Archive
Showing Our Caregivers We Care About Them
I am a physician and my husband works in finance. I work early hours and he travels for work. With two sons under the age of 6 and busy schedules, we needed flexible childcare and found this in the au pair program. After phone calls, emails, and exchanged photos of...
A Rotten Bacon Behemoth
American consumers may not even notice the change if a newly proposed takeover by China's largest meat processor of our nation's leading pork company goes through. But the $4.7 billion transaction would certainly show up on our plates: in the form of farmer...
This Week in OtherWords: A Spotlight on Poverty
This week in OtherWords, Jill Richardson puts her own brush with food stamps into a broader context, Jim Hightower lampoons a rich Tennessee lawmaker who wants to slash spending on the program but pockets plenty of farm subsidies, and Marc Morial calls for raising the...
None of My Business
It was late, I was grumpy, and the woman in front of me was buying cigarettes. I noticed the items in her cart: brand-name snacks, colas, and frozen foods. I looked at how she dressed, considered the carton of cigarettes she requested, and made a wager to myself that...
Prosperity for All
With the stock market breaking ever-higher records, Americans should be celebrating our economic resurgence, right? After all, why else are we supposed to care when the Dow ticks up or down? Although half of us own no stocks at all and the richest 10 percent of us own...
Boosting the Economy from the Bottom Up
The minimum wage is $7.25. If it had kept up with inflation since 1968, minimum-wage workers would be earning $10.69 an hour today. During his State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama put a face on the growing chasm between the "haves" and "have nots" with a...
Michele Bachmann Bows Out
It looks as though we jackals of the "lamestream media" won't have Michele Bachmann to kick around anymore. With just a hint of Nixonian rancor in her voice, she announced — via a lengthy YouTube rant in the middle of the night a short while ago — she would not seek...
The Wealthy’s Free Pass
All of a sudden, almost everybody — in Congress at least — seems to want to talk about the IRS. Fine. We need a good debate about taxes. But let's have a debate that zooms in on the core issues. Like who's paying taxes in America today and who isn't. Interested in a...
Feeding the Economy
I never paid much attention to the food stamp debate in Congress before. But I'm on food stamps myself these days, so I'm tuning in this time around. Officially called SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — food stamps are one of those things that...
A Frog-Jumping Double Standard on Food Subsidies
I'll bet that Mark Twain, who wrote "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," would've loved a current saga. I call it "The Jumping Congress Critter of Frog Jump." The critter's name is Representative Stephen Fincher. He's a millionaire, agribusiness...
