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(1 comments) SHARE        Friday, May 18, 2012
The Commencement Address That Won't Be Given Outstanding student debt now totals over $1 trillion. That's more than the nation's total credit-card debt. The extraordinary rise in student debt is due to two related facts: the cost of a college education continues to increase faster than inflation, and state and local spending per college student continues to drop -- this year reaching a 25-year low.

(5 comments) SHARE        Thursday, May 17, 2012
The Dog That Didn't Bark: Obama on JPMorgan The dog that didn't bark this week, let alone bite, was the President's response to JP Morgan Chase's bombshell admission of losing more than $2 billion in risky derivative trades that should never have been made. Twenty years ago, the 10 largest banks on the Street held 10 percent of America's total bank assets. Now they hold over 70 percent.

(2 comments) SHARE        Friday, May 11, 2012
How J.P. Morgan Chase Has Made the Case for Breaking Up The Big Banks and Resurrecting Glass-Steagall Let's also stop hoping Wall Street will mend itself. What just happened at J.P. Morgan -- along with its leader's cavalier dismissal followed by lame reassurance -- reveals how fragile and opaque the banking system continues to be, why Glass-Steagall must be resurrected, and why the Dallas Fed's recent recommendation that Wall Street's giant banks be broken up should be heeded.

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, May 7, 2012
A Question of Timing: What America Can Learn from the Revolt in Europe The first priority in America and in Europe must be growth and jobs. That means rejecting austerity economics for now, while at the same time demanding that corporations and the rich pay their fair share of the cost of keeping everyone else afloat. The proper sequence is for government to keep spending until jobs and growth are restored, and only then to take out the budget axe.

(5 comments) SHARE        Friday, May 4, 2012
The Stall Has Arrived We've still got a terrible cyclical problem -- we can't get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. There's no way to put the mask back on. We've got to face the truth. Obama and the Democrats have to explain to the American people why inequality isn't just unfair; it's also economically unsustainable.

(1 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, May 1, 2012
The Tinder-Box Society Most of the gains from the productivity revolution are going to the owners of capital, while typical workers are either unemployed or underemployed, or else getting wages and benefits whose real value continues to drop. The portion of total income going to capital rather than labor is the highest since the 1920s. Increasingly, the world belongs to those collecting capital gains.

(4 comments) SHARE        Friday, April 27, 2012
The GOP's Death Wish: Why Republicans Can't Stop Pissing Off Hispanics, Women, and Young People How can a political party be so dumb as to piss off Hispanics, women, and young people? Because the core of its base is middle-aged white men -- and it doesn't seem to know how to satisfy its base without at the same time turning off everyone who's not white, male, and middle-aged.

(3 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Why Anyone Should Care that Bill O'Reilly Calls Me A Communist Debate all over America is disappearing. All we're left with is a nasty residue. Democrats and Republicans no longer even talk. They just vent charges and counter-charges. Across the nation, conservatives right-wingers and liberal or progressive lefties have stopped debating their respective views, or even listening to anyone they disagree with. They just find broadcasters and bloggers who confirm their views.

SHARE        Thursday, April 19, 2012
Why "We're on the Right Track" Isn't Enough, and What Obama's Plan Should Be For Boosting the Economy Obama should make clear the underlying problem is widening inequality. With so much of the nation's disposable income and wealth going to the top, the vast middle class doesn't have the purchasing power it needs to fire up the economy. He should remind voters that congressional Republicans prevented him from doing all that was needed in the first term, and they must not be allowed to do so again.

SHARE        Wednesday, April 18, 2012
The Significance of Citigroup's Shareholder Revolt The real news here is new-found activism among institutional investors -- especially the managers of pension funds and mutual funds. They're the ones who fired the warning shot Tuesday. Institutional investors are catching on to a truth they should have understood years ago: When executive pay goes through the roof, there's less money left for everyone else who owns shares of the company.

(2 comments) SHARE        Sunday, April 15, 2012
Why a Fair Economy is Not Incompatible with Growth but Essential to It What we should have learned over the last half century is that growth doesn't trickle down from the top. It percolates upward from working people who are adequately educated, healthy, sufficiently rewarded, and who feel they have a fair chance to make it in America. Fairness isn't incompatible with growth. It's necessary for it.

(4 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Beyond Outrage: The General Election of 2012 Starts Today Nothing good happens in Washington unless good people outside Washington become mobilized, organized, and energized to make it happen. Nothing worth changing in America will actually change unless you and others like you are committed to achieving that change.

(4 comments) SHARE        Saturday, April 7, 2012
America's hall of mirrors recovery We'll avoid a double dip, but the most likely scenario in coming months is a continuation of the same -- an anemic jobs recovery. President Obama will claim the economy is improving -- and, technically, it is. Growth has probably slowed to around 2%, but that's still growth. The problem is that most Americans aren't feeling it in their paychecks.

(3 comments) SHARE        Thursday, April 5, 2012
The Fable of the Century Imagine the candidacy of the private equity manager (and all the money he and his friends use to try to sell their lies) has the opposite effect. It awakens the citizens of the country to what is happening to their economy and their democracy. It ignites a movement among the citizens to take it all back. Just a fable, of course. But the ending is up to you.

(15 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, April 4, 2012
The Choice in 2012: Social Darwinism or a Decent Society The Republican budget plan is the most radical reverse-Robin Hood proposal propounded by any political party in modern America. It would save millionaires at least $150,000 a year in taxes while gutting Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, transportation, child nutrition, college aid, and almost everything else average and lower-income Americans depend on.

SHARE        Monday, April 2, 2012
Turning America Into a Giant Casino In December, the Department of Justice announced it was reversing its position that all Internet gambling was illegal. That decision is about to create a boom in online gambling. Expect high-stakes poker to be available on every work desk and mobile phone.

SHARE        Sunday, April 1, 2012
Whose Recovery? Republicans would rather not talk about widening inequality to begin with. The reverse-Robin Hood budget plan just announced by Paul Ryan and House Republicans (and endorsed by Mitt Romney) would make the lopsidedness far worse -- dramatically cutting taxes on the rich and slashing public services everyone else depends on.

(2 comments) SHARE        Thursday, March 29, 2012
Break Up The Big Banks, Says the Dallas Fed As Republicans make the repeal of "Obamacare" their primary objective (and Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and perhaps Kennedy sharpen their knives) another drama is taking place at the Fed. The question is whether Bernanke and company in Washington will heed the warnings coming from its Dallas branch, and amplify the message.

(2 comments) SHARE        Monday, March 26, 2012
Healthcare Jujitsu Compared to private insurance, Medicare is a great deal. Its administrative costs are only around 3 percent, while the administrative costs of private insurers eat up 30 to 40 percent of premiums. So why not Medicare for all? Because Republicans have mastered the art of political jujitsu. Their strategy has been to demonize government and privatize everything that might otherwise be a public program financed by tax dollars.

(3 comments) SHARE        Thursday, March 22, 2012
Why Mitt Won't Be Able to Hide From His Primary Self (We're No Longer In An Etch-A-Sketch World) Ever since Mitt left the governor's office, he's been twisting the right knob, moving downward into the muck of regressive Republicanism in pursuit of the Republican nomination. It won't be nearly as easy for Mitt to "shake it up and start all over again" for the general election of 2012, should he get the nomination. Try as he might, Romney won't be able to twist the knobs and create a brand new picture.

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