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"It feels like bad news for the economy in every direction," warned CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera on NBC as she reeled off statistics on the "huge increase" in inflation in March. The wholesale Producer Price Index rose by 1.1% in a single month with oil and food costs taking the blame: "Normally when the US economy is slowing prices tend to fall," Caruso-Cabrera complained, but "in fact, the only thing going down is home prices." Southern California statistics showed a 24% fall in the value of residential property in a single year.
The other two networks covered the economy with features, not news reports. ABC's Kitchen Table series had Betsy Stark profile a married couple in small town Pennsylvania who have to work four jobs each week to make ends meet. By the way, Barack Obama, they are not bitter & clinging--their motto is "the next good thing is always just around the corner." CBS' Hitting Home examined a proposal to prevent an estimated 600,000 home mortgage foreclosures by allowing bankruptcy judges to adjust monthly loan repayments downwards. Ben Tracy reported on the accusation by the plan's sponsor, Sen Richard Durbin (D-IL), that mortgage bankers lead the opposition to the idea. "We think that Sen Durbin is off base on that comment," argued David Kittle of the Mortgage Bankers Association. Yet Tracy pointed out that Kittle does, too, oppose the rule change, since to do so "would encourage homeowners to declare bankruptcy to lower their payments, forcing banks to raise rates on all homeowners." So Kittle presumably means "off base" in that K Street sense of "accurate."
April 15th is IRS income tax filing deadline so CBS had Bob Orr put together a Follow the Money feature on what the fiscal lobbyist group Third Way calculates an average household's annual bill of $13,112 federal taxes is spent on: $2761 on the Pentagon, $2663 on Social Security, $1085 on interest payments, $62 on law enforcement, $12 on the National Parks--and $49 on the Internal Revenue Service itself.
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