Boosting the Economy from the Bottom Up

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...
The Wealthy’s Free Pass

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...
The Irish Tax Blight

The Irish Tax Blight

Now that Apple’s shady-yet-legal scheme to funnel its income to low-tax Ireland is common knowledge, a question arises. Are its tactics connected to the concentration of massive wealth at the top of society while average Americans hang on by their fingernails...
Oklahoma’s Biblical Irony

Oklahoma’s Biblical Irony

There’s an almost biblical irony to Oklahoma’s latest tornado disaster. Not a funny irony, but the grim, tragic kind so common to acts of God. Four months before this twister, five of Oklahoma’s seven members of Congress — including both of its...
These Hedges Need Trimming

These Hedges Need Trimming

They’re hunkering down at SAC Capital, the hedge fund empire of billionaire Steven A. Cohen. Federal prosecutors have been picking off SAC’s second bananas one by one, plea bargaining for information that brings them ever closer to Cohen. SAC coughed up...
The New Face of Poverty in America

The New Face of Poverty in America

Fifty years after poverty in America briefly became a front-burner issue on our nation’s political agenda, it’s time to move it off the back burner again. Even as those at the top of our society have grown fabulously richer, those in the economic middle...