"The pace of hiring in the U.S. slowed last month. Employers added just 138,000 jobs. But the unemployment rate dropped to 4.3 percent, the lowest it has been in 16 years.
The monthly snapshot from the Labor Department is one of the most closely watched indicators of the health of the economy.
No matter what the numbers actually say, how we feel about them is often colored by politics."
Lotteries exploit the poor and generally make their lives much worse, especially when they win.
"United Airlines violently removed a passenger from an airplane earlier this week. The company had overbooked the flight, which is standard practice in the airline industry, and then failed to entice enough people to give up their seats by offering as much as $800 to anyone who would volunteer. The final solution to the conundrum of too many passengers and not enough seats was to demand certain passengers give up their seats. When one man refused, he was forced out."
"The video of the event, which showed the man being beaten and bloodied by the police, went viral and attracted nearly universal condemnation. But the condemnation that I’ve seen so far is very unclear about what the problem is. The video is violent and repulsive, but only insofar as all property and contract enforcement is. The forceful removal of the passenger is not an extraordinary aberration from our civilized capitalist order. Rather, it is an example of the everyday violence (and threatened violence) that keeps that capitalist order running."
"The Trump administration has gone to court to try to bring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under its control. The bureau is an executive branch entity, but the president doesn't have direct control over the six-year-old agency.
The Justice Department filed a brief with a federal appeals court in Washington on Friday, making the case that the structure of the agency violates the Constitution."
“Historically, when one party controls both houses of Congress and the White House, the deficit goes up,” says William Gale, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “You’ve got your hands in the cookie jar.”
"Now, President Donald Trump has made it clear he does not like Dodd-Frank and wants to make big changes."
"So, we wanted to know, what are the important parts of Dodd-Frank? And what's going to happen to them?"
"We call everyone from bankers to Barney Frank to find out."