Economy

I am beginning to understand George Will. Normally, that would worry me in too many ways to count, and it would be cause enough for my progressive friends to stage an intervention. So let me be clear, before I find myself facing just such a situation, I did not say I...

With apologies to Richard Farina, today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report for October shows small gains that for most of U.S. history would have been considered meager but must now be seen as better than expected. (See these tables and graphics on this month's...

On the morning after Senate Republicans blocked consideration of an infrastructure jobs bill, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that the economy created only 80,000 net jobs during the month of September. The unemployment rate is now 9 percent. The continued...

A conservative minority in the Senate earlier today voted against allowing an infrastructure jobs bill to come to a floor vote, continuing a pattern of obstruction that has blocked every significant effort to get people working on the jobs that need to be done. The...

Much has already been written and said about violence police used against unarmed OWS protesters in New York, Chicago, Boston, and now Oakland. From using pepper spray against peaceful protesters to lobbing flash bombs at unarmed protesters rushing to help an injured...

Texas Governor Rick Perry touts himself as the most conservative candidate who is electable. He prays with the fundamentalists, hunts with the Second Amendment gang, decries federal tyranny with the 10th Amendment crowd, and “pokes” around with the birthers. He just...

For most people Social Security cuts are something to be feared in the future, but for one group of people cuts in Social Security are already a real and present danger: the employees of the Social Security Administration. And these Social Security cuts are having a...

"Get a job!" It's the right-wing's favorite retort to protesters on the left. It goes back at least as far as the 1960's and 1970's, and implies that only "dirty hippies" who are too lazy to work — and would rather mooch off the government and be subsidized people in...

As the Senate prepares for a vote on a $35 billion bill to support hiring of teachers and first responders around the country, conservative are pillorying Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for a bit of inartful truth-telling. After all, it is so much easier for Senate...

Telling people to "Get a job!" on one hand, while telling businesses to "Stop creating jobs!" on the other, and then blaming the unemployed for their jobless state sounds more than a little contradictory. If an individual person managed all three,...