Women’s Wages Can No Longer Rescue the American Family
For the past forty years American men's incomes have stagnated. The US economy has doubled in real per capita terms since 1973, but the median male wage income has fallen...
Labor
A Bold New Labor Call for a ‘Maximum Wage’
The leader of one of America's feistiest unions is aiming to expand the economic fairness debate. He's proposing a cap on incomes at the top that rises only if incomes...
Gun-Toting Vigilante Lunatics versus Tree-Hugging Bleeding Hearts
This election season is full of laments about how polarized American politics has become. Extreme right-wing Republicans claim they can't see eye to eye with extreme left-wing Democrats. Politicians are...
Why the Jobless Recovery?
Ever since the sharp recessions of the early Reagan years, each new expansion has yielded fewer and fewer jobs. A recession is bad enough for most people. A jobless recovery...
When Did America Give Up on Progress?
Once upon a time, America was always getting better. It was never perfect, but it was always improving itself. The ideal -- and usually the reality too -- was progress....
The Invisible Recession: How Forty Years of Stagnant Incomes Got Lost in the Shuffle
The recession is over. The US economy has been growing since July, 2009. In the final quarter of 2011 it grew at a 3% annual pace. Personal spending is up. ...
Why Have Levels of Income Inequality Risen So Much?
The recession has been tough on many Americans. But the recession only started in 2008, and the statisticians at the National Bureau of Economic Research figure it ended in 2009. ...
The Problem Isn’t Growth — The Problem Is Inequality
Commentators still talk about the Great Recession as if we're still in it. But according to semi-official statistics from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) the recession ended in...
Federal Workers Should Not Have to Pay for the Social Security Tax Cuts
Congress is set to extend the 2011 Social Security tax reduction to the end of 2012. Three cheers for that. Social Security taxes are some of the most unfair in...