Working Life

   This guy–Allan H. Meltzer, a political economist at Carnegie Mellon University–is seriously delusional: Mr. Meltzer says the risk lies not in pulling back too soon but dithering too long. And he would scrap the stimulus program immediately and replace it with cuts in marginal tax rates for individuals and businesses. "It’s certainly not a […]

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Today, the minimum wage rises to $7.25 an hour. We should all be glad that millions of people are going to get a bit more money in their pockets. But, this hike masks a very grim fact: the “recovery” is not going to happen anytime soon, if the measure we use for “recovery” is that […]

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   I always thought pay cap rules coming from Washington were more show than real. Earlier this year, I pointed out the weaknesses in the initial CEO pay cap rules. And, in fact, the new twist on this will cover a relatively few in the high-flying world of obscene CEO pay: The Obama administration’s sweeping […]

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  I am watching the parade of outraged leaders–especially Democrats–who are railing about the AIG bonuses and, to be honest, I’m far more disgusted by the outrage then the chump change being argued over. Because the outrage masks this fact: virtually our entire political and economic leadership has turned a blind eye, and actually endorsed, […]

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  Yes, that is the underlying message delivered today by one of the world’s leading financial publications. For many of us, this is no surprise: you had to be truly ignorant to pretend like the economic system was a success just based on the growing divide between rich and poor over the past decade, and […]

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The Republicans, and Judd Gregg in particular, have handed the president a golden chance to make lemonade out of lemons. To do so, he has to enact some real change: put a progressive economist or political leader in charge of the renamed Department of Prosperity (formerly known as the Department of Commerce). Follow the argument […]

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   Paul Krugman makes a point today in his column that I, and others, have made before: Meanwhile, a Washington Post report based on administration sources says that Mr. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, “think governments make poor bank managers” — as opposed, presumably, to the private-sector geniuses who managed to […]

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   Later today, the International Labor Organization will release a sweeping report on global wages. I’ve got a copy and here is the upshot: wages declined in most countries, inequality increase and, thank you very much, a lot of that can be blamed on the wonders of so-called "free trade".   The ILO is an […]

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   It still seems astonishing to me that, despite the evidence that they simply can’t be trusted, the people who got us into the mess we are in–the rabid "free marketeers"–still seem to have jobs–and are being asked to continue to serve in our government and are sought after for advice. While certainly I am […]

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Yes, to begin, let’s posit that a president with the lowest approval rating in the history of polling has no credibility about any subject of importance–and, in fact, most of the country would like, as David Letterman joked, to let Barack Obama start his new job right away. But, the current president’s pronouncements that the […]

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