Working Life

If you sit and worry about how to save public money, it’s no mystery — go after the drug companies and health insurance mafia. That’s where real money is.

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We tend to hear most of the rhetoric on taxes focus on federal taxes — and there certainly is good reason to do so. But, the underbelly of the system — and the way in which the poorest people are screwed — can also be seen at the state and local level.

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With all the foolishness everyone seems to associate with the folks in Washington, D.C., don’t worry — coming to a state near you will be same lame-brained ideas that have caused a heap of damage for decades. You know the rap: lower taxes because, presto, that’s the magic potion for all that can be good. Oh, no.

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   You’ve heard (and, in some cases, unfortunately, been persuaded) that "generous" pensions given to public employees has caused great deficits in pensions and state budgets. It’s nonsense. And here are the facts to prove it.    The Center for Economic and Policy Research has a very important study out. It must be given wide [...]

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In the lore of political budgetary rhetoric, Sen Everett Dirksen’s observation is often useful: "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money" he is rumored to have said–rumored because there is some debate about whether he actually used that whole phrase. But, whatever–it’s useful to our current discussion. Where [...]

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  Each day brings a stupefying new chapter in the class warfare underway in America. Today, it’s the unfathomable idea that regular people who had worked their entire lives serving the public should now be effectively cast out into the cold, their pensions ripped up. But, what we need to connect is this: there is [...]

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   I’m as critical of the Democratic Party has anyone. But, we need to keep in mind that, on a daily basis, it can matter somewhat, at the margins, who is in charge. This would never happen under Republican rule: The National Labor Relations Board announced on Friday that it planned to sue Arizona, South [...]

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   A lot of pain is going to continue to wash across the country. Witness this info on the continued lag in the construction industry: Construction is a big employer and one of the better-paid sectors for men who lack a college degree. The sector has shed 2.1 million jobs from its peak in March [...]

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The danger in a blip of good news is that it’s simply that: a blip. It is certainly a good thing that the data shows that 162,000 jobs were added in March. But, the truth is that this is not much to celebrate. And it actually should be a siren to move dramatically to embrace [...]

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   Bob Herbert makes a point that I’ve been making repeatedly for many, many months: Those who think some kind of robust recovery is hiding around the corner, just waiting to spring a pleasant surprise on us, are deluded. Too many families and individuals are tapped out. They’re struggling from week to week and month [...]

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   The healthcare bill is a mess–it won’t cover all Americans at affordable costs and it will hand insurance companies tens of billions of dollars in new profits, the hard-earned wages of working people who are already stressed out financially.    The only ray of light down the road to fix this, if you just [...]

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   This is how fragile–and foolish–the talk of recovery is. Yesterday, you may recall that I pointed out the record level of personal bankruptcies recorded in 2009–at the same time that some "analysts" were heralding a recovery based on some uptick in manufacturing (one would venture to guess that those same "analysts" were among those [...]

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