Working Life

   My state is on the verge of a mass execution. It’s an execution that will be carried out by a Democratic governor on behalf of the richest people in the state. It will be applauded by the traditional press, which will, in its collective willingness to ignore facts, bless the execution as the path […]

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    I always shake my head when I read that the country no longer has industry and has evolved into a "service economy". That simple isn’t true. The main problem is that we have jobs–whether industrial or service–that don’t pay decently and are largely non-union.     Someone thinks we should do something about that: The […]

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   Ok, fine, this is a good thing, via The Wall St. Journal: The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits slid last week to the lowest level in nearly two and a half years, indicating that labor-market conditions continue to improve. Initial unemployment claims declined by 34,000 to 388,000 in the […]

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   All that clamoring for jobs. Feh. Complain, complain. The Republican family values crowd will soon be promoting this: Why don’t you just move in with your parents, like a lot of other stressed-out Americans, and then we can give out even more tax cuts for the wealthy: Of the myriad ways the Great Recession […]

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Putting aside the larger argument for the moment about whether we–the taxpayers–should have stepped into to save failing institutions, it is pretty clear now that what we also did was just give a nice new revenue stream for banks that did not need the money but figured, heck, why not get our taste from the […]

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   I’ve never been sold on the notion of education as the saving grace of this unholy economic system. The problem in the country–and the world–is not that people are not smart enough or that they need to go to college. It’s that we have a system that drives down wages no matter how smart […]

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We hear an enduring myth: the "free market" decides who gets what in an efficient dance of allocation of resources through competition. Garbage. Especially when it comes to CEO pay–though apparently there are some who want to continue the myth of competition.   Over the weekend, I caught this in the NYTimes business section–an excerpt […]

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   Some people get it about Wal-Mart: But interviews with New Yorkers shopping here on a recent day revealed some surprising views: even some of Wal-Mart’s loyal customers would rather drive to the bargains than risk bringing those low prices — along with the crowds and competition that may come with them — closer to […]

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   This is an example of what we will see in louder tones in the coming year (this in today’s Wall St. Journal): Cities across the nation are raising property taxes, largely citing rising pension and health-care costs for their employees and retirees. In Pennsylvania, the township of Upper Moreland is bumping up property taxes […]

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   We have a huge crisis in the country. The private pension system is collapsing. The public pension system is on the brink of collapse, and people are being pitted one against the other. But, what we often fail to do is connect the dots: between the collapse of the public pensions system and the […]

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