Free Republic

There’s been a move over the past few years to help young Americans learn how to manage their money better. And it’s long overdue. It can be easy to wonder what sort of problems financial literacy courses could have prevented for the generations before those who are in school now. In recent months, Florida, Nebraska, Ohio, and Rhode Island have signed laws creating a requirement that high school students take financial courses in order to graduate. In all, a dozen states have similar laws on the books. Georgia joined the ranks of those states this week. Gov. Brian Kemp signed...

The fact that our nation’s unemployment rate is approaching the low rate of 3.5% that was reached just prior to the pandemic should be a cause for celebration. But for a variety of reasons, the official unemployment number is misleading.The employment situation is not as rosy as it may seem. There is a wide disparity among the states that can be explained by how much economic freedom they allow, including how severely each state shut down its economy due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Consider that the U.S. remains 1.6 million jobs short of our February 2020 high, just before the pandemic...

Roughly a dozen states are proposing sending tax rebate checks to their residents to offset the highest inflation in four decades, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle pointing to high gas and food prices as prompting their actions. Among them is Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, who on Wednesday signed a law to send checks of up to $500 to state residents. The reason, he said in a statement, is to soften the impact of inflation on household budgets — and also return some of money amid a record state budget surplus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci this week insisted that blue states finally moving to lift mask mandates has nothing to do with politics, asserting it simply has to do with the data, despite the fact that the science has not changed, as prominent conservative politicians have pointed out.

Louisiana and 15 other states on Feb. 4 lodged a new legal challenge against the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers, arguing that the dominance of the Omicron virus variant undercuts the justification for the mandate.Approximately 10.4 million workers fall under the vaccination requirements, which apply to every facility that receives Medicare or Medicaid funding.The Supreme Court lifted injunctions against the mandate on Jan. 13, finding in a 5–4 decision that the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) had the authority to issue the rule requiring vaccination. The mandate...

In 2020, our nation’s economy was booming. Then everything came to halt when COVID came to us from China. The country went into lockdown in an effort to “slow the spread,” sending unemployment levels skyrocketing to historic highs. But thanks to President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, the federal government authorized three vaccines in record time and the lockdowns ended. Yet a year later, our nation has yet to recover the jobs it lost, as incentives to remain unemployed predictably kept people from going back to work. But four states have managed to see a full recovery of the jobs lost...

Four states on the East Coast have declared a state of emergency ahead of a large snowstorm expected to hit Southern and Eastern states Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia all declared a state of emergency on Friday in advance of the storm.

In a crushing blow to his pandemic response, Biden urged businesses to impose vaccine mandates on their own and urged states to ‘do the right thing’ after the Supreme Court blocked his sweeping rules on private companies. The high court, however, permitted an employee vaccination mandate at health care centers receiving federal funds to go into effect. Twenty-seven states had petitioned the Supreme Court to issue a stay on the rule while it is battled out in the judicial system. Biden has suffered a series of setbacks in the past 48 hours, who hasn’t been able to win Democratic support...

CNN anchor Jake Tapper pointed out Tuesday on his show “The Lead” that Democrats were only complaining about voting restrictions in red states, while blue states like New Jersey and Delaware did not allow ballot harvesting. After both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris gave speeches on the Democrats voting legislation in Georgia today, Tapper said, “Look, I genuinely as an American feel that in addition to guarding against fraud, which is very little of in the United States, it should be as easy as possible for Americans to vote.”

Blue states currently lead the U.S. in the daily average of coronavirus cases per capita, according to Saturday’s data. According to the New York Times’ coronavirus tracker, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC, lead the U.S. in the daily average of coronavirus cases per capita. Rhode Island currently stands at 413 per 100,000, followed by New York with 362 and New Jersey with 351.

At least 20 states are beginning the new year by increasing their minimum wages, while Puerto Rico and several cities and counties are also bumping up pay for workers in 2022. A total of 26 states will have minimum wage increases go into effect in 2022, with wage hikes beginning in 22 states on Jan. 1, according to Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., a company providing information on finance, regulatory compliance and the law. A wage increase in New York state began a day earli

Joe Biden is cutting off supplies of a medical therapy that helps people fend off COVID and keeps them from going to the hospital and possibly dying. Monoclonal antibodies are a man-made therapy to fight off the COVID infection.You’ve got to hand it to Biden: Cutting off likely life-saving medication is one way to ingratiate yourself with your voters. Yeah, that’s the ticket.This week, his minions in public health decided to cut off – “pause” was the word they used – the allocation of certain monoclonal antibodies to the states using them.And that’s not nothing.The operator of two Maryland monoclonal...

Blue states that have repeatedly imposed mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and lockdowns over the last year have lost population to red states that have done away with such policies. Newly released data from the United States Census Bureau reveals that while blue states like California and New York have increasingly lost population from July 2020 to July 2021, red states such as Texas and Florida have seen population increases.

Covid-19 hospitalizations are once again rising in the United States. Among the 30-plus states that have seen increases in Covid-19 hospitalizations over the last two weeks, six stand out. Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois have accounted for the majority of the country’s increase in hospital beds filled, according to an NBC News analysis of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data.

Americans have started factoring a state's political ideology into their decision to move as the nation grows increasingly polarized. A survey from Redfin, a real-estate brokerage firm based in Seattle, predicted more people would vote with their feet in 2022, moving to states that align with their political beliefs about abortion, civil rights, mask and vaccine mandates and critical race theory.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid said Monday on her show “The ReidOut” that states with low COVID vaccination rates are like a sanctuary for dumb people, which she dubbed a “dumbass-tuary.” Reid said, “Republicans in several Southern states, in particular, were cutting off the additional unemployment aid, but now all of a sudden, magic, they want to give unemployment benefits to people that quit or get fired because they don’t get their shot. So they’re forgetting the free money that makes you lazy as long as it makes you lazy but possibly puts you in the hospital.”

State governments spent more money in the last fiscal year than ever before, bolstered by federal funds meant to help avert an economic catastrophe as businesses shuttered to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Total state spending topped $2.6 trillion in Fiscal Year 2021, up 16.2 percent from the previous year, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.

States with statewide mask mandates in place are reporting higher coronavirus cases per capita than Florida, a target of the establishment media throughout the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Illinois is just one of a handful of states that has a mask mandate in place. Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) reinstituted the mandate in late August, which requires all Illinois residents older than two to wear a mask in indoor settings, regardless of vaccination status. However, that has not seemed to stop the virus from spreading.

OSHA has “officially filed its vaccine mandate rules for the COVID19 Jab. Affected employers have until Jan 4, 2022, to comply. In response, twenty-five states have filed or joined lawsuits in four different circuit courts to stop the mandate. The states are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Several groups have also joined with the states in each respective filing in the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Eleventh Circuit Courts.From Reason.com, edited and reformatted: Texas filed...

Eighteen states filed three separate lawsuits Friday to stop President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors, arguing that the requirement violates federal law. Attorneys general from Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming signed on to one lawsuit, which was filed in a federal district court in Missouri. Another group of states including Georgia, Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Georgia. Texas also sued individually on Friday. The states asked a federal judge to block Biden’s requirement that all employees...