| Mar 6, 2013 | Economy / BusinessI have a question: If this is the greatest country in the world, why do we keep acting so dumb? I suppose the sequestration of the federal budget isn’t as dumb as deliberately going over the fiscal cliff, but it’s plenty dumb. Just as the economy was showing signs of...
| | Economy / BusinessA dozen years ago, Brazil ranked as the world’s most unequal major nation. Brazil’s most affluent 10 percent were grabbing nearly 50 times more income, on average, than Brazil’s poorest tenth, over double the U.S. gap. Amid this intense inequality,...
| | Economy / BusinessHow do you gauge the impact of depriving 12,000 low-income California preschoolers of the opportunity to participate in the Head Start program because of budgetary gridlock? Or stripping more than half a million people living in poverty of their access to the highly...
| Feb 27, 2013 | Economy / BusinessJust over a year ago, the Costa Concordia, a Carnival Cruise ocean liner, ran aground on an Italian reef. Thirty-two died. “We expect to fully recover from the ship incident,” the subsequent Carnival annual report told shareholders. Earlier this month,...
| Feb 20, 2013 | Economy / BusinessOur political vocabulary is changing all the time. Words that loom large in one generation’s national public discourse can almost totally disappear in the next. Take the word “segregation.” A half-century ago, newspapers headlined “segregation” on almost a daily...
| | Economy / Business“In the wealthiest nation on Earth,” President Barack Obama declared in his State of the Union speech, “no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.” Right! Not only does his call to raise America’s minimum wage put some...
