by Dave Johnson | May 2, 2013 | Uncategorized
The trade deficit fell to "only" $38.8 billion in March. This could mean that manufacturing is starting to shift from China (good) -- or it could mean our economy is slowing and we just aren't buying as much as we would have (not so good). It is also because we are...
by Richard Eskow | May 1, 2013 | Uncategorized
Sure, we urgently need to repeal the sequester. (You can tell your member of Congress that here.) But it's even more important to repeal the insane thinking that led to the sequester. That means repealing the deficit babble that still dominates Washington (and...
by Dave Johnson | May 1, 2013 | Blog
The CEO of a big company makes 1795 times what its clerks are making, and the company is now in trouble. Does it matter which company, when so many other companies are in a similar situation? There is a three-year-old law that requires companies to disclose to...
by Thom Hartmann | May 1, 2013 | Blog
Most of us are still feeling the effects of a struggling economy, but the corporate elite and the Wall Street banksters are doing better than ever. Many corporations have seen record profits in recent years, which have fueled buying sprees on Wall Street, pushing the...
by Digby | May 1, 2013 | Uncategorized
... because if he were we could dismiss him as a typical stupid hippie to whom nobody should ever pay attention (particularly when sharp analysts like Newt Gingrich and George Will exist.) But now that people who the mainstream media can respect, like Tim Kaine, are...
by Richard Long | May 1, 2013 | Uncategorized
African Americans in retirement or on disability would be hit particularly hard by a proposal to use the “chained CPI” to limit cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits, according to a new study released by the Center for Global Policy Solutions....
by Bill Scher | May 1, 2013 | Uncategorized
MORNING MESSAGE: Sequester Cuts Are Dumb, Education Cuts Are Dumber OurFuture.org's Jeff Bryant: "Unfortunately, cuts to essential funds for educating our children aren't limited to the dreaded sequester. The assault on spending is pervasive in all aspects of...
by Jeff Bryant | May 1, 2013 | Education
Cuts to government spending like the now-reviled "sequester" are not only "dumb" as my colleague Robert Borosage explained this week. They are literally making us dumber. What's dumb is to cut money for air traffic controllers and endanger airline passengers and...
by Richard Eskow | Apr 30, 2013 | Uncategorized
A poll was released today which found that only 16 percent of adult Americans know anyone who was affected by sequester flight delays. Now that Congress has acted so swiftly to address this disproportionately higher-income inconvenience, that number probably won't...
by Dave Johnson | Apr 30, 2013 | Uncategorized
"Duty evasion" is when foreign competitors undermine American producers using fraudulent schemes to avoid paying the duties they owe. The foreign companies get a competitive advantage from lower prices that come from avoiding duties imposed for "dumping" by selling...
by Terrance Heath | Apr 30, 2013 | Uncategorized
Reports of austerity's demise are greatly exaggerated. Yes, austerity has been on the ropes recently, since it was revealed the whole thing was based on a sloppy spreadsheet by a couple of academic austerians. Before that the IMF denounced and even apologized for...
by Mary Bottari | Apr 30, 2013 | Blog
Last week, Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and David Vitter (R-LA) introduced the first bipartisan legislation aimed directly at putting an end to "too big to fail" financial institutions and preventing future bailouts of America’s behemoth banks. Too-big-to-fail banks...
by Robert Reich | Apr 30, 2013 | Uncategorized
Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good. Most had forecast growth of at least 3 percent (on an annualized basis) in the first quarter. But we learned this Monday morning (in the Commerce Department’s report) it grew only 2.5 percent. That’s better...
by Dave Johnson | Apr 30, 2013 | Uncategorized
All of the original justifications for budget cuts have gone away. The sequester is hurting the economy and keeping unemployment high. But instead Republicans plan to double down on cuts. Apparently their real game is to force high unemployment and desperation for 99%...
by Leo Gerard | Apr 30, 2013 | Climate
You are not safe. Not at work. Not at home in your bed. The biggest threat is not terrorism. It’s corporate negligence leading to a blast or collapse or release of toxic chemicals. Terrorism killed 3,000 Americans on 9-11. But in the dozen years since then, terrorists...
by Dean Baker | Apr 30, 2013 | Trans-Pacific Partnership
In polite circles in the United States' support for free trade is a bit like proper bathing habits. It is taken for granted. Only the hopelessly crude and unwashed would not support free trade. There is some ground for this attitude. Certainly the United States has...
by Sam Pizzigati | Apr 29, 2013 | Uncategorized
If we let wealth continue to concentrate — and corrupt every element of our contemporary societies — we'll all end up crying ‘96 tears.’ Aging baby boomers may remember, from way back in 1966, a one-hit-wonder rock band that sported an all-time great of a name. That...
by Trevor Davis | Apr 29, 2013 | Uncategorized
Sequester Nation For All (Except Air Travelers) Sequester slashes CA jobless aid. KGO-TV: "Federal unemployment benefits will be cut by 18 percent due to the federal sequester spending cuts that Congress allowed to automatically kick in to reduce the deficit ... The...
by Dave Johnson | Apr 29, 2013 | Uncategorized
Affluent business flyers inconvenienced by delays = national emergency that Congress immediately fixes. Cancer clinics closing = Congress does squat, goes home. This is just one more story of our corrupt times. A continuing seriesRead the full series Last week the...
by Stan Collender | Apr 29, 2013 | Uncategorized
Last August and September, I did a series of eight posts about how, contrary to Tea Party and John Boehner assertions, federal spending was actually very popular. As I said at the time, Americans don't want less government; they just want government that costs less....
by Robert Borosage | Apr 28, 2013 | Uncategorized
“Spending cuts hold back US growth,” warns an across the page headline of the conservative Financial Times. No surprise there. Americans are in trouble. Wages are losing ground. Over 20 million need full-time work. The percentage of working-age Americans with jobs...
by Richard Eskow | Apr 28, 2013 | Uncategorized
The other day I used a Politico story about Congressional staffers and health benefits to make some points about health reform. The Politico article was essentially a GOP-planted attack on “Obamacare” which exploited the fact that Representatives and their staff are...
by Richard Eskow | Apr 26, 2013 | Uncategorized
This week Slate columnist Matt Yglesias became the latest in a long list of commentators, analysts, and politicians to be seduced by the alluring notion that you can quantify, measure and model the value of a human life in intellectually stimulating, value-free, and...
by Isaiah J. Poole | Apr 25, 2013 | Uncategorized
Today, the Campaign for America's Future is joining 100 other organizations in delivering a message to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell: Enough is enough. End the obstruction. Stop the constant abuse of the filibuster....
by Jeff Bryant | Apr 24, 2013 | Education
By now, there have been plenty of negative reactions to last week's defeat of sensible gun regulation in the U.S. Senate due to the power of the gun lobby to have more sway with senators than popular opinion has. In his Rose Garden address, President Obama was...
by Trevor Davis | Apr 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
Obama Budget Splits Dems "Obama Budget Strategy Irks Democrats" reports Roll Call: "Several Democratic sources outside the White House ... said Obama’s budget release this week is not just a bad bargaining stance but also another instance in which the president...
by Trevor Davis | Apr 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
Obama Budget Splits Dems "Obama Budget Strategy Irks Democrats" reports Roll Call: "Several Democratic sources outside the White House ... said Obama’s budget release this week is not just a bad bargaining stance but also another instance in which the president...
by Terrance Heath | Apr 23, 2013 | Blog
Here's one for the "We Told You So, Republicans" file. As it turns out, when you cut government spending arbitrarily and across-the-board it can affect things that your care about and rely on. If you do a lot of flying say between Washington, DC and home, that means...
by Richard Eskow | Apr 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
The New York Times got a key fact wrong today when it wrote that Mark Begich, the Democratic Senator from Alaska, “voted against a measure to expand background checks” for gun purchases. But we doubt that Begich will complain: The truth is much worse. Thanks to...
by Digby | Apr 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
David Frum published an interesting letter from one of his readers the other day on the Reinhardt-Rogoff brouhaha. It provides a fascinating rundown of all the cracked economics that have dominated the debate for the past few years: The Reinhart- Rogoff paper that has...
by Trevor Davis | Apr 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
Sequester In The Air Air travelers suffer major delays as sequester furloughs kick in. The Hill: "Airlines and organizations representing pilots put the blame for the delays squarely on the furloughs, while Republicans said the Federal Aviation Administration was...
by Richard Long | Apr 23, 2013 | Blog
Corporations are shifting more of their money overseas to avoid the taxman in the U.S. and pursuing territorial tax legislation in Congress that would further enshrine that tax evasion into law. At a conference call Monday for progressive writers hosted by the...
by Dave Johnson | Apr 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
Austerity is beginning to hit and the economy is slowing as a result. The most immediate effect is that flights are delayed, but unemployment checks are smaller and there are fewer things We the People do to make our lives and economy better -- also called "government...
by Richard Eskow | Apr 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
Since the austerity crowd won’t own up to a mistake, I will: I engaged in a kind of thought experiment last week, after we first learned that austerity economics is partly based on a spreadsheet error. I wondered, What if you were a government leader who sincerely...
by Dean Baker | Apr 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
Most of us accept that the earth goes around the sun. This is impressive since we can look up in the sky and see the sun going around the earth. We believe the opposite because we have been told about the research of astronomers over the centuries showing that what we...
by Isaiah J. Poole | Apr 22, 2013 | Uncategorized
A critique of the impact on African Americans of using the chained CPI to limit the cost-of-living adjustment on Social Security benefits and my criticism of President Obama's jobs proposals were among the highlights of a one-hour discussion Sunday led by Maya...
by Sam Pizzigati | Apr 22, 2013 | Uncategorized
How much did America's top execs make last year? The scorekeepers don't all agree. But that won't matter if we keep our eyes on the most important figure of all: the pay gap between CEOs and workers. The new numbers on executive pay have been coming fast and furious...
by Derek Pugh | Apr 22, 2013 | Climate
The Pew Charitable Trust’s fourth annual report on "Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?" doesn’t give the United States much to celebrate on this Earth Day. The report, released last week, finds that the United States is no longer the global leader in renewable...
by Derek Pugh | Apr 22, 2013 | Uncategorized
The Pew Charitable Trust’s fourth annual report on "Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?" doesn’t give the United States much to celebrate on this Earth Day. The report, released last week, finds that the United States is no longer the global leader in renewable...
by Richard Eskow | Apr 21, 2013 | Minimum Wage
Corporate interests and their elected representatives have created a world of illusion in order to resist paying a decent wage to working Americans. They'd have us believe that minimum-wage workers are teens from '50s TV sitcoms working down at the local malt shoppe....
