The monthly national employment numbers are posted by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics [typically] on the first Friday of the month with the preceding month’s data. These days, a key statistic has been the Labor Force...
A few weeks ago the U.S. Department of Treasury released its latest estimate of the budgetary deficit for the fiscal year ending Oct. 31, 2011. Once again it revealed an extremely large deficit of which the majority of members of the European Union...
Soak the rich if we can agree on who they are; 999 is the way to go; flat tax rate or bust; and on and on it goes. This current crop of tax proposals is not new. Huckabee, Forbes and others from previous elections, put forth similar ideas. ...
Several years ago, we examined inflation data that showed retailers were having trouble passing on rising costs incurred at the wholesale level. The traditional pattern of the Producer Price Index (PPI) and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) had...
The Fed recently announced that it would ‘twist’ the yield curve. “The Committee intends to purchase, by the end of June 2012, $400 billion of Treasury securities with remaining maturities of 6 years to 30 years and to sell an equal amount of...
Is there a contagion spreading across democratic nations? Rights without responsibilities is the new cry. Trillions for redistribution; not a penny for job growth. Alexis de Tocqueville could see it coming way back in the early 1800s. “The American...
In late July, the Charlie Rose Show (the first 20 minutes) included commentators Gerald Seib from the Wall Street Journal, Al Hunt from Bloomberg News and Dan Bolz from the Washington Post discussing the Debt Limit Talks. The ‘conventionally-wise’...
In Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI notes that, “Charity is at the heart of the Church’s social doctrine.” (Paragraph 2) In the same encyclical, he goes on to say that, “Charity goes beyond justice … but it never lacks justice. … Not only is...