Free Republic

BAR STOOL ECONOMICS Suppose that every day, ten men go out for a beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this: The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1.00 The sixth would pay $3.00 The seventh would pay $7.00 The eighth would pay $12.00 The ninth would pay $18.00 The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.00 So that’s what they decided to do. The men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite...

Closing out his bus tour on a low-key note, President Obama made a pitch for his jobs package at a firehouse, where a subdued crowd needed a bit of prompting to applaud his proposal to boost the economy. Obama visited Fire Station 9 to draw attention to a major piece of his $447-billion jobs package. He wants to spread $35 billion among states and cities, in part to prevent layoffs of police and firefighters, and would pay for it with a surtax on millionaires. Congress may vote on that measure as early as this week. On Wednesday afternoon, Obama stood...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: S&P has indeed gone ahead and downgraded Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and countless banks even as we speak. Let me tell you what that means: That means everything is gonna cost us more. Everything ultimately involving credit, capital, is gonna cost more. Standard & Poor's, is this right? They're even downgrading Warren Buffett? From the Wall Street Journal: "Berkshire Hathaway, other insurers get negative tag from Standard & Poor's after Standard & Poor's bit an appendage from the US' credit rating, the credit rating firm is smelling blood in the water at Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. "S&P...

President Barack Obama made two fundamental mistakes today in his press conference which was intended to calm the markets. First, he did not lead off with a moment of reflection on the loss of American military lives in Afghanistan over the weekend. Second, he completely missed the boat on why Standard & Poor’s (S&P) lowered the credit rating of the United States. The President should have led off his press conference with prayers and condolences for the families of the 30 members of the U.S. military who lost their lives in Afghanistan over the weekend. Instead, the President waited until...

NEW YORK) Stocks accelerated their selloff in heavy volume Monday as investors fled from risky assets following S&P's downgrade of U.S.'s credit rating last week in addition to ongoing uncertainty over the euro zone crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped sharply to break below the psychologically-significant 11,000 mark, led by Bank of America and Alcoa, after logging its steepest weekly decline since Mar. 2009 last week. The S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq were down almost 5 percent. August is already on track to be the worst month for both indexes since Oct. 2008.

Remember how during the debt ceiling negotiations Obama went before the country what seemed like almost every day in order to call for tax increases, vilify the GOP, attack corporate jet depreciation schedules yet pretend to be a centrist? Well, his poll numbers still haven't recovered from that so you have to wonder why he felt the need to go before the country today with markets imploding. Did he think he could reassure the world with his magical speech-giving ability? Well if he did, he failed miserably. Check out this chart: I do realize markets were imploding anyway, but they...

Investors spooked by both the downgrade of the U.S. debt late Friday and the direction of the economy continued to sell stocks Monday, sending market indexes down 5% to 6%. The Dow Jones industrial average fell by more than 600 points, dropping below 11,000 for the first time since November. The Dow fell more than 633 points, to 10,810.83. The Standard & Poor's 500 index was off 6.66%, closing at 1,119.46, and the Nasdaq Composite index fell by 6.9%, closing down nearly 175 points at 2,357.69. Another down day on Wall Street followed declines in overseas markets earlier in the...

One of the most promising developments early on in the Schwarzenegger administration was the new governor's willingness to tackle the issue of prison reform – especially in the wake of Gov. Gray Davis' administration, which acted like a wholly owned subsidiary of the ham-fisted state prison guards union. The prison guards, which pumped enormous contributions into Gov. Davis' campaign, received oversized pay hikes and were given undue power over the correctional system, where a code of silence among guards made it impossible to root out abuse and corruption. Under Gov. Schwarzenegger, the state proposed wide-ranging and sensible reforms. But as...

Build highways, freeways and mass transit, he said, "so you don't get stuck in traffic all the time." Expand universities, build new classrooms and modernize old ones "so that our kids have the best place to go." Strengthen the state's levee system "to protect the people of California from a major disaster." But in his stem-winder on the banks of the Sacramento River, the governor mentioned nothing about the housing bond, a key component that helped him win votes from Democratic legislators for the bond package he has touted as a bipartisan triumph. Housing bond supporters such as Assembly Speaker...