Free Republic

As a result of China’s flooding the world market with cheap, state-subsidized aluminum and our president’s irrational aversion to fossil fuels, a 127-year-old American industry is in danger of disappearing. This week, the two largest primary aluminum producers in the United States announced curtailment of aluminum production at key smelters across the country. Alcoa announced that it was halting smelting operations at its Intalco Works (583 employees) and Wenatchee plants (428 employees) in Washington state, its Massena West plant in New York (500 employees) and that it was curtailing alumina refining capacity at its Point Comfort facility in Texas. Century...

Economists Lawrence H. Summers, Treasury secretary under President Clinton and top economics adviser under President Obama, and N. Gregory Mankiw, CEA chair under President George W. Bush, team up this morning in an op-ed supporting Obamacare’s Cadillac tax... They are right to do so, as the Cadillac tax actually cuts government spending (properly understood).

Interesting piece in the New York Times by Patricia Cohen about how easy it would be to raise taxes on the “1%” in order to see tens of billions of additional revenue for the government.I had to read this twice to make sure it wasn’t a parody. The top 1 percent on average already pay roughly a third of their incomes to the federal government, according to a Treasury Department analysis that takes into account the entire menu of taxes — including income tax, payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security, estate and gift taxes, excise and custom...

The official U.S. unemployment rate is 5.1% -- the lowest in seven years -- but Donald Trump calls that a "joke." On Monday, he claimed he'd seen numbers that show America's real unemployment rate is as high as 42%. How does he arrive at such a wild figure? Trump appears to be looking at the number of American adults not working. Period. Out of about 251 million American adults, roughly 102 million -- or 40.6% -- aren't working. But, of course, there are a lot of reasons people don't work. They could be disabled, in college, at home raising kids...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump clearly prides himself in shunning focus-group research. He refuses big campaign donations that he asserts make his opponents beholden to special interests. He seems to target no specific constituency. Many pollsters remain puzzled by Trump’s political appeal. “Republican support for Donald Trump just continues to grow,” said Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth Polling after its August survey, “with no clear sense of who his constituency really is.” Yet a constituency is emerging. Trump’s strongest supporters, roughly a quarter of Republican voters across the polls, are not dissuaded by any increased media scrutiny of their candidate....

Donald Trump Claims The 'Real' Unemployment Rate Is 18%. Here's What Wall Street Says.After Donald Trump announced his latest bid for the presidency, I reached out to get details on Trump’s plan to replace Obamacare, and posted that interview on FORBES last week. But for many FORBES readers, the most eye-catching part of the interview wasn’t Trump’s plan for health care. It was what the Trump campaign said about unemployment. “Mr. Trump believes that the real unemployment rate is over 18%, not the reported 5.5%,” a spokesperson told me. Trump’s distrust of the government’s job statistics isn’t new. In July,...

At Trump Tower, only a few blocks away from the meeting of world leaders at the United Nations, GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump announced his new plan to reform the U.S. tax code. After the main announcement, he took questions from the press. On how his plan would address income inequality: TRUMP: In terms of income inequality, we're going to create a lot of jobs. You know, right now we have a false [unemployment rate] 5.4%, 5.3%, 5.6%, every month it is different. It is such a phony number. Because when people look and look and look and then they...

Hillary Clinton has a solution to the problem of low wages: Government should make them higher. Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times, endorses the idea. There was a time when Krugman dismissed rhetoric like Clinton’s as economic quackery. These days he’s trying to sell the same snake oil as the politicians. As I wrote in a column at Forbes, here is what economists know about the labor market: Employees tend to get paid their marginal product – the value they add to final output. In a competitive market this is almost a truism. Wages are not a gift....

A little more than a year ago, oil prices were above $100 a barrel. The national average for gasoline was in the $3.50 range. In late spring, oil was $60-ish and the national average for gas was around $2.70. The price of a barrel of oil has plunged to $40 and below—yet, prices at the pump are just slightly less than they were when oil was almost double what it is today. Oil and gasoline prices usually travel up or down in sync. But a few weeks ago the trend lines crossed and oil continued the sharp decline while gasoline...

As historians begin to assess Obama’s record as president, there’s at least one legacy he’ll leave that will indeed be historic—but not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of the country. In fact, no president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics. Legacies are often tough to measure. If you want to see just how tricky they can be, consider the campaign to get...

I’ve never written a column like this. Readers rarely believe it, but I am not on any political team. Generosity toward the high and mighty isn’t among my few virtues. But this needs to be said: Americans are lucky to have Barack Obama as president and we should wake up and appreciate it while we can. President Obama will go down in history as an extraordinary president, probably a great one. He will have done this in an era that doesn’t aggrandize leaders and presidents, but shrinks them. All presidents have had profound opposition, vicious enemies and colossal failures. A...

Mike Dice, the merry trickster whose videos expose liberal stupidity, picked a great subject for his latest: white privilege. Specifically, Dice asked people to sign a petition that would impose a 1% "white privilege" tax on all white people. The resulting hilarity is worth watching.

When the Census Bureau began calculating poverty a half-century ago – as a “war on poverty” became a hot issue in Washington – it devised a rather simple formula. The formula defined income that would be counted – excluding non-cash income such as food stamps and housing subsidies – and applied it to a narrow “market basket” of food and other living necessities. All the data were nationwide, with no adjustments for regional or local differentials. By the official poverty index, California doesn’t fare too badly, with 17 percent of its residents impoverished, a bit above the national rate of...

The Golden Arches are looking a little less shiny this year and McDonald’s franchise owners see hard times coming. This time it has nothing to do with the raging national debate over whether or not the McRib is awesome or awful, however. The vast majority of their fast food outlets are not owned by the corporation, but by franchise operators. Those entrepreneurs are regularly polled about their outlook for the coming year and most of them aren’t putting on their happy faces. (From CNBC) Just when you thought it couldn’t get much worse for McDonald’s, it did.The six-month outlook...

American teen employment has dropped 20 percent from the late 1980s, in part because more and more immigrants have flooded into the market to displace native-born kids from jobs in percentages far higher than on adults, according to the Federal Reserve. "The displacement effect of immigration on the employment of younger persons is much larger than on the employment of prime-age adults," said the September 2014 report, "Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects."

According to financial disclosure reports, President Obama has an estimated net worth of $7 million dollars. Since he was worth $1.3 million in 2007, that makes the millionaire 438% more wealthy than when he first ran for office... While the average US citizen has a median income of roughly $51,000, Obama rakes in the cash with an annual presidential salary of $400,000. In addition, he receives money from book royalties and other investments. Hypocrisy isn’t a stranger to the liberal elite. Michael Moore’s fifty million dollar fortune came from creating documentaries that makes free enterprise look like the same as...

SEATTLE — Microsoft plans to announce a major new round of layoffs as early as Wednesday, as the company seeks to further cut costs in a shifting technology landscape. The layoffs are in addition to the about 18,000 employees that Microsoft said it planned to let go a year ago, according to people briefed on the plans, who asked for anonymity because the details were confidential. The new job cuts are expected to affect people in Microsoft’s hardware group, among other parts of the company, including the struggling smartphone business that it acquired from Nokia last year in a $7.2...

NEW YORK (AP) — Microsoft will cut 7,800 jobs and take a $7.6 billion impairment charge as it attempts to revive its flagging phone hardware business. The company paid $7.3 billion for Nokia’s phone business in April 2014, seeking to push rapidly into the smartphone sphere as its traditional software business slowed. Microsoft ultimately wanted to build an ecosystem that made customers that are loyal to a slew of products, much as Apple and Google have done so successfully.

Simply asking someone “Where are you from?” or calling America "the land of opportunity” is now considered offensive at some colleges and universities, where such “micro-aggressions” are detailed in training programs and seminars for new faculty and staff. Other examples of “offensive” statements include, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” “Affirmative action is racist,” Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” When I look at you, I don’t see color,” and “I don’t believe in race.” A full list of these “offensive” statements can be seen here. The newly forbidden terms were...

Job gains stayed healthy in June and the unemployment rate hit a seven-year low, but workforce participation skidded and wage growth remained anemic, muddling views of the labor market for a central bank seeking clarity. Employers added 223,000 jobs, the Labor Department said Thursday, about as many as economists had forecast, and the jobless rate fell to 5.3% from 5.5%. The number of people working part-time because they can't find full-time work fell, as did the number of long-term unemployed. But 432,000 people left the workforce, and the labor force participation rate fell to 62.6%, the lowest since 1977. Wage...