Rick Newman: In Defense of the Chevy Volt
The plug-in Volt, which debuted in late 2010, has become a political target for Republicans, who associate it with the 2009 General Motors bailout and with President Obama’s fondness for controversial green-energy programs. Conservative pundit Glenn Beck called it “crappy.” Rush Limbaugh huffed about GM “trying to kill its customers.” Obama’s likely opponent, Mitt Romney, says the Volt is “an idea whose time has not come.”
GM CEO Dan Akerson, not surprisingly, complains that the Volt has become a “political punching bag,” with sales hurt by partisan bickering that has nothing to do with the car itself.
Why Women Will Rock the Economic Recovery
But women tend to be better educated than men, with more relevant skills, which means economic power will continue to shift toward women, as it has been for the last 20 years. The unemployment rate for women, for example, is 8.1 percent, while it’s 8.3 percent for men. During the recession, the gap was much bigger, favoring women by more than two percentage points for many months. That overall trend is likely to persist throughout the recovery. “Women are uniquely positioned to take advantage of jobs in tomorrow’s growth industries,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch wrote in a recent report, “and tend to enjoy stronger earnings growth relative to men.”
Why Cell Phones Will Never Be Banned In Cars - Rick Newman
The NTSB doesn’t regulate transportation; it only makes recommendations about how to improve safety. By design, the NTSB doesn’t worry about how much reforms or new rules will cost, or how much inconvenience they will cause. That’s up to other agencies—federal, state or local—that have to decide whether recommended safety reforms are practical or not. Sometimes they’re not. By calling for a cell-phone ban, the NTSB is raising awareness of a new problem that most people aren’t aware of, including phone-addicted teenage drivers and their parents.
When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976, they set to work building a line of computers—culminating in the Macintosh—that would be the most intuitive machines of their kind. In a way, they introduced the middling people to the magic of digital processors the way Henry Ford introduced them to cars. The brash young Jobs left Apple in 1985, after a spat with the board over the company’s direction. By his own later admission, he needed a strong dose of perspective.
Jobs did other things for 12 years, until returning to Apple as CEO in 1997. The company was floundering, after a string of misfires. Jobs straightened things out, then brought Apple to new heights with wonders like the iPod, iPhone and iPad, along with services like iTunes and Apple TV meant to complement the elegant devices. By the time Jobs retired as CEO earlier this year, Apple was more valuable than virtually any other technology company in the world, including Google, IBM and Microsoft.
How Rick Perry Created Jobs in Texas
It sounds like an outsized Texas boast, but the numbers support Rick Perry when he claims that Texas has created more than one-third of the jobs in the United States since the economic recovery began in 2009. There’s an important caveat, however, that the Texas governor is unlikely to volunteer: Virtually all of those new jobs are in the government sector, not in private enterprise.
Rick Newman: Why GOP Discord Is Good For the Economy
Democrats are gleeful over all this discord, because it delays the ascent of a presidential frontrunner, makes fundraising more difficult for Republicans, and provides superb sound-bite material for campaign commercials that are sure to show Republicans contradicting each other. But this disagreement is good for the democratic process, and good for voters, too.
