Working Life

   For many months, I have argued that the greatest crisis we face is the lack of good-paying jobs–not the deficit. Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom took hold in Washington and stymied the president from taking the action that was needed during the debate over the stimulus bill, which came in at $787 billion–and too small […]

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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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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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   Maybe it slipped by me but the president never used the word "union" in last night’s State of The Union address. Kudos to him for talking about the jobs crisis in America, and he correctly criticized the immoral and irresponsible behavior of too many Wall Street bankers and the Supreme Court’s decision to let […]

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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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   Last week, I pointed out that the Senate health care bill was bad for many reasons including the provision that would actually encourages companies to hire people for less money. Seems like that was what people thought would fit right into the current trend sweeping the country: The hiring of temporary workers has surged, […]

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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 president, having just announced that we would be wasting tens of billions of dollars more in a pointless, tragic, immoral war in Afghanistan, will hold a job summit tomorrow. It is a very small point but telling that we would first be told that vital resources will be spent in a conflict that […]

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