Archive

(This is Part 3 of a series on our ongoing - and worsening - national healthcare crisis.) As major provisions in the Affordable Care Act are rolled out, we'll need a way to track its effectiveness - a scorecard for "Obamacare," as it's now universally called. What's...

Losing Hope in Detroit (via Moyers & Company) Jobs. They are supposedly the foremost concern of every Democrat and every Republican, and they are certainly the greatest concern for the 20 percent of American workers who are unemployed or underemployed, and the...

Don’t be fooled. Despite what politicians and the media have led many to believe, struggling middle-class Americans are not in a real recovery. The latest evidence is in a report released this month by the Investor Education Foundation of the Financial Industry...

Something's happening out there, in fast food restaurants, retail shops, and other places where people work for minimum wage or minimal wages, and don't earn enough to live on. It started in New York, and from there spread to Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Milwaukee,...

A new Congressional Budget Office report is making headlines for finding that the top 10 income and payroll tax "expenditures" – deductions, credits and other tax breaks – amount to $12 trillion over a 10-year period. That's more than Medicare, Social Security or...

Recent stories appearing in "mainstream" opinion-leader outlets would have you think that things with the economy are going great – if you didn't know better (and they don't). The thing is that outside of the geographic areas and cultural circles these opinion leaders...

Part 1 of this series took a look at family healthcare costs for people with “good” insurance – better insurance, in fact, than most people will receive from the Affordable Care Act’s health care exchanges. We found that these costs soared above those of other...

With the passing of Memorial Day Weekend, summer has unofficially begun. Schools will soon let out for summer break, and families will go on vacations, with many of them heading for national parks. But this summer is going to be a tough one for national parks, their...

Washington may be in for a very hot summer. I don't mean the usual sweltering heat and suffocating humidity that are just a natural part of living in a former swamp (or "tidal plain," if you prefer). While the rest of us will be sweating through another Washington...