Free Republic

If your earnings rose by 34% from January 2020 to October 2023, congratulations, the purchasing power of your labor kept pace with higher costs.Official measures of inflation are a long-running tragi-comedy: comedic in the transparency of the distortions, and tragic in the consequences: what will you believe is true--the statistics or your lying eyes?The basic gimmick of distortion is to underweight whatever is eating away at the purchasing power of earnings and highlight the trivial items that are getting cheaper due to declines in quality and globalization. So your rent went up by $200 a month, or $2,400 a year,...

Despite the biggest increase in average hourly wages for production and non-supervisory workers in 40 years, these people are actually worse off. Why? Rising prices are eating up their income gains. Year-over-year, average hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory employees were up 6.7% in March, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Other than the lockdown distortions in April and May of 2020, this was the biggest gain since 1982. This includes jobs in all industries that are non-management, ranging from assembly line workers to computer coders. In dollar terms, the average wage of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees increased by...

We found that the most affordable housing markets in America were uniformly located in the South and Midwest. The most affordable place we looked at in America was Youngstown, Ohio where the median household income in one year is more than the typical purchase price of a home. On the other hand, almost all the least affordable places to buy a home were in California. Of all the markets we examined, Newport Beach was the least affordable market in the country.

If Britain were to join the United States, it would be the second-poorest state, behind Alabama and ahead of Mississippi. The ranking, determined by Fraser Nelson, an editor of The Spectator magazine, was made by dividing the gross domestic product of each state by its population, and it took into account purchasing power parity for cost of living. Several other European countries were also included in the ranking.

Economists on both the left and the right have long had concerns and criticisms about the accuracy of the poverty rate — so, at the instruction of the federal government, the Census Bureau developed a new measure to determine the number of poor in America. The Bureau today released the nation’s poverty numbers under the new gauge.Called “The Supplemental Poverty Measure,” the new indicator suggests 49.1 million Americans face poor economic conditions, compared with just 46.6 million under the standard measure. That sounds “grim,” as an MSNBC headline put it — but, just as the standard measure is misleading in...

The 2007 Human Development Report says Iceland now leads annual United Nations Index. Iceland has narrowly passed Norway to take the top spot on the Human Development Index (HDI), according to the 2007/2008 Human Development Report (HDR) released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) today. Norway had held the number one ranking for the previous six years. This change in ranking is a result of new estimates of life expectancy and updated GDP per capita figures, stress the Report authors. Introduced with the first HDR in 1990, the HDI assesses the state of human development through life expectancy, adult...

Please patronize American businesses today and spend lots of money. Our economy does NOT depend on poor, uneducated, unskilled illegal immigrants from Mexico no matter what the pundants say. We will prove them wrong once again. This is nothing but open border, leftist pyschobabble BS. Now, go forth and SPEND! Semper Fi' Jarhead

Industrial production and new home construction rose sharply last month, suggesting that the economy is overcoming high energy prices and rebounding from the summer slump. But a spike in consumer prices is also stoking worries that inflation might spread more broadly as the economy heats up. The Federal Reserve reported yesterday that industrial production rose 0.7 percent in October, the fastest pace since July. In addition, the Commerce Department reported that new housing starts had recovered from a September dip to rise 6.4 percent last month. Investors in financial markets seemed encouraged by the emerging panorama of economic strength, as...