Free Republic

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Wednesday ordered two Jan. 6 defendants pardoned by President Donald Trump to be refunded in full for restitution payments made and fines incurred as part of their earlier criminal cases. It was a reversal from just months earlier, when the same judge rejected their bid for repayment. Boasberg used a memo order Wednesday to outline the fairly complex case history for Cynthia Ballenger and her husband, Christopher Price, both of whom had been tried and convicted on misdemeanor charges in connection with events of Jan. 6, 2021, and ordered to pay hundreds of dollars...

2025 Thanksgiving dinner under Trump is 25% lower than 2024 Thanksgiving dinner under Biden, according to Walmart. My cost are lower than the Democrats on everything, especially oil and gas! So the Democrats “affordability” issue is DEAD! STOP LYING!!!

Stacy Cox used one word repeatedly as she described how she felt after learning her ACA premium could jump over 300% without the enhanced tax credits: "devastating." "I don't know if I've ever cried opening a letter from an insurance or before, but it happened this time," she told ABC News. Cox's premium this year has been $495.32 for coverage for her and her husband. Without the credit in 2026, she was informed that it's increasing to $2,168.68. "It's devastating because we can't afford that," she said. "Just that bill right there, that's more than our mortgage, our insurance, most...

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – A sharp rise in global oil prices following Israeli strikes on Iran will benefit Russia and bolster its military capabilities in the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday in comments that were under embargo until Saturday afternoon. Speaking to journalists in Kyiv, Zelenskyy said the surge in oil prices threatens Ukraine´s position on the battlefield, especially because Western allies have not enforced effective price caps on Russian oil exports. “The strikes led to a sharp increase in the price of oil, which is negative for us,” Zelenskyy said. “The Russians are getting stronger...

The prices of goods and services charged by U.S. businesses rose by less than expected in May, adding to the evidence that President Trump’s tariffs are not putting upward pressure on inflation. The producer price index for final demand ticked up 0.1 percent last month, half of what economists had forecast. Core producer prices, a metric which excludes food and energy, also rose 0.1 percent, one-third of the 0.3 percent increase forecast by economists. If trade services, a measure of retail and wholesale margins, is also excluded, prices still rose by just 0.1 percent. Compared with a year ago, the...

Nucor Corporation has announced a price increase for its hot-rolled coil (HRC) consumer spot price (CSP), marking a shift in the steel industry as new tariff policies begin to reshape market dynamics. Effective June 9th, 2025, Nucor has raised its CSP HRC base price to $890 per ton for all producing mills, with California Steel Industries (CSI) pricing set at $950 per ton. This represents a $20 per ton increase for all mills and a $40/ton increase for CSI from the previous week’s pricing of $870 per ton for standard mills and $910 per ton for CSI, signaling a potential...

Since President Trump took office in January, the average price for a dozen eggs has plummeted from $6.49 on January 21 to just $2.52 today. That is a 61 percent drop, Fox News points out. It is an even bigger drop from the $8.00 per dozen average eggs hit in March. Some of that price drop can be attributed to the decrease in demand caused by those insane price increases, as well as fewer bird flu cases. Where the Trump administration deserves the most credit is its decision to proactively increase the importation of eggs from foreign countries until America’s...

On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) argued that imposing government price controls on prescription drugs will lead to shortages and this is what happens in Europe. Paul said, [relevant remarks begin around 5:25] “The thing is, is if you want prices to be low and you say the government should just make them fair or low, Venezuela’s got a great example of this, and there they’ve had price controls on everything. But you know what? They don’t have anything. Price controls lead to shortages. And so, in the European countries that...

Nintendo is facing criticism over the high price tag of its upcoming Switch 2 console, which is set to launch at $450 in the U.S. Despite leftists eager to blame Donald Trump’s tariffs for the console’s high price, Nintendo of America’s top boss has now said that tariffs had nothing to do with the hotly-anticipated gaming machine’s price. TechSpot reports that Nintendo has found itself in the midst of a controversy surrounding the pricing of its highly anticipated Switch 2 console. The Japanese gaming giant recently announced that the Switch 2 will launch at a price point of $450 in...

Elon Musk and former Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) sparred on Wednesday as the failed vice presidential candidate celebrated the recent dip in Tesla’s stock price. “If you need a little boost during the day, check out Tesla stock,” Walz wrote, featuring a video of the former vice presidential candidate’s town hall in Wisconsin on Tuesday night. He even suggested that audience members that have a Tesla can pull the badge off of the electric car. Many analysts have blamed Musk’s more political role for the price performance of Tesla, while there have been many protests of Tesla dealerships, including one...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that President Donald Trump’s tariffs were a “one-time price adjustment.” Bessent said, “I don’t think it’s a radical change. It’s just a much needed course adjustment. And when we go back and look at what’s happened, there’s a new paper out called the China Shock and it talks about what happened post 2004, that some of the communities recovered, but the workers never recovered and that it was much more devastating on a human level. And what we are trying to do is make free trade fair trade, because the...

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) — an anti-Trump Democrat — was seemingly unable to remember what the price of eggs was in her home state, despite continually bringing attention to the high cost of eggs. The New York Times interviewed Klobuchar about her insistence on bringing up the price of eggs, using it — seemingly — to suggest that President Trump has failed, despite his being in office just over one month after four years of rising prices and rampant inflation under the Biden administration.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) stated that President Donald Trump hasn’t brought down costs after “Joe Biden handed Donald Trump the strongest economy in the entire world.” And is undoing work “to make sure that the climate change that is crushing economies across the country is going to start to help improve.” Wasserman Schultz said, “Joe Biden handed Donald Trump the strongest economy in the entire world. He is the only president in modern times that had positive job numbers in every single year he was president. We passed the CHIPS and...

Americans nationwide have every reason to be optimistic that positive change is on the horizon for the nation’s healthcare system. Though new government figures show costs $4.9 trillion per year and 17.6 percent of GDP, straining families, businesses, workers and public-sector budgets, President-elect Trump and his healthcare nominees are poised to deliver access to quality care at far lower costs, by fully realizing his price transparency legacy. Using power vested by the Affordable Care Act, Trump issued hospital and health insurance price transparency rules during his first administration that empower consumers, including employers and unions, with actual prices for their...

Let’s face it, the Democratic Party got off track. Back in the late ’90s, President Bill Clinton had approval ratings in the 70s as the party stood for a form of centrist progressivism. It meant finding a vital center in which the party looked to give people in need a helping hand but required people take responsibility for their own actions. That meant the adoption of policies like Pell Grants that required a B average or work requirements for welfare or a balanced budget. The economy soared. But the left fought these policies, and gradually they regained more and more...

Price and wage fixing is always harmful. There is no right way of doing it. There is no right way of doing a wrong thing. There is no fair way of doing something that oughtn’t be done at all. We can’t even define a fair price or a fair profit or a fair wage apart from the market or apart from the state of supply and demand. Instead of talking about “fair” prices, “fair” profits, and “fair” wages, we ought to be talking about functional wages, functional prices, and functional profits. Prices have work to do. What they do in...

Senate Democrats attacked McDonald’s on Tuesday for price gouging while it continues to “grow” profits and serve the needs of customers. The letter, written by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Bob Casey (D-PA), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), underscores the success of former President Donald Trump’s campaign stop on Sunday when he worked a McDonald’s drive-thru window in Pennsylvania. Images and video of the former president helping customers to McDonald’s finest foods nearly broke the internet. Many of Trump’s critics heralded the gesture as great retail politics and a stroke of political genius.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s latest ad touts her price control policy proposal, which has been widely criticized, considering price controls historically result in shortages of goods. The advertisement, titled “Focused,” hypes Harris’s plan of “cracking down” on grocery “price gouging.” “She’ll make groceries more affordable by cracking down on price gouging. And she’ll cut housing costs by taking on corporate speculators,” the ad vaguely promises.

We wrote Friday that Kamala Harris was likely to continue President Biden’s unfinished Build Back Better agenda, but it turns out we were far too optimistic. The policy priorities the Vice President laid out Friday are much worse, including a plan to impose national price controls on food and groceries.

Greetings, comrade worker: Candidate for Party General Secretary Kamala Harris has promised to punish the hoarders and wreckers driving up grocery prices. All hail the might of Soviet labor! That’s the latest bonkers proposal from Komrade Kamala Harris, unveiled in her marquee speech on the economy Friday — socialist price controls on groceries. Because the sky-high grocery prices average Americans have seen since she’s been in office couldn’t be the result of her boss’s disastrous economic policies. No, they must be caused by price-gouging corporate overlords who for some reason want customers to buy less of their products. The data...