Free Republic

As President Biden approaches the end of his first year in office, more than half of likely voters believe he is doing a bad job of handling crime and immigration issues, according to a new poll. The Rasmussen Reports survey found that 51 percent of respondents gave Biden a “poor” rating for his approach to crime and law enforcement issues, while only 31 percent rated the president as “excellent” or “good” on the matter. On immigration-related issues, 54 percent of likely voters graded Biden as “poor” and only 27 percent graded him as “excellent” or “good.” Even Biden’s biggest supporters...

President Joe Biden declared on Wednesday that despite record inflation and a record trade deficit, he has the “strongest first-year economic track record of any president in the last 50 years.” “We’re ending 2021 with what one analyst described as the strongest first-year economic track record of any president in the last 50 years,” the president tweeted, adding, “Let’s keep the progress going”:

We used strategic price controls after inflation sky-rocketed after the second world war. There’s a strong case for doing so again now; nflation is near a 40-year high. Central banks around the world just promised to intervene. However, a critical factor that is driving up prices remains largely overlooked: an explosion in profits. In 2021, US non-financial profit margins have reached levels not seen since the aftermath of the second world war. This is no coincidence. The end of the war required a sudden restructuring of production which created bottlenecks similar to those caused by the pandemic. Then and now...

An update on what we’ve been calling the strangest Google search volume charts out there: US consumer searches for the words “cheap”, “coupon” and “discount”. They are strange because, despite fast-rising inflation, search volumes for each are declining. Here is the Google Trends chart showing search volumes for the words “cheap” (blue line) and “coupon” (red line) from January 2020 to now. ◾As noted in the chart, searches for “cheap” hit their peak at the start of the pandemic (March 2020) and saw similar levels in March 2021 as inflation started to become evident. Since then, however, search volumes for...

An elitist economist is insulting his readers by doubling down on the much-criticized notion that spiking inflation is only “transitory.” Princeton University professor Alan Blinder penned an absurd Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined, “When It Comes to Inflation, I’m Still on Team Transitory.” Blinder even conceded in his subheadline that “transitory” apologist Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell “may have retired the term," but proceeded to claim that "bottlenecks and shortages should be over soon.” This was the same Blinder who wrote an equally absurd March 15 op-ed headlined: “There’s No Need to Panic About a Little Inflation.” Another Blinder piece...

A year ago a respected Tokyo-based think tank, the Japan Center for Economic Research (JCER), alarmed observers in the West by forecasting that China’s economy will surpass that of the United States by 2029, or less than a decade out. But the same think tank this month issued greatly revised figures, saying this is now expected to happen later than previously thought – in 2033 and not 2029, according to the updated forecast. JCER concluded that China is damaging its growth potential in its recent clamp down on big tech and other major industries, including among other things its ambitious...

How is it possible to survive a nation with inflation rates of 20%/month and 1700%/year? The answer? The underground economy. This is the level of hyperinflation we have found ourselves with here in Venezuela, and considering the spread of inflation worldwide, it would be well worth the prepper’s time to glean what we can learn here. Virtually everything you read dictates inflation on this scale necessitates civil war. Yet Venezuela hasn’t seen this. Why not? Why are the streets not being taken by armed civilians? While the main reason revolves around 20 years of disarmament and anti-self-defense teachings, I would...

How is it possible to survive a nation with inflation rates of 20%/month and 1700%/year? The answer? The underground economy. This is the level of hyperinflation we have found ourselves with here in Venezuela, and considering the spread of inflation worldwide, it would be well worth the prepper’s time to glean what we can learn here. Virtually everything you read dictates inflation on this scale necessitates civil war. Yet Venezuela hasn’t seen this. Why not? Why are the streets not being taken by armed civilians? While the main reason revolves around 20 years of disarmament and anti-self-defense teachings, I would...

It appears burnt-out junior bankers aren’t the only white-collar workers who have seen their compensation improve over the past 12 months. According to a report published in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, America’s salaried employees are finally seeing wage gains commensurate with those experienced by (often lower-paid) hourly workers. Citing data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, American professionals toward the end of this year saw their compensation jump at the fastest rate in nearly 20 years. Though that’s still slower than the pace of headline inflation, which is running at a YoY rate of nearly 7% according to the...

Where did all the workers go? That is a great mystery that continues to be unsolved. All over America, businesses are literally hiring anyone with a pulse and there are “help wanted” signs all over the place. But the number of people that are actually working is still close to four million below the pre-pandemic peak. What happened to all of those extra workers? They certainly aren’t on unemployment, because claims for unemployment benefits are the lowest that we have seen “in decades”. So where are they? It is almost as if millions upon millions of people have disappeared from...

It was one thing when Americans panicked hoarded food and toilet paper during the early days of the virus pandemic. Then guns and ammo after social unrest broke out, but 20 months later, recreational vehicles continue to be hoarded at levels never seen before. A new RV Industry Association (RVIA) report released Tuesday shows shipments for towable RVs jumped 14% in November to 43,881 from 38,485 the same month last year. All motorhome shipments soared 30.4% to 5,254 vehicles for the month, and total RV shipments increased 15.6%. Like all of 2021, November’s sales are a record for that month…For...

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said that the Biden administration has “created this turbocharged economy,” which does have the bad side of inflation, but despite the inflation issue, the Biden administration is “right to try to be aggressive on this and keep things going.” Brooks stated, “[T]hey put their pedal to the metal. I give them credit for that. They’ve really created this turbocharged economy, which has its good sides, incredible job growth. It has its bad sides, the inflation. But I think they’re right to try to be aggressive on this and keep things...

The Omicron variant’s economic impact will depend heavily upon how consumers feel about it. From homebuying to shopping to hiring, everything hinges on whether U.S. households fear the virus enough to halt the activities that have permitted the economy to reopen, or if they are learning to live with the ongoing pandemic. Households curbing vacation plans and shifting back to online buying would send ripple effects throughout the U.S. economy, slowing both economic growth and job gains of in-person service sectors. Moreover, inflationary pressures could worsen if these factors led U.S. households to demand more goods, but foreign manufacturers were...

CNN has gone above and beyond the call of propaganda to spin economic coverage to benefit President Joe Biden’s White House. A new poll it released shows that effort has floundered. CNN’s new poll of registered voters found that Americans gift-wrapped Biden with the “lowest net economic rating of any president at this point through their first term since at least Jimmy Carter in 1977.” Fifty-five percent of voters disapprove of Biden in comparison to 44 percent who approve. The average of all polls taken in December has Biden at -13 points on the economy, according to CNN. That's “18...

FIRST ON FOX: A Michigan Democrat claimed during a fundraiser Zoom call that the U.S. economy under President Biden is "flourishing," leading Wolverine State Republicans to push back Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., not only claimed last Wednesday that the American economy was doing great, but also said it was the "best economic recovery" the U.S. has seen since the days of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "We have an economy that is flourishing. We have literally the best economic recovery since FDR," Stevens claimed in the Zoom call. "If you want a job today, you’re going to make more money than...

If you want to know the pickle the Democrats are in as they scuttle their Build Back Better bill and pivot to the real red meat, the H.R.1 bill that imposes vote-by-mail nationwide, read this piece from the NY Sun about Ronald Reagan in 1981-82. Beating stagflation required political heroics by President Reagan and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker. It was “a triumph of economic policy,” Robert Samuelson recently wrote. “Volcker imposed a ferocious credit squeeze, and Reagan supported this wildly unpopular policy.” Interest rates soared to 21 percent. Unemployment spiked at more than 10 percent. Bankruptcies...

How much do solar, wind and electric vehicle companies get in federal handouts and tax loopholes in resident Joe Biden's Build Back Better bill? Well over $100 billion in taxpayer largesse. If all the tax credits are included, that number could reach half a trillion dollars. No other industry in American history has ever received this lucrative a paycheck. The folks at the Institute for Energy Research calculated that this is on top of the more than $150 billion in subsidies these industries received from Uncle Sam in the last 30 years. The umbilical cord to taxpayer wallets never gets...

The Federal Reserve’s zero-interest rate policies (ZIRP) has The Fed Funds Target Rate at a measly 25 basis points or 0.25%. While this is great for some, it is disastrous for savers. Once we subtract off the inflation rate (CPI YoY), we find that the REAL 90-day Certificate of Deposit (CD) rate is a horrifying -6.74%. I don’t think that Congress or the Biden Administration really think about how their spending may contribute to inflation and crush savers. Or the American worker who is seeing NEGATIVE real average hourly earnings growth (yes, Biden said that Americans have more money this...

Source: Official White House Photo by Andrea HanksBROWNSVILLE, Pennsylvania -- Just before 10 a.m., cars begin pulling into the parking lot of the Country Thrift Market, a sprawling former grocery store 40 miles from Pittsburgh. Normally, folks in the area shop for gently used clothing, toys and deeply discounted home goods here. But today is different because Santa Claus is on site along with free cookies, provisions, frozen turkeys and hundreds of brand-new winter coats in every child's size. Most of the cars and trucks that pull in have seen better days, but the children inside them look excited, seemingly...

Bloomberg news co-founder Matthew Winkler had arguably one of the most ridiculous takes on President Joe Biden’s performance on the economy yet. Winkler wrote a Dec. 20 op-ed with an outrageous headline, “Biden's Economic Performance Has Proved Unbeatable.” The piece read like a press release from the Biden White House itself. Winkler based his absurd assessment on 10 economic measures he spun to serve the pro-Biden narrative. Here was his hot take: “America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden's first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years notwithstanding the contrary media narrative contributing to dour public opinion.”...