Working Life

While I do not agree with the way in which the president took on health care and the mess we ended up with, he was absolutely right to understand that health care reform was essential to ensure a strong (and, need I say, moral) economy AND job growth. I think it is unfortunate that too […]

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   I wonder if you feel this way. We face the greatest emergency in our adult lifetimes. It’s not the deficit. It’s the reality that one in five Americans does not have decent paying work and that one in four children are on food stamps–in the richest nation in human history. That is a five-alarm […]

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One of the biggest challenges that we face as a country is not that we lack money or wealth–we have plenty of money. Rather, we have a distorted set of priorities and an ideological frame that walls off many possibilities to create a decent society. For example: the belief in the so-called "free market" that […]

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   In one sense, this is a good thing: In the strongest employment report since the recession began nearly two years ago, the government said Friday that the nation’s employers had all but stopped shedding jobs in November, taking some of the pressure off of President Obama to come up with a wide-ranging jobs creation […]

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   The deficit hawks are on the march–and this is a bi-partisan din. And it is basically nonsense designed to open the door to some very draconian cuts in our basic social safety net. Here is Dean Baker: Relative to the size of the economy, the deficits that we are running are large and the […]

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   There has been a lot of handwringing about the long-term debt forecasted by the Administration (a quick observation, in case there is confusion: the fiscal deficit is the annual gap between what comes into the government and what is paid out; the country’s debt is the accumulated gaps from the annual deficits). For example: […]

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   When last seen on the American political scene in 1995, Bob Packwood was forced to resign from the U.S. Senate because of charges of sexual harassment, assault and abuse–charges he continued to deny even though the evidence was pretty compelling (for those of you with political recall, you might remember the endless struggle over […]

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  I continue to be amazed at the moral obscenity underway in our country. We are in a financial crisis, states are cutting education and health care, and we are wringing our hands over federal deficits–yet there is no serious discussion about significantly taxing the rich, who have reaped hundreds of billions of dollars in […]

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