"Sick of sticker shock at the supermarket? Don't expect relief any time soon.

"That's the word from mighty Goldman Sachs, which says in a report to clients that grocery prices will rise by as much as 6% this year -- on top of a similar increase last year.

"'The stage has been set for further substantial increases in retail food prices this year,' the investment bank's economists wrote in the report.

"They blamed COVID-related supply issues, as well as high labor costs and rising expenses for fertilizer and other farming necessities.

"Goldman's forecast is the latest gut punch for U.S. consumers grappling with rising costs for practically everything, from rent to food."

Read the entire article here.

"The debate over speech in this country is defined by people using their childishness and sense of entitlement as weapons. It won't change until leaders are unafraid to tell them in no uncertain terms to grow up."

"President Joe Biden is seeking to raise federal employee pay by 4.6%, with private sector pay estimated to rise just 3.4% this year.

"The pay raise for federal employees is reportedly part of Biden's forthcoming FY2023 budget, which the White House plans to send to Congress after the president's State of the Union address on March 1.

"The White House requested a 2.7% increase for federal employees in FY2021. Pay raises for the federal workforce in FY2022 range from 2.42% to 3.21%. Federal News Radio reported that the 4.6% request for the federal workforce in the FY2023 budget is the 'largest in decades.'"

Read the entire article here.

"Gerrymandering is to politics what doping is to sports. It is universally viewed as a cheat, an effort to manipulate districts to guarantee electoral victories. Drafting coherent districts evenly and logically to divide populations is not particularly difficult. School districts usually are designed to evenly distribute populations with schools as center points; those school districts often serve as voting locations. Once you depart from such logical divisions, however, political pressures produce a grotesque progeny of malformed districts. ...

"Both parties have engaged in gerrymandering this year -- but the blinkered outrage of President Biden to Republican gerrymandering only highlights the hypocrisy of our times. We are left, yet again, with a gang of arsonists espousing fire safety in our political system. Despite voters calling for an end to gerrymandering, their leaders continue to lie to them and frustrate efforts to end this insidious practice.

"While the National Democratic Redistricting Committee called for a 'Fair Districts Pledge' to 'commit to restoring fairness to our democracy,' these politicians have instead followed Oscar Wilde's rule that 'the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.'"

Read the entire article here.

"Union membership in Wisconsin is about half of what it was a little over a decade ago.

"The latest numbers from the Department of Labor show a steep drop in union membership in Wisconsin since 2009.

"In 2009, nearly 385,000 people were union members in the state. That was about 15% of the workforce.

BLS said, as of 2021, that number fell to 215,000 union members, or 7.9% of the state's workforce.

"Wisconsin saw two steep drops in union membership, the first after former Gov. Scott Walker signed Act 10 into law in 211, and the second after Gov. Walker signed the state's Right to Work law in 2015.

"'To lose 12,000 members in one year and over 170,000 members since 2009 proves that Big Labor needs forced coercion to survive and shows us why it was so important for former Governor Walker and the Republican Legislation to pass worker freedom. Wisconsinites are voting with their feet and they are walking away from the labor movement,' Brett Healy with the MacIver Institute told The Center Square. ...

"The drop in Wisconsin's union membership mirrors a drop in national union membership as well."

Read the entire article here.

"The average price for regular gasoline continues to rise and is only three cents away from a new seven-year-high.

"According to AAA, the average price for regular gasoline now stands at $3.39, which is only 3 cents per gallon from a new seven-year high that was reached in 2014 when gas hit $3.42. ...

"New analysis published Wednesday by the Joint Economic Committee Republicans suggests the Biden administration is exacerbating soaring energy prices by cracking down on the oil and gas industry with new regulations that limit production and discourage investments in traditional energy infrastructure.

"The JEC study, shared exclusively with FOX Business, shows how President Biden's policies have stoked higher energy prices by 'imposing new barriers to accessing American oil and gas reserves, and by discouraging investment in these historically reliable and inexpensive sources of energy.' Rep. Mike Lee, R-Utah, is the ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee."

Read the entire article here.

"The tally for how much the federal government spent to combat COVID-19 is now estimated to be $5 trillion. It is more than the combined costs of World Wars I and II. The left is celebrating that politicians in Washington saved us. Really? From what exactly? ...

The left believes that it was government intervention that saved millions of lives. But even with all the federal spending, some 879,000 (and counting) have perished from the virus. It was politicians such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo whose awful decision-making contributed to the deaths of thousands of seniors exposed to infected patients in nursing homes. In addition, politicians didn't shut down the New York subway system for many weeks into the virus, costing thousands more avoidable deaths.

Suppose the government is here to save us. How do we explain the shameful malfeasance of the CDC, the FDA, the NIH and other government medical agencies and programs that spend roughly half a trillion dollars each year to keep us healthy? All of that money couldn't stop a virus from wreaking havoc on the country for two years and counting.

Why was the CDC caught entirely unprepared to fight this virus? It would be like a town spending millions of dollars a year on fire protection, and the first time there is a significant fire, the firefighters are all napping, no one slides down the poles and the fire engines won't start. So, what were Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the experts at the CDC doing with the tens of billions of dollars we give them each year? They studied the health effects of liberal obsessions such as climate change, racism and gun violence. What they weren't ready to do was their job: preparing for infectious diseases. ...

Big government didn't save us. On the contrary, big government has left us weaker as a nation in every way, and we will spend decades cursing the fact that we panicked and handed over so much power to so many incompetent people in Washington."

Read the entire article here.

"Let's get something straight: there was absolutely nothing racist or sexist about a pair of tweets by Ilya Shapiro last week criticizing President Biden for his blatantly racist and sexist decision to consider only black women for nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Every single person who saw them knows that -- especially the people who immediately tried to get Shapiro fired for it.

"That's really what this is all about. The feigned outrage over Shapiro's tweets is nothing more than a pretext for trying to get him run out of his new job at Georgetown Law School, where this week he's supposed to begin as executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. The left thinks it owns places like Georgetown, and for the most part it does. The message of this coordinated campaign to cancel Shapiro is simple: if you're right-of-center, stay out of academia because it's ours. ...

"Here's hoping this ginned-up controversy will die down and the mob will move on. If it doesn't, and Shapiro loses his new gig at Georgetown over this, understand that that was the purpose of the outrage and the smear campaign against Shapiro. They don't want someone like him at Georgetown, not because he's a racist but because he's not a leftist. And they will say and do anything, including launch an entire smear campaign based on a lie, to get him out."

Read the entire article here.

"If you needed a metaphor for President Joe Biden's economic recovery, or even his presidency, you just got it on Friday. The very day the president went to Pittsburgh to talk about infrastructure, a bridge collapsed.

"If you have a bridge on your commute, you would do well to keep an eye on whether Biden has plans to visit your town.

"Yes, we are joking, of course. But the bridge metaphor works because Biden has a track record of making everything he touches worse. Between his staggeringly incompetent exit from Afghanistan and his deplorable conduct in handling the border crisis he created, Biden is really stinking up the joint. But it is the economy where he is arguably doing the most damage."

Read the entire article here.

"'In 2021, we had the fastest economic growth since 1984. The Biden economic plan is working, folks,' blared the official Twitter account of President Joe Biden. ...

"So how, exactly, is Biden's economic plan 'working'? His main impact on the economy has been the near-$2 billion spending bill passed last spring, now widely seen as fueling the record inflation. (The cash has barely started going out the door from the infrastructure bill passed in the fall.) And his anti-energy policies (killing pipelines, denying drilling permits, threatening new 'carbon' taxes, etc.) have helped spur soaring energy costs, another inflation-driver.

"Like virtually everything else he tells the nation, 'The Biden economic plan is working' was just empty malarkey."