The US dollar has depreciated against foreign currencies, including the Mexican peso, South African rand, Indian rupee and Chinese Yuan.

From The Hill:

In a presidential proclamation released Thursday, President Obama called upon Americans to boost their understanding of their personal finances in April.

As America digs out from underneath the financial crisis of 2008, he stressed in the announcement that the need for a strong understanding of finance is more important than ever, as the nation works to get back on a sound fiscal foundation.

How big is the national debt?

It’s too bad they don’t give Nobel Prizes for comedy.

Some Maine Republicans have come under attack from progressive and union groups for a proposal (pdf) to curtail some child labour laws or as progressives put it, to wage “war on child labor laws”.

Ignoring politics, lets make a simple economic analysis. Minimum wage laws cause unemployment, especially for younger people. By setting a minimum wage above the equilibrium price in a labour market, the result is a surplus of labour, i.e. quantity supplied exceeds quantity demanded. This means that employers will not hire as many employees at the government mandated wage. (See image above)

Think Progress goes on to claim:

Burns’ bill is particularly insidious, because it directly encourages employers to hire children or teenagers instead of adult workers. Because workers under 20 could be paid less than adults under this GOP proposal, minimum wage workers throughout Maine would likely receive a pink slip as their twentieth birthday present so that their boss could replace them with someone younger and cheaper.

This claim is very blunt, and lacks economic backing. Adult workers typically have more work experience and more education than teenagers, which is why adults earn higher wages than teens. So really this nothing more than hyperbole, not a form of economic reasoning.

There is nothing wrong with letting young people, willing to work, bid down wages so they can gain valuable work experience.

Alan Greenspan is apparently criticising the federal government for its “fiscal ‘stimulus’”.

It seems that a fiscal ‘stimulus’ is a no-no, but pumping billions of dollars into credit markets and fueling a housing bubble is perfectly OK.

I have yet to figure out how a central planner like Greenspan has a “long-held free-market ideology”.

The listed food prices increased at an average rate of 2.03%, an annualised rate of 24.36%.

Crap like this is simply that: Crap.

It appears that now Young Americans for Freedom simply find Ron Paul’s belief in a non-interventionist foreign policy a dereliction of his constitutional oath of office. Apparently this didn’t bother YAF until now, even though this has been Paul’s position for several years. In fact, until the second Bush administration, this non-interventionist viewpoint was the conservative view on foreign policy. That was actually the position Bush ran on in 2000: ‘No nation building.’

Now the neocons call this treason and other like terms. It is now the mainstream “conservative” viewpoint that the United States must be the master of the world. Not only is this not conservative, it’s anti-American.

In 1776, the Founders of this nation declared their independence from their imperial overlords, the British. Now we seek to be the world’s dominant empire; let the Founders be damned. Was it the goal of the Founders to gain independence simply to replace the British as the world’s empire? No, it wasn’t. The same non-interventionist policy advocated by Ron Paul was advocated by the Founders. Jefferson wanted trade and friendship with foreign powers and to “avoid entangling alliances”; Washington and Adams spent a great deal of their time as presidents to avoid a war with France and Britain. If the early American nation were ran by neocons, this nation might not have survived.

This shows that the neoconservatives want nothing to do with shrinking the size, scope or power of the government. They care little if the government rules every aspect of your lives; in fact, they prefer that—it’s for your own good! Their goal is to spread the role of American government overseas. Apparently it is their goal to export the American welfare state into the Middle East, via, of course, the warfare state.

It is the goal of these people to overturn hundred and thousands of years of Arab political culture and to replace it with American “democracy” because that’s what those people need, say the neocons. Of course the neocons couldn’t give a damn about the Arabs or anyone else. Their goal is to expand the American empire at all costs.

The price report is available for 1/31/2011.

The average prices recorded increased at a monthly rate of 4.27 percent, an annual rate of 51.24 percent.

NYC is installing 3,000 new cameras to spy on its residents.

Perhaps Orwell’s 1984 should be renamed 2015.

Mr. Messamore has a hilarious and very true article about the real freaks in politics (i.e. the ones people vote for).

Apparently the feds have little better to do than punish people for illegal online gambling.

That Australian is not having a G’day.