Archive
If You Want to Collect Social Security, Trump’s Tax Plan Is an Outrage
How much did your paychecks total last year? You know the answer, of course. So does the Social Security Administration. The totals for every American’s paycheck income are sitting in Social Security’s computers. Once every year, Social Security does a serious data...
If There’s a War on Coal, Coal Already Lost
"The war on coal is over," according to Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt spoke these words in a speech to coal miners in Hazard, Kentucky, where he announced the formal repeal of Obama’s Clean Power Plan. What he failed to mention is...
The Sad State of Disaster Relief
Five former U.S. presidents recently came together to raise money for hurricane relief for the victims of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. This generous, bipartisan act is one of true generosity and statesmanship. And yet, as former presidents, all five men know...
Leading Democrats Are Way Behind the Public on Health Care
Good news, people — at last, congressional Democrats have gotten a clue, grown some spine, and are beginning to act like… well, like progressives. In particular, a majority of Dems in the U.S. House are responding to the rising public demand that decent health care be...
Pruitt Stinks
In OtherWords: October 18, 2017
This week, social media feeds lit up with women saying "me too," spreading awareness of just how pervasive sexual assault and harassment remain in our country. In OtherWords, Jill Richardson writes that she can't think of a single woman who hasn't experienced one or...
An Independent Thinker’s Guide to the Tax Debate
For 40 years, tax cutters in Congress have told us, “we have a tax cut for you." And each time, they count on us to suspend all judgment. In exchange, we’ve gotten staggering inequality, collapsing public infrastructure, a fraying safety net, and exploding deficits....
There’s No Defending Founding Fathers Who Practiced Slavery
This summer, on the very day that white supremacists rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, I was down the road visiting Montpelier — the home of James Madison, our fourth president. On the house tour, we stopped in Madison's upstairs library, where he spent hundreds of...
Me Too. And You. And You.
"Me too." I posted those words on Facebook recently, along with what seems like every woman I know. A post went viral asking each woman to write the words “Me too" if she'd been sexually assaulted or harassed. A man exposed himself to me once. Ten years ago. He was in...
Robots Aren’t Taking Our Jobs. Corporations Are.
There's a robot in your future. Not one of those cute little labor-saving automatons — like a "Roomba" vacuum cleaner. Far from saving you from doing extra labor, this new wave of robots is being brought into your workplace to rescue corporate bosses from paying you...
