Working Life

This coming week, the drumbeat will get louder with the rhetoric about the phony government debt/deficit "crisis". I’ll be writing more about this in conjunction with my new book, "It’s Not Raining, We’re Getting Peed On: The Scam of the Deficit Crisis". Today, I thought I’d focus on this specific point: debt is not a […]

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    Frankly, this is good news: WASHINGTON—The bipartisan commission examining how to cut the federal debt ended three days of closed-door meetings Thursday without a firm agreement among its 18 members, with several saying the panel was still at odds over how to contain the ballooning costs of health care.    The Commission should just […]

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   I am so tired of listening to the transcribers of press conferences (people we used to call "journalists") speaking about the debt or deficit "crisis". They just regurgitate crazy, phony stuff–and the height of all this came yesterday with the release of the proposals by the co-chairmen of the Commission appointed by the president. […]

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Count me in the group, perhaps small, that is unimpressed with the pledge by a group of billionaires to give away large parts of their fortune. Not because I oppose the idea of philanthropy. Rather, the announcement obscures a reality: very little of the money will go to challenging the root causes of the incredible […]

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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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   There is a rhetorical firefight going on in Britain that is worth reading. It’s carrying on in the letters section of the Financial Times. It started with a call this past Sunday from 20 conservative economists that the British government immediately begin cutting back the fiscal budget–an echo to what we are hearing in […]

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    I understand why many people do not expect much from most of the traditional media–particularly The New York Times. People don’t get the sense that the traditional media can get out of its own insular thinking to do hard, independent reporting about the facts.    The newest drumbeat being pushed by the traditional media […]

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  We are still not being serious about asking people to pay their fair share: Taxes on high-income earners would rise by nearly $1 trillion over the next 10 years, under the budget plan put forward by President Barack Obama on Monday. The bulk of that increase comes as tax cuts enacted under President George […]

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