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The economists found that this led to a 9% reduction in low-wage jobs. The pay increase it generated didn’t make up for the reduction in employment, and earnings fell for low-wage workers overall.

Parler’s CEO has gone into hiding with his family after receiving death threats, according to a new court filing. CEO John Matze “has had to leave his home and go into hiding with his family after receiving death threats and invasive personal security breaches,” the filing in Parler v. Amazon states.

I was struck by Dennis Prager's comparison of "Good Germans" with "Good Americans," but I now think it misses the mark.The true comparison is West Berliners to East Berliners.In the United States, we have families split between open Red States and closed Blue States. In open Red states, one can go out to dinner at local restaurants and bars, get haircuts and manicures, go to parks and theaters. In closed Blue states, there are curfews and fines, travel restrictions and quarantines, "essential" workers and everyone else.The Democrat party erected a wall between Red and Blue states, literally overnight. If you...

“The madness of Trump, as bad as it was, it really needed to happen. We really needed a reflection of our world’s greatest problem, which is not climate change, but sociopathy and narcissism. Especially in America. It’s going to kill the world. It’s not capitalism, it’s narcissism.” So said songstress Lana Del Rey, reflecting on the Trump administration this week. She’s right to dig deeper than climate change and capitalism, but wrong to finger an incurable element of the human condition for America’s ills. The broader point, however, is important. Del Rey is arguing that Trump’s political ascent exposed or,...

Of the 25 U.S. counties reporting the highest number of new cases during the current surge, 21 had mask mandates in place before August. Looking at the 100 counties with the most confirmed cases during this period, 97 had either a county-level mask mandate, a state-level mandate, or both. Of these 97 counties, 87 instituted their mandates prior to October.

“In December, 15.8 million persons reported that they had been unable to work because their employer closed or lost business due to the pandemic–that is, they did not work at all or worked fewer hours at some point in the last 4 weeks due to the pandemic. This measure is 1.0 million higher than in November.”

"Real Time" host Bill Maher on Friday night addressed the death of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran from California who was fatally shot inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. Maher stressed that Babbitt "lost her life trying to prevent Biden from becoming president" -- despite the fact she was previously an Obama voter. He sympathized with Babbitt as a struggling business owner who was "pissed off at the greed and corruption," but insisted a second term for President Trump term would not have solved her problems since it was her home state of California that was "doing most of...

California’s Continuing CollapseCalifornia’s rapid descent is starting to remind me of the old Hemingway line about how someone went bankrupt: “Gradually and then suddenly.”The New York Times noticed yesterday:They Can’t Leave the Bay Area Fast EnoughThe migration from the Bay Area appears real. Residential rents in San Francisco are down 27 percent from a year ago, and the office vacancy rate has spiked to 16.7 percent, a number not seen in a decade.Though prices had dropped only slightly, Zillow reported more homes for sale in San Francisco than a year ago. For more than a month last year, 90 percent...

Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy are making two very different bets on Donald Trump — and the one who guesses right may find themselves with a future leading the GOP. The decision by Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, to split with the minority leader and embrace Trump’s impeachment marks the most dramatic rift in the upper rungs of GOP leadership since Trump took office. It caps a years-long tussle between the party leaders over how closely the GOP should align itself with Trump and where the party should go after he leaves office.

The Biden stimulus package is truly epic in size. It would be more than twice the size of the 2009 Obama budget stimulus and would come on top of the more than US$3 trillion in Covid-19 budget stimulus measures enacted last year. It would also be coming at a time that the U.S. registered a record budget deficit last year, which raised our public debt to GDP ratio to over 100 percent. That ratio was higher than that which prevailed after the Second World War. Mr. Biden is justifying his spending proposal on the grounds that all too many people...

There’s a high price to pay for banning President Donald Trump from social media platforms, and both Twitter and Facebook are feeling the massive bite out of their wallets for doing just that. Both Twitter and Facebook “have collectively seen $51.2 billion erased from their market caps over the last two trading sessions as investors balk at their banning of President Trump,” according to Markets Insider. Facebook took the lion’s share of the losses, bleeding through a whopping “$47.6 billion following CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that Trump would remain suspended from the social media platform ‘indefinitely,’ until at least after...

Fewer Americans will be alive to see Joe Biden Inaugurated than were living on Election Day. This has probably never happened before. Here’s the math. Across 2019, the US averaged about 8000 deaths per day. In 2019, we averaged about 10,000 births per day. That is, by the way, the lowest figure in decades, part of a long-term, accelerating decline. By the end of 2020 it was estimated that the daily rate of new births might have declined to as few as 8800 a day. for now, though, let’s just stick with the 10,000 figure. A normal delta between deaths...

Dear Chuck, Is America heading towards an economic collapse? If so, how do I prepare? Worried Boomer Dear Worried Boomer, My view is we are headed towards another economic crisis with a low risk of an actual economic and/or currency collapse. In either scenario, there are ways to be prepared. Economic Crisis vs. Collapse An economic crisis is different from a collapse. America has worked through several in my lifetime: ‘70s stagflation, ‘81 recession, ‘89 savings and loan crisis, post-9/11 recession, ‘08 great financial crisis, and the 2020 coronavirus crisis we are in now. A collapse is brought on by...

In August, Russia unveiled the export version of its fifth-generation Sukhoi Su-57 fighter aircraft. Displayed at the Army-2020 International Military and Technical Forum, the Su-57E also took part in the arms tradeshow’s flight demonstration program. Among the nations that apparently expressed interest in the aircraft was India, which The EurAsian Times reported was “seriously considering exploring an initial batch of ‘off the shelf’ Su-57 jets from Russia to evaluate their capabilities – before entering into a contract for joint production.”

The publisher of The Bulwark and executive director for one of NeverTrumper Bill Kristol’s get-rid-of-Trump campaigns is a donor to President-elect Joe Biden. Kristol’s Republican Accountability Project (RAP) is working to protect anti-Trump Republicans in Congress. It is guarding those who “vote to impeach, remove, and disqualify President Trump” by warding off primary challenges, according to the campaign’s webpage. RAP announced that it would also be looking to punish more than 100 GOP members who objected to certification of the Electoral College. Specifically, RAP would do this by “standing up primary challenges” to Republicans who didn’t toe the line and...

Some are calling for Facebook to be banned from the app store after a Washington Post report revealed that a great deal of the Capitol Hill riot was planned on Mark Zuckerberg’s platform. According to the Post, “a growing body of evidence shows that Facebook played a much larger role” in the storming of the building than COO Sharyl Sandberg previously acknowledged. Sandberg claimed that the events “were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency.”

If you’re not part of Twitter, and media Twitter at that, you will be blessedly ignorant of a HUGE controversy today. The political news and commentary website Politico asked conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to guest-edit today’s edition of its morning Playbook feature. Shapiro is completely within the conservative mainstream, but that did not stop the Politico staff from freaking out. Erik Wemple is the Washington Post media columnist:

The coronavirus vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech has been found to be 50.4 percent effective in a late-stage Brazilian trial—falling far below the 78 percent level that was initially announced. While the percentage barely met the 50-percent threshold required for regulatory approval, the finding has only raised more concerns about the veracity of vaccine data put forth by Chinese companies.

What if forgetting your password for a website could cost you $200 million? That’s the situation facing a programmer living in San Francisco. From the Times: Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.

Google is under fire for removing some local news content from its search results in Australia as part of an "experiment", in what critics called a "chilling illustration" of the firm's power. The incident is the latest in an ongoing spat between Google and the Australian government, which is considering forcing it and Facebook to pay local news providers for displaying their content. Shortly after the law was proposed early last year, Google added a notice to its site warning "the way Aussies search every day on Google is at risk." On Wednesday, Google said it had been "running a...