Archive
We’re Watching a Great Depression Re-Run
The philosopher George Santayana wrote: "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." Which is what we're doing. I thought I'd found an isolated instance of that phenomenon the other day when I ran across quotes on the necessity for balancing the...
A Wall Street Powerhouse Attorney Talks Sense
With April 15 fast approaching, Americans are naturally thinking about taxes. But most of us won't be thinking about them the same way our forebears once did. Over the past half-century, our nation has witnessed a profound transformation in attitudes toward income...
A Recipe for a Sounder Diet
Healthy food is expensive and telling people to eat organic, local food is elitist. Have you heard that argument before? It's true. Healthy, organic, local food is expensive. Calorie for calorie, you get more for your money at a fast food drive-thru than at a farmer's...
Fracking Free Speech
It's one thing for Big Oil to bust into our communities, groundwater, and economic well-being with the hydraulic fracturing natural gas boom. Now, in addition to poisoning the environment, this fracking fad is busting the free speech rights of locals who dare to speak...
Under-Taxing the Rich Is Uncivilized
Please don't fret about paying taxes. They're your most productive investment. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. noted more than a century ago, "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society." Tax cuts may bring some temporary relief for the yachting...
Taxing Economics
This Week in OtherWords: March 27, 2013
This week in OtherWords, Jill Richardson makes the case for raising chickens in your backyard and Sam Pizzigati discusses Ford's worker-financed bailout. Donald Kaul is taking a spring break this week and will be back on April 3, when we'll run a Tax Day special...
A Plateful of Justice
When my father immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the mid-1980s, his first job was washing dishes at a Furr's Fresh Buffet restaurant in New Mexico. It paid the state-mandated minimum wage of $2.90 per hour. My father sent a portion of his scant earnings...
Ditching ‘Rape Culture’ for Good
Usually when I'm angry about something, my first instinct is to write. And while I'm furious about what happened to that 16-year-old girl in Ohio, I'm hesitant to lend more ink to the topic, because every additional word adds to the explosive media gossip-fest this...
A Dubious Honor
Global pork titan Smithfield has ranked second among food production companies on Fortune magazine's 2013 list of "Most Admired Companies." Before untangling how terribly strange and ironic this is, I'd like to address just what "most admired" means, and how the...
