Free Republic

WASHINGTON — The burst of job growth in January gives President Obama a fresh — but tricky — opportunity to revise the grim economic narrative of his presidency while offering Mitt Romney a choice: embrace a new optimism or campaign against a sinking economy even as it shows signs of turning around. The Labor Department reported on Friday that the unemployment rate had fallen all the way back to the level of President Obama’s first full month in office, to 8.3 percent, from a high of 10 percent in late 2009. Yet unemployment also remains higher than it has been...

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti on Sunday rejected talk of a euro crisis and said Rome was open to the idea of a tax on financial transactions championed by France—but only if the measure was part of an EU-wide effort. "The euro is not in crisis, the currency has solidly maintained its exchange rate with the dollar," Monti said on RAI 3 public television, adding that Italy's "banking system is not under threat". "The problem we are facing is that some EU countries have a public debt crisis," he said. "Our crisis is a systemic crisis." Monti, a former European...

Stimulus bill spending has slowed to a trickle, despite President Obama’s June order to his Cabinet to speed it up. The average stimulus spending per week has dropped severely, to just $4.2 billion over the past month from $9.7 billion during the prior four months. The government spent $2.9 billion in the week ending Aug. 7. Taxpayer groups say the numbers show spending decisions are random and prove that the $787 billion stimulus program has had no effect on the economy. “This is a typical bureaucracy. They don’t operate in an efficient way. They can’t operate in an efficient way...