Free Republic

Britons have suffered a slump in living standards, official data shows, as a surge in net migration wiped out any gains from economic growth. So-called real GDP per head shrank by 0.3pc between April and June compared with a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said, suggesting living standards have slid backwards as the population grew. It comes after net migration hit a near-record 685,000 last year. Experts said the figures meant the population was growing faster than the economy, underlining the challenges facing Rachel Reeves ahead of her maiden Budget. Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital...

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban warned Thursday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that Vice President Kamala Harris’ capital gains tax plan would “kill the stock market.” Cuban said, “What I told them is if you tax unrealized gains, you’re going to kill the stock market, and it’s going to be the ultimate employment plan for private equity because companies are not going to go public because you can get whipsawed.” He added, “Based off the unrealized gains, I would have had to borrow money and I effectively would have been in hawk just to pay my tax bill instead of trying to...

More than 100 House Republicans warned on Wednesday that President Biden’s multi-trillion dollar social spending bill is only likely to exacerbate the nation’s supply chain shortages. Rep. Sam Graves, the top Republican on the House Transportation Committee, and more than 100 other GOP lawmakers wrote in an open letter to the White House that Mr. Biden’s emphasis on tax hikes, creating new entitlement programs and imposing stringent environmental regulations would cripple the ability of businesses to respond to the blockages plaguing both consumer and industrial goods trapped in the supply pipeline. “Multiple factors have contributed to the nation’s supply chain...

For the past decade, Hollywood’s battle against online pirates has been mainly been focused on leaked DVD screeners and illegal streaming sites. Now a pair of security researchers say they’ve discovered a vulnerability in the Google Chrome browser that allows people to save illegal copies of movies from streaming sites like Netflix and Amazon Prime. The vulnerability, first reported by Wired, takes advantage of the Widevine EME/CDM technology that Chrome uses to stream encrypted video from content providers. Researchers David Livshits from the Cyber Security Research Center at Ben-Gurion University and Alexandra Mikityuk of Telekom Innovation Laboratories discovered a way...