Free Republic

On Wednesday’s broadcast of NBC’s “MTP Now,” host Chuck Todd and NBC News Business and Data Reporter Brian Cheung discussed the latest inflation report and noted that prices aren’t falling, they’re just “going up by a slower rate,” and are “higher than pre-pandemic during the Trump administration as well.” Todd said that while the report is “good” news, “It doesn’t mean that prices still aren’t going up. They are.” He added, “The good news is, prices are going up slower. This doesn’t mean prices have somehow dipped below where they were say, two years ago at this time.” Cheung responded,...

Three years after the coronavirus pandemic began and authoritarianism strengthened around the world, nearly half of U.S. adults (47 percent) say they do not expect their lives to “return to pre-pandemic normalcy,” a Gallup News poll found. That percentage was the same in October 2022 and is slightly down from July and August 2022 when 53 percent of U.S. adults said they do not expect their lives to return to the way they were before the pandemic. Results of the poll are based on self-administered web surveys conducted February 21-28 with 5,167 adults. The margin of error is ±2 percentage...

The number of workers in the U.S. has continued to shrink as businesses struggle to find employees for their openings. "The hope for many to achieve a soft landing is that you meet in the middle, with demand cooling off and labor supply picking up, and we reach a much healthier equilibrium between the two," Michael Pugliese, an economist at Wells Fargo, told the Wall Street Journal Sunday. "But if labor supply flatlines or keeps falling, you need to bring demand down even more in order to cool off wage growth." According to Labor Department data, the number of workers...

(CNN)Most Americans say the way they conduct their lives is still affected to some extent by the pandemic, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Wednesday, though fewer say their activities remain dramatically curtailed. A majority also favor continued masking in some public places, and say they've continued to wear masks in some, though not necessarily all, situations when they're indoors and in public. The results -- and the marked partisan and demographic splits that characterize them -- highlight the nuances and fault lines that mark Americans' response to Covid-19 more than two years after the start of...