to...

...It turns out that Health Care dot gov is just like Kayak, Amazon, or any other website you use to buy something…and then not pay for it...

(CNSNews.com) – Once again acting without Congress, President Obama has unilaterally changed his signature health insurance law, delaying its employer mandate – the second time he’s done this -- to 2016, after the mid-term elections. BUT: To be eligible for the additional delay, the Obama administration says an employer “may not reduce the size of its workforce or the overall hours of service of its employees” unless it can justify those reductions to the Internal Revenue Service. On Monday, the administration issued new regulations saying that employers with 50 to 99 workers don’t need to provide minimum essential coverage until...

There are any number of reasons a person might consider giving up their U.S. citizenship, ranging from the familial to the professional to the financial, but for me at least, it would take a heck of a lot for me to even think about it. And by “a heck of a lot,” I mean that I have difficulty fathoming a situation in which I would actually want to give up my citizenship and/or live anywhere permanently other than the United States, because from where I’m sitting, the mere suggestion sounds pretty ghastly — which is precisely why our spiking expatriation...

With all this talk in Washington about income inequality, why isn't Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi — or anyone in the greed-and-envy lobby — going after the grotesquely unfair farm bill? This near-$200 billion bill is one of the biggest giveaways to the rich and politically powerful in recent history. Usually, in Washington Congress doles out taxpayer subsidies to industries that are in severe financial trouble — think of bailouts to autos, banks and steel. That's bad enough. But the farm economy isn't in distress. It's booming, and agribusiness still walked away with $20 billion a year in direct payments,...

Unless you are exceptionally coldblooded, it's hard not to be disturbed by today's huge economic inequality. The gap between the rich and the poor is enormous, wider than most Americans would (almost certainly) wish. But this incontestable reality has made economic inequality a misleading intellectual fad, blamed for many of our problems. Actually, the reverse is true: Economic inequality is usually a consequence of our problems and not a cause. For starters, the poor are not poor because the rich are rich. The two conditions are generally unrelated. Mostly, the rich got rich by running profitable small businesses (car dealerships,...

This year President Barack Obama and his party will begin their campaign against “the rich” while emphasizing the “gap” in wages between those on top and those on the bottom. Their solution will be to increase the minimum wage, raise taxes on “the rich” and increase government spending. They will exploit ignorance and envy to maintain power. Their solution will make the gap larger and create an endless recession. Unless reversed, the result is likely to be a financial collapse, wiping out savings, retirement accounts and putting almost everyone in the country into the category we now call the "working...

It is always in poor taste for modern Americans to liken their ideological critics to Nazis. So when venture capitalist Tom Perkins wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal that equated "the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich,'" with "fascist Nazi Germany," he opened his double doors to the cable TV umbrage-fest that followed. I have a teensy bit of advice for Perkins: When your reported worth is somewhere in the neighborhood of $8 billion, you don't need to wrap quotes around the word "rich." In three paragraphs, Perkins, 82, lambasted the San Francisco Chronicle...

New York’s new Occupy mayor, Bill de Blasio, took office this month with a stern, if hazy, vow to right the imbalances of economic inequality in New York City, which other speakers at his inauguration called “Dickensian” (Harry Belafonte) and a “plantation” (Brooklyn pastor the Rev. Fred Lucas Jr., delivering an invocation).But he can’t fix income inequality, nor should he. Given that there will always be some who are just starting out or lack the wherewithal to succeed, it’s the wealthy who are responsible for the gap between rich and poor. And it’s those same wealthy whom de Blasio will need to...

If you brought back either of the Roosevelts—Teddy or Franklin—from the grave, the most astonishing thing they would find is that the “malefactors of great wealth” have become the benefactors of today’s liberalism, and Democrats have become the party of the rich. In the economic crisis of the 1930s, the rich hated FDR. Most of today’s rich love Barack Obama—so much so that Washington D.C. area airports ran out of space to handle all of the private jets flying in the well-heeled for both of his inaugurals. Forget the “limousine liberals” of the 1960s and 1970s, sending their own kids...

Tonight’s TopClip shows a side of ‘Duck Commander’ Phil Robertson that many don’t know: when he was teammates with future NFL Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw…

I AM your Lord, God and Savior for you were constructed in my likeness and created in my way, You hear the Voice of your Master say, Whom shall I turn to, to do my will?! Where are the vessels that listen, abide and fulfill, For you are my handiwork, a tool in my shed, Always ready and waiting, ready to be led, I AM your inheritance all that you see, No looking to the left or right for I set you free, From all obstacles and entanglements and now you reside, In Zion with your Lord and "I AM"...

Lawyer’s for 16-year-old Ethan Couch were able to pawn off on a doe-eyed court that “affluenza” was to blame for his stealing beer at WalMart, getting wasted and then plowing his out of control Ford F-350 into a group of folks, killing four. Affluenza? Please. For those who’re not hip to “affluenza“, allow me to help you add another word to that ever growing list of PC terms spun by blame-shifting therapists in order to explain away criminal behavior by little Ethans who need to go to prison instead of a luxury rehab in Newport Beach: Affluenza is a portmanteau...

The rich are paying even more in taxes than you think.According to a Congressional Budget Office report this week, America’s top 40 percent of earners pay 106 percent of the taxes and the bottom 40 percent pay negative 9 percent, reports CNBC.How can one group pay more than 100 percent and another group pay less than zero? The formula that the CBO uses offsets taxes that are paid with refundable tax credits. These include money the government transfers back to the taxpayer for food stamps and social programs.Some low-income Americans received very generous subsidies. The report shows that Americans who...

Income Gap: As President Obama laments America's growing income inequality, a new government report shows the futility of his calls for ever-more wealth redistribution. To deflect attention from ObamaCare's failures, the president this month trotted out his income inequality chestnut. "A dangerous and growing inequality," he intoned, "has jeopardized middle-class America's basic bargain." He argued, "as a trickle-down ideology became more prominent, taxes were slashed for the wealthiest, while investments in things that make us all richer, like schools and infrastructure, were allowed to wither." Apparently, nobody bothered to brief the president before he delivered this speech. Fact is, federal...