Working Life

   Let’s review a couple of facts. Over the past 30 years, even though productivity has been skyrocketing, wages have been essentially flat for workers. And we are now living through a period where at least one in five Americans does not have full-time work with decent wages.    But, at least some people are […]

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   The president is going to announce today a tax on the big banks and financial institutions: The tax on banks, insurance companies and brokerages with more than $50 billion in assets would start after June 30 and seek to collect $90 billion over 10 years, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters […]

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   It’s a strange coincidence but there is a direct connection between the earthquake in Haiti and the spectacle of the financial elite testifying  before the Commission-that-will-do-nothing about the mess they made.    How did we get to where we are? We have lived in a system that allowed a tiny elite to rob the […]

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   Here is one thing that is quite fascinating to me. There is a wave of stories popping up now about taxes being raised on the wealthy, or a fee put on banks, or restrictions put on executive compensation. Today, for example, there is a story in The Wall Street Journal: The grassroots fervor that […]

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After years of supporting her racist father, Liz Cheney is finally calling out racism where she sees it — in the words of Harry Reid. Liz Cheney insists that Reid’s comments about Obama were racist because they involved "I mean, talking about the color of the president’s skin…" I think we can all agree that […]

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   Bankers are nervous about the bonuses they are about to get: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and other big banks are bracing for a renewed public and political backlash against their compensation plans as they prepare to unveil multi-billion dollar bonus packages. Under pressure from government, banks are already saying they will devote the […]

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   A fundamental right of a functioning democracy is the right of the people to know what the government is doing–particularly with the peoples money. Let’s not be naive: we all have lived through many chapters in the country’s history where we do not know, in advance or in real-time, what the government does in […]

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   A quick post today since yours truly is in transit. Along the same theme of "don’t pay any attention to the person behind the screen who is promising recovery," today’s version has retail sales having gone up. But, as this points out: Of course, the industry’s 1 to 2 percent increase is not an […]

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Anyone who has ever been caught with his pants down knows it’s easier to look up to Jesus than it is to squat down into a lotus position. So Brit Hume, Fox News commentator and moonlighting theologian, is urging the troubled Tiger Woods to mend his skirt-chasing and om-chanting ways by embracing Christ. On Fox […]

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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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