Anyone hoping for signs of a healthy economic recovery was disappointed by lower-than-expected GDP growth for the first quarter of 2013—a mere 2.5%, far short of the forecast 3.2%. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to soar, hitting record levels in recent weeks. It's a striking disconnect, and one that is discouraging and confusing for Americans as they seek to earn a living and save for the future.Companies and small businesses are also dealing with the same paradox. Many are in good shape and have money to spend. So why aren't they pumping more capital back into the economy, creating...
Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his "farewell lecture" here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon's Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education.Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with...
After President Obama's gun bill failed in the Democratic Senate, the media lamented his supposed lack of political ruthlessness. Why can't he be more like LBJ? For example, why didn't he trade a road that Alaska's Senators want in return for gun-control votes? Well, maybe because building such a road is against his Administration's environmental religion.
The company that bought the Twinkie, HoHo and Ding Dong brands out of bankruptcy is gearing up to reopen plants and hire workers, but it won't be using union labor.Hostess Brands LLC—Metropoulos & Co. and Apollo Global Management LLC's new incarnation of the baking company that liquidated in Chapter 11—is reopening four bakeries in the next eight to 10 weeks, aiming to get Twinkie-deprived consumers the classic snack cake starting in July.
The Federal Aviation Administration claims the sequester spending cuts are forcing it to delay some 6,700 flights a day, but rarely has a bureaucracy taken such joy in inconveniencing the public.Though the FAA says it is strapped for cash, the air traffic control agency managed to find the dollars to update its interactive "command center" tool on its website so passengers can check if their airports are behind schedule due to what it calls sequester-related "staffing" problems. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn noticed this rare case of FAA...
The taxi business has long been a launching pad for immigrants and entrepreneurs who want to start their own business without a big investment. That dream got a boost on Monday when a unanimous Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the state improperly blocked an independent taxi company from starting a new service.
The debate over whether 1,500 air-traffic controllers need to be furloughed every day as part of $85 billion in federal spending cuts comes down to a gray area in the budget that might only be resolved in federal court.Republicans and many airline executives have said the White House has flexibility to avoid the furloughs but has chosen to force travel delays to score political points.The Department of Transportation, which runs the Federal Aviation Administration, says it has no choice but to force employees to take unpaid leave to absorb the mandatory, across-the-board spending cuts that...
For a few months in 2012, Bruce Simon, the chief executive of gourmet food retailer Omaha Steaks International Inc., drove a $100,000 plug-in hybrid electric car known as the Fisker Karma. No longer.
President Obama's sequester scare strategy has been a political flop, but his government keeps trying. The latest gambit is to force airline flight delays until enough travellers stuck on tarmacs browbeat enough Republicans to raise taxes again.This week the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began furloughing each of its air-traffic controllers for one day out of every 10 to achieve roughly $600 million in savings this fiscal year. The White House dubiously claims that the furloughs are required by the sequester spending cuts enacted in 2011.
It has been noted far and wide that the Texas House is moving slower than molasses in January this session. Here we are, mid-April, and the House calendar for Thursday, April 18 features just 7 second-reading bills and 7 third-reading bills – though many, many more on “local and consent.” While not a bad thing when it comes to keeping bad legislation away from eager voting fingers, good legislation could languish and die as well.
