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So Who Is It That Cares About The Deficit Anyway?

Your reading assignment is this great piece in the New York Review of Books by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson entitled What Krugman & Stiglitz Can Tell Us. There's a lot to it, but I homed in on this particular piece: A majority of Americans have consistently told pollsters that creating jobs is a much […]

Rebuild The Middle Class With Jobs For Veterans

There's one thing I forgot to mention in my previous post, "10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class": We already know how to rebuild the middle class. We've done it before. One way we built the middle class was to "Give unemployed job seekers a real, fresh start," which is one of the ten steps in the report, "10 Ways To Rebuild The Middle Class For Hardworking Americans." Back then, those unemployed job seekers happened to be in uniform, and America gave them a real fresh start with something called the GI Bill.

Today, a chance to give unemployed veterans a real, fresh start is stalled out in the Senate and going nowhere in the House.

10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class

The middle class is the great engine of the American economy, but today that engine is sputtering. Our economic crisis is one half of a vicious cycle in which it and the unemployment crisis feed and perpetuate one another, hollowing out the middle-class in the process.

Middle-class wages are their lowest in 17 years. Too many workers are toiling in jobs that don’t pay enough to support families, and too many can’t find work at all. Meanwhile, the jobs that will grow the most in the next decade are expected to be low-wage and stripped of benefits. What passes as America's economic "recovery" is awash in low-wage jobs.

Chicago Teacher Strike Not About Money

Teachers in Chicago are on strike. You will hear from the usual anti-government, anti-union crowd that this is another instance of greedy public employees trying to get more money, but that is just wrong and here's why.

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