“The Labor Department reported Friday that worker payrolls expanded by 201,000 in August and private-sector hourly wages grew 2.9% from a year earlier,” last Friday’s Wall Street Journal reported.
“Populism” seemed to have suffered a premature death a year ago. Emmanuel Macron had beaten Marine Le Pen in the French presidential elections, Dutch right-winger Geert Wilders had underperformed massively, and the EU had found — or at least thought to have found — new popularity all around Europe. After a turbulent 2016, in which the UK voted to exit the EU, and which saw Donald Trump become US president, everything seemed well again.
By now you’ve heard about the combative spectacle that was last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for President Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. This momentous event was characterized not by political acumen, wit, cunning, or prudence, but by partisan obstruction, lawlessness, tantrums, hysteria, ignorance, frenzy, and anger.
Last month, when a host of media outlets began talking about the Trump administration’s alleged “battle against breastfeeding,” few of them — if any — mentioned the fact that the US federal government continues to subsidize the baby formula industry to the tune of billions of dollars.
According to the Federal Reserve’s Underlying Inflation Gauge , the 12-month inflation growth in June was 3.33 percent. That’s the highest rate recorded in 158 months, or more than 13 years. The last time the UIG measure was as high was in April 2005, when it was at 3.36 percent.
Money supply growth fell in July, dropping to the lowest rate recorded since February of this year. Overall, money-supply growth remains well below the growth rates experienced from 2009 to 2016.
In July, year-over-year growth in the money supply was at 4.1 percent. That was down from June’s growth rate of 4.4 percent, and was also down from July 2017’s rate of 4.9 percent.
[Editor’s note: our immigration roundtable is a series of articles presenting the views of prominent Austrian and libertarian thinkers. By necessity each article provides only a basic overview of those views, with links to original sources.]
Our goal is to present each thinker’s views on immigration by excerpting his or her writings on the subject.
When not assisting the continued politicization of America’s most powerful legislative branch, the media this week has relished in a variety of news items continuing to push the narrative that President Donald Trump is mentally unfit to hold office.
