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Is Pessimism About the Economy Justified? - American Thinker
Recent press reports and opinion poll results declare the U.S. economy is in worse shape than it was in 2021 through 2024. This impression prevails despite very high gross domestic product growth and falling inflation in the second and third quarters of last year, in the wake of slower growth and steady inflation numbers in the fourth quarter. An accurate gauge of the overall health of the economy is critically important considering the federal government’s assumption of authority and control over the nation’s economic well-being. A false diagnosis will lend credence to bad policy choices. Overall, the U.S. economy is not yet where it should be, though the doom talk today is overstated and politically motivated. What is most damaging about the mismatch between today’s economic myth and reality are the false conclusions about economic policy its advocates send. The midterm elections are the obvious context for the doomsaying about the economy. The wrong diagnosis could have long-term policy implications. The important question is what the current state of the economy indicates about economic principles and what policy course the United States should pursue in the future. The two broad alternatives are more government intervention and economic management, or greater economic freedom. Let’s look at the numbers with that in mind. Inflation has come down far from its mid-2022 peak of 9.1 percent (as measured by the Consumer Price Index, or CPI), to 2.4 percent. January’s headline inflation rate was the lowest since May of last year. Inflation of core consumer prices, which excludes volatile food and fuel costs, was 2.5 percent over the past 12 months, the lowest since March 2021. Reported inflation remains above the Fed’s goal of 2 percent per year. Through January, the unemployment rate was middle-of-the-road, neither alarmingly high nor encouragingly low, though continuing a reversal of the pre-pandemic trend that has now lasted three years. Critics are characterizing this normal but very slowly rising unemployment rate as a bad sign. “The U.S. labor market is facing another year of sluggish hiring and a further increase in the unemployment rate, a leading economist has warned,” Newsweek reported in January. The widely predicted increase in unemployment has been scaring the public, as it should if it is true. Those prophecies proved wrong in January. However, as total nonfarm employment rose by 130,000 and the unemployment rate “changed little,” at 4.3...
How annoying! The $165 billion industry that means that everything ...
Ever have one those days when you just want to put your head in your hands and scream, ‘Why does everything have to be so difficult these days?’. Welcome to the Annoyance Economy - and it’s big business, so get used to it because it ain’t going away any time soon. The fuel for the Annoyance Economy are those everyday interactions that should be simple, but which turn out to be fraught with process, procedure, nit-picking, form filling, and all sorts of other things designed to eat into your life to little or no effect other than to annoy. And the main perpetrators of this Annoyance Economy are almost universally service providers across multiple walks of life, organizations or bodies whose goal in life is to make it harder for customers to actually accomplish anything that is in their interests, but not the self-interest of the company in question. My own battle with the ghastly process-ridden Metro Bank is a case in point, where daring to want to do something outrageous, like spend my own money, is a capital offense, punishable by hours of pointless attempts to talk someone on the phone into doing their job, or trying to wrestle past the most obstructive and unhelpful AI system known to humankind. Just this week I attempted to make contact with the UK Royal Mail to report a delivery failure. How difficult is it to email a complaint to Royal Mail? Really, really, really difficult, a procedure involving navigating many screens all asking if you really need to be doing this and can’t you just accept our canned answers? Then when you do persevere and finally make it to some form of contact information, there’s no way to email the firm that I could see. But the time I’d got that far I was essentially blinded by frustration, so who knows? Worth What we do know is that the Annoyance Economy costs a lot, an estimated $165 billion in lost time and dollars annually for the average American consumer, according to The Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank with a mission statement to “build an economy that works for all” In its research report - Taking on the Annoyance Economy - the group breaks down that total cost into annoyance categories: Junk fees: $90 billion a year Phone scams: $25.4 billion Calls with health insurance administrators: $21.6 billion Waiting for medical services: $19.4 billion Robocalls: $8 billion Waiting 'in line' for government services: $1.6 billion But however you slice and dice it, the bottom line is that it sucks, it f...
How likely is a US recession? How to prepare if one comes
A coin flip. That's the odds the US enters a recession in the next 12 months, according to a Moody's Analytics model. How to prepare in case it comes.
Executive Orders - The White House
Ensuring Truthful Advertising of Products Claiming to be Made in America Presidential Actions, Executive Orders March 13, 2026
