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Gallup Poll Finds 50 Percent of Americans says they’re Financially Worse off now than Last Year

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the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, President Biden claimed in his State of the Union speech the U.S. economy has emerged from the pandemic “stronger than when we entered it.”

Too bad voters aren’t buying it. A new Gallup poll finds 50 percent of Americans says they’re financially worse off now than last year. That’s the highest percentage since the Great Recession of 2008.

Continue reading Gallup Poll Finds 50 Percent of Americans says they’re Financially Worse off now than Last Year

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Inflation: Most Americans Still Expect Grocery Prices to Keep Rising

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the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ , Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday the “disinflationary process” in the U.S. economy has begun, and said additional rate hikes will likely be necessary to bring inflation back to its 2% target.

Continue reading Inflation: Most Americans Still Expect Grocery Prices to Keep Rising

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Federal Reserve Approves 1/4 Point Rate Hike ,first Interest Rate Increase in Over Three Years

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell2

Washington DC, Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement :

“Indicators of economic activity and employment have continued to strengthen. Job gains have been strong in recent months, and the unemployment rate has declined substantially. Inflation remains elevated, reflecting supply and demand imbalances related to the pandemic, higher energy prices, and broader price pressures.”

Continue reading Federal Reserve Approves 1/4 Point Rate Hike ,first Interest Rate Increase in Over Three Years

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Rep.Scott Garrett : The CFPB has oversized influence on the U.S. economy because it alone decides which financial products you are allowed to buy

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October 18,2016

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, after a federal appeals court delivered a strong rebuke to the government’s new “consumer-finance watchdog”, declaring the agency’s unusual independence to be unconstitutional, and ordering its powers be curbed. Rep. Scott Garrett gave us his take on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) . In an email Garret spelled out the issues:

“This week, a federal court found that one of the most secretive Washington bureaucracies violates the constitutionally-mandated system of checks and balances designed to protect Americans from abuses of government authority. The court decided that the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is unconstitutional because of its toxic combination of immense power and little accountability. As Chairman of the Financial Services subcommittee that is responsible for making sure our country has competitive and robust capital markets, I have worked with my colleagues on solutions to restructure the CFPB in a way that protects consumers while holding Washington accountable to We the People.  
The CFPB has oversized influence on the U.S. economy because it alone decides which financial products you are allowed to buy. Everything from mortgages, to car loans, to retirement savings, the CFPB’s current structure allows it to unilaterally infringe on the economic choices of every American.

With a single, politically appointed head and its ability to bypass Congress to get funding, the CFPB acts as a rogue federal bureaucracy.  And while the CFPB has an important mission, it’s unacceptable to allow a single government agency to control how Americans can spend their own money.

In fact, in his decision on this case, Judge Brett Kavanaugh said, “Other than the President, the Director of the CFPB is the single most powerful official in the entire United States Government, at least when measured in terms of unilateral power.” As someone who has been an outspoken critic of this agency’s unchecked power, I completely agree.

To implement consumer protections that actually put people and families first, a complete re-organization of this bureaucracy is needed. I recently supported the Financial CHOICE Act, a bill that would transform the CFPB into a bipartisan, five-member commission which is subject to Congressional oversight and appropriations, just like other independent Washington agencies. This is the only way to ensure that Washington will actually do its job instead of acting in its own self-interest.

This ruling that the CFPB’s structure is unconstitutional is a win for transparency, and for the checks and balances that protect American families from abuses by overzealous government bureaucrats.  While stories like this don’t always make front page news, I feel it’s my responsibility to pass along information about my work and my priorities in Congress to the people of New Jersey’s Fifth District.”

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Productivity Growth of U.S. Economy Collapses to Record Low

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By James D. Agresti
May 13, 2016

U.S. productivity growth, the greatest determinant of living standards, has been lower for the past five years than any five-year period on record. New data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that productivity growth has averaged 0.4%per year over the past half-decade. This is 82% below the average of the prior six decades, which is as far back as this data extends.

The importance of productivity growth has been described in blunt terms by:

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, who stated that “the most important factor determining living standards is productivity growth.”
the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which reported that “a small change in the growth of productivity” over an extended period can inflict more harm than recessions, because lower productivity reduces economic “output by an ever-increasing amount.”
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Betty W. Su, who wrote that “high productivity growth” affords people with a “higher standard of living and quality of life.”

Productivity growth is especially vital for people with low incomes, because low-wage workers in highly productive nations have much better standards of living than their peers in less productive ones. For example, McDonald’s workers in the U.S. can buy about 2.4 Big Macs with their earnings from an hour of work, but this drops to:

2.2 Big Macs in Western Europe,
0.8 Big Macs in Eastern Europe, and
0.4 Big Macs in Latin America.

This amounts to a stunning 500% premium in purchasing power in the U.S. versus Latin America. As detailed by Princeton economics professor Orley C. Ashenfelter, McDonalds’ workers across the world perform the same jobs with the same levels of productivity, but because they live in nations with different levels of productivity, these workers have vastly different standards of living.

https://www.justfacts.com/news.record.low.productivity.asp

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Sluggish jobs report raises questions about the direction of U.S. economy

US President Obama waves from a golf cart in Kailua

Don LeeContact Reporter

For the last two years, America’s job-creation machine has been like “The Little Engine That Could,” chugging ahead with “I think I can, I think I can” regardless of headwinds at home or abroad.

The nation added 3 million jobs in 2014, making up all the ground lost in the Great Recession, and then piled on another 2.7 million jobs last year. All while the broader economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, grew at a relatively lackluster pace.

But the January jobs report, released Friday, suggests that the ever-dependable locomotive for the U.S. economy has encountered a hill that slowed it sharply.

The question now is whether it is just moving through an unusually steep patch or has finally met a hill it cannot conquer. The answer probably won’t be known for a couple of months, but Friday’s report has further clouded the outlook for investors and the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy.

The Labor Department said that employers added just 151,000 jobs last month, down from an average monthly gain of 283,000 in the fourth quarter of last year.

Economists caution that one can’t make too much of a single month’s data, especially in the winter when weather can skew payroll statistics. Unseasonably warm temperatures in December probably inflated hiring that month in construction, for example.

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobs-report-20160205-story.html

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U.S. economy set to grow less than 3% for the 10th straight year

US President Obama waves from a golf cart in Kailua

Published: Dec 22, 2015 10:08 a.m. ET

The economy expanded a touch slower in the third quarter than previously reported, revised government figures show, but the path of growth is still the same: The U.S. running well below the historical norm more than six years into a recovery.

Gross domestic product — the sum of all the activity in an economy — increased at a 2% annual pace from July to September, according to the government’s latest update. Previously the Commerce Department had said the U.S. grew at a 2.1% rate after a 3.9% increase in the second quarter.

The slight downgrade was triggered by a larger trade deficit and a smaller buildup in inventories than earlier estimates showed.

The U.S. expanded at a 2.2% rate through the first nine months of the year, and the economy is projected to grow at a similar pace in the fourth quarter that ends on Dec. 31. If so, the economy will have failed to reach 3% growth for the 10th straight year, marking the slowest stretch since the end of World War II.

Historically the economy has expanded at a 3.3% rate.

The government’s second update on GDP growth reflected a somewhat worse trade picture in the late summer and early fall. Exports rose a slower 0.7% instead of an earlier 0.9% estimate. And imports climbed 2.3% instead of 2.1%.

Companies also rebuilt inventories somewhat less than the government had tallied.

The value of inventories increased $85.5 billion, down from a prior $90.2 billion estimate. Inventories had jumped by $113.5 billion in the second quarter when the economy expanded at a much faster 3.9% clip.

Spending on home construction rose at a faster 8.2% pace in the third quarter instead of 7.3%, the revised Commerce Department figures show.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/third-quarter-gdp-growth-trimmed-to-2-2015-12-22

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Garrett: Attention on Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) Meeting Proves Fed has Too Much Influence on U.S. Economy

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Sep 16, 2015
the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ,  Rep. Scott Garrett (NJ-05), Chairman of the Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, issued the following statement as the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) begins their September meeting:

“As the ridiculous amount of attention on this week’s FOMC meeting proves, the performance of our economy and the financial markets is increasingly dependent on a group of unelected bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve.  Chair Yellen and her predecessors claim that the Fed’s monetary policy decisions are based upon objective criteria, yet traders, lenders, economists, and other market participants anxiously wait to probe and dissect every word in the FOMC statement.

“There is a problem when more Americans are looking to a secret Fed meeting for economic indicators than the actual financial markets. We need to scale back the undue influence that the Federal Reserve and other central bankers have on our economy by following what has worked in the past: a rules-based monetary policy that fosters greater certainty and leads to longer periods of sustained economic growth.”

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How Awesome Would the U.S. Economy Be If It Were Set Free from Massive Government Regulations?

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How Awesome Would the U.S. Economy Be If It Were Set Free from Massive Government Regulations?

IImagine if the U.S.’s economy had grown an extra 1% every year since 1949 as a result from less strangulating federal regulation.

This is the thesis for a recent Forbes article by Rich Karlgaard, the magazine’s publisher and head writer. Using the concept of compound interest, along with an assertion that runaway federal tinkering and silly regulations have had a massive impact on the country’s economic growth over the decades, he gives a handful of answers to the question:

“Where would the U.S. economy be today without massive federal regulation?”

Here’s what he came up with:

The 2014 GDP would be $32 trillion, not $17 trillion.
Per capita income would be $101,000, not $54,000.
Per capita wealth would be $480,000, not $260,000. It would probably be higher than that, since savings rates might be higher.
The U.S. would have no federal, state or municipal debts or deficits.
Pensions would be solid. So would Social Security.
The trend of new entrants to The Forbes 400 would not favor entrepreneurs in software, the Internet and financial services but would be more broadly distributed across all industries. Electronic bits–money and software–are less prone to regulation than such physical things as factories, transportation, etc.
Faster, quieter successors to the supersonic Concorde? Cheap, safe nuclear power? Cancer-curing drugs for small populations? Bullet trains financed by private investors? Yes!
The U.S. would have the resources to fight the multiplicity of threats from abroad, from ISIS to hackers.

His conclusion is that when considering political leaders, those that are committed to less government interference should be preferred.

Furthermore, he wisely points out that it’s not a partisan idea, stating that Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton are examples of these types of leaders, whereas Truman, George W. Bush, and Obama are examples of precisely the opposite.

https://www.ijreview.com/2014/10/185794-americas-economy-look-like-without-silent-deadly-killer-astounding/