Free Republic

A recent comment by Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee gives you a glimpse into how Fed people think and helps to explain exactly why you’re paying more for everything. It’s almost as if inflating was hardwired into Fed members’ brains. Goolsbee recently sat down with Illinois Treasurer Mike Frerichs during the National Association of State Treasurers conference in Chicago. In the course of the conversation, the subject of pennies came up. There are a lot of people who think the U.S. Treasury should do away with the penny. This would make sense financially. It costs about 3 cents...

MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle called upon the president of Chicago’s Federal Reserve to tell viewers that they are economically far better off than they think. "We need an economic explainer," the MSNBC host said. "People are confused, they’re exhausted, but they’re also doing quite well." Ruhle, who hosts MSNBC’s "The Eleventh Hour," had been discussing a recent Federal Reserve report that "shows people are still struggling to cover day-to-day expenses, even as inflation has slowed." She noted how some major brands are responding by enticing consumers with slashed prices, "Target says it is cutting prices on 5,000 essential items, things...

VIDEO Rick Santelli gets very very emotional during this CNBC jobs report for March.

Treasury Department investigators completed but never released a 2011 law enforcement probe of White House economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, The Washington Examiner has learned. The investigation by the Treasury Department Inspector-General for Tax Administration was sparked by Goolsbee's remarks during an Aug. 27, 2010, White House news briefing in which he appeared to possess confidential tax information on Koch Industries, the private conglomerate controlled by the Koch brothers, Charles and David. "So in this country we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax. Some of...

Senate majority leader Harry Reid has a whole page on his official Senate.gov website devoted to revealing "THE FACTS ABOUT THE KOCH BROTHERS." One of the alleged facts promoted on Reid's website is that the Kochs do not pay any corporate taxes: “They are known for bankrolling conservative, Libertarian and Tea Party causes and became poster boys for corporate tax reform last year when an Obama Administration official suggested Koch is organized as an S Corp. and so pays no corporate level taxes.” The claim that the Koch brothers don't pay corporate income taxes was first made by former White...

RUSH: The news media today, gosh, the unemployment rate's up to 9%, and they're celebrating. They're talking about some of the strongest job growth, with 244,000 new jobs, 62,000 of them from Mickey D's, 62,000 from McDonald's. Now, remember in the past, those jobs have been impugned by the Democrats and the left as meaningless, futureless hamburger flipper jobs without health care. Folks, I'll tell you, if we had our news media of today back in the days of Herbert Hoover we would have never had a Depression, because it woulda never been reported as a depression. This isn't even...

Editor's note: FoxNews.com is pleased to present an excerpt from "Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future " the new book by Grover G. Norquist and FoxNews.com contributor John R. Lott Jr. Chapter 3: The Stimulus Made Things Worse What Was Promised Matt Lauer: At some point will you say, “Wait a minute, we’ve spent this amount of money. We’re not seeing the results. We’ve got to change course dramatically?” . . . President Obama: Look, I’m at the start of my administration . . . And . . ....

The economy has added more jobs than expected in each of the past three months, pushing down the unemployment rate to 8.3 percent and marking the best six-month streak of jobs numbers since 2008. But President Obama’s former economic adviser said today that this seemingly rosy economic picture probably won’t last. “I think the main thing that [President Obama] ought to worry anybody is that the growth rate is probably not as sustainable as at high a rate as it’s been, so the pace of expansion, which for six months has been pretty impressive, it may just slow down a...

Goolsbee in his own words: "In the year 2010 which is when most of the clips when the president was saying we were going to grow again. We were growing and over that 17 months we added two-and-a-half million jobs. "Now, at the beginning of this year we get earthquakes, tsunamis, revolutions in the Middle East, European financial crises, now they even have earthquakes out of Washington, D.C. I mean, we've had a series of things that have put some heavy blows and slowed the economy back down again. But, I think it's a little -- I don't think you...

El Rushbo has mentioned this many times in the past, and today it is worth repeating: The Democrat Party rewards failure.For instance, when Howard “Yaarrrrrgggghhhh!” Dean lost the 2004 presidential candidacy to John Kerry, he was rewarded by being made the DNC chair, at which post he boosted the integrity of his party by accusing the Republicans of being racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, etc., etc., who want women back in the kitchen and blacks in the back of the bus. (This illustrious tradition, incidentally, is now continued by the new DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but that’s another story for...

Great Recession: Austan Goolsbee is only the latest prominent White House economist to pull the ejection lever and parachute to safety. But like the others, his reputation has already crashed and burned. Last September, Goolsbee, the Council of Economic Advisers chairman who resigned this week, got a question from ABC News: If the Obama administration spent yet another $50 billion on infrastructure - on top of the $800 billion that had been spent already - plus targeted business tax credits for R&D, would it bring down unemployment? Goolsbee's answer: "I don't anticipate it coming down right away." That, of course,...

Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can't, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly. Take Austan Goolsbee, please. President Obama's "fresh-faced" University of Chicago econ professor arrived in Washington in December 2008 to fill two slots: chief economist/staff director of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and member of the Council of Economic Advisers. In September 2010, he replaced CEA head and fellow academic Christina Romer,...

"We do big things," President Obama said during his State of the Union speech in January. And, in fact, we do. Sometimes. Finding and dispatching Osama bin Laden certainly qualifies. "We are once again reminded," the president said after announcing the terrorist's death, "that America can do whatever we set our mind to." But if that's true, why are our leaders so accepting of a stagnant economy? If they really focused on the havoc it is wreaking on the lives of tens of millions of Americans, they would, in the memorable words of Richard Clarke, be running around with their...

There has been no recovery in the job market during the Obama recovery. Despite all the cheerleading by the Obama administration and the media, job creation has been horribly sluggish. The jobs created recently are noteworthy only in comparison to the lack of jobs created during the rest of the “recovery.” In contrast to other recoveries over at least the last half century, job creation has never been more anemic. When the new employment numbers came out on Friday, Austan Goolsbee, the head of the President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, boasted about "the solid pace of employment growth in...

If you think it's hard now to balance the budget, just wait until our credit rating gets trashed. Monday’s warning from the Standard & Poor’s rating agency -- that the U.S. government’s credit rating could be revised downward -- produced a firestorm in Washington. Republicans called it a "wake-up call," while the Obama administration's chief economist, Austan Goolsbee, lambasted Standard & Poor’s actions as purely "political." Credit ratings aren’t just a matter of national pride. Less dependable, risky borrowers have to pay a higher interest rate to get people to buy their bonds. Right now the our government only has...

OK, the unemployment is now down to 8.8 percent, and the economy added 216,000 jobs last month. Here is the political economy of the situation, which is not as good for Team Obama as you might think: 1) Let’s not overstate the strength of the report: a) based on last two nasty downturns, 1974-75 and 1981-82, jobs should be growing roughly 400K a month; b) nominal wage growth over both the last quarter and year have both been 1.7% vs. 2.1% inflation; c) the number of people who have been unemployed less than five weeks rose by 59K, first increase...

White House Council of Economic Ad visers Chairman Austan Goolsbee is warning of cataclysmic results if the new Republican House majority holds back on raising the nation's debt limit. "I don't see why anybody's playing chicken with the debt ceiling," he says. "If we get to the point where we damage the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity." Blah, blah, blah. Or, taken another way, a collapse is coming -- but what kind of collapse? Not raising the debt ceiling could cause a default. But so,...

Obama aide: Don't 'play chicken' with debt ceilingThe Associated Press Sunday, January 2, 2011; 10:48 AM WASHINGTON -- The top White House economic adviser is warning against what he calls "playing chicken" with the need to raise the nation's debt ceiling. For some conservatives, refusing to raise the limit on the federal debt would be a tactic to force the government into cutting spending. Last February, Congress raised the debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion. The debt is now at nearly $13.9 trillion and growing each day. A move to raise the ceiling again is expected this spring.

Austan Goolsbee is the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Today’s employment report shows that private sector payrolls increased by 64,000 in September, continuing nine consecutive months of private sector job growth. This growth provides more evidence that the economy continues to recover, but we must do more to put the economy on a path of robust economic growth. At the same time, the rate of job growth is not as large as needed to bring the unemployment rate down quickly, as the unemployment rate remained at 9.6%. In addition to the increase in September, the estimates of private...

The White House is in full spin mode trying to convince Americans that President Obama doesn't hate business. The president claims: "it's very hard to find evidence of anything that we've done that is designed to squash business as opposed to promote business." His administration's economists were out in force at the end of last week trying to argue that Obama was actually pro-business. The impression here matters because Americans see how incredibly slow this "recovery" and they intrinsically understand how eliminating incentives will stop growth. President Obama may hope Americans will forget that he called Wall Street executives "fat...