Free Republic

NEW YORK - The calculus of living paycheck to paycheck in America is getting harder. What used to last four days might last half that long now. Pay the gas bill, but skip breakfast. Eat less for lunch so the kids can have a healthy dinner. Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It's starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and...

Wall Street moved soundly higher Thursday, sending the Dow Jones industrials to their first close above 14,000 as investors kept jitters about the economy at bay and focused on a string of upbeat earnings reports. The Standard & Poor's 500 index also had a record close. Profit news from companies like International Business Machines Corp., network equipment maker Juniper Networks Inc., and business software company SAP AG help lift stocks and boosted investors' appetite for technology issues. Resurgent concerns about the health of subprime loans, which are made to borrowers with poor credit history, hurt financial stocks, while a report...

Job Creation Continues - More Than 8.2 Million Jobs Created Since August 2003 On July 6, 2007, The Bureau Of Labor Statistics Released New Jobs Figures – 132,000 Jobs Created In June. Since August 2003, more than 8.2 million jobs have been created, with more than 2 million jobs created over the twelve months ending in June. Our economy has now added jobs for 46 straight months, and the unemployment rate remains low at 4.5 percent. Americans Are Working And Taking Home More PayReal After-Tax Per Capita Personal Income Has Risen By 9.9 Percent – Nearly $3,000 Per Person –...

Dulce Suarez-Resnick: Some colleagues in my office are leaving, some of my customers and even some family and friends.In 2006, friends, who were also my customers, went from $8,000 on their windstorm policy to $17,000. They have every mitigation credit available for an older home. They are selling their home and moving to Central Florida because they can afford to live there on their fixed income.State Sen. Steven Geller: They're moving to North Carolina, they're moving to Georgia. They're getting out of Dodge . . . . I think the single most important issue facing the state is windstorm [insurance]....