Economy and Business
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
Finding true love, philosophers have always understood, can get complicated in deeply unequal places. Grand fortunes tend to give Cupid a hard time not just on Valentine's Day, but all the time. "If you gain fame, power, or wealth, you won't have any trouble finding...
Boxing Us into Poor Job Prospects
You know what America needs? More jobs, that's what. Not Walmart-style "jobettes," but real jobs. We need more stable employment with a good salary and benefits, union jobs so workers have a say in what goes on, and jobs that have strong protections against...
Tipping the Scales of Inequality
At a pancake house in Houston, Claudia spent two hours rolling silverware into napkins on a slow weekend night. Without any tables to serve, she wasn't tipped to supplement her $2.13 hourly wage. Like many other restaurant employers, Claudia's boss did not make up for...
Are We Doomed to Ever More Inequality?
America's ongoing debate over economic inequality may be turning a new page. Starting in the 1980s, during the debate's first chapter, pundits and policymakers battled over whether the United States was in fact becoming more unequal. This initial debate is over now....
The Minimum We Can Do to Fight Inequality
The political profile of economic inequality in America has certainly been growing. So has the political confusion over what overcoming inequality will take. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama’s latest State of the Union address may only add to that confusion....
Three Boos for Cheerleader Abuse
Let's turn now to the wide, wide and cruel world of sports. The big story at this time of year, of course, is the Super Bowl — that multi-multi-million-dollar showcase of super-paid superstars, billionaire owners, taxpayer-financed sports palaces, extravagant...
Getting Trade Right Instead of Fast
Many hundreds of thousands of Americans saw their good working-class jobs disappear once NAFTA took effect. And millions of Mexicans lost their ability to live off the land after cheap factory farmed corn from the United States displaced their crops in local markets....
The State of Our Union’s Inequality
There's no doubt that President Barack Obama will make inequality a major theme of his State of the Union address, just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in 1935. "We have not weeded out the overprivileged and we have not effectively lifted up the underprivileged," FDR...
Fast-Tracking Misery
When it comes to trade policy, President Barack Obama is mimicking the same policies he criticized when he served in the Senate. As a presidential candidate, Obama promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), recognizing the enormous loss...
From Canada, a New Gold Standard
The 32,400 employees at Goldman Sachs averaged $383,374 each last year, the Wall Street banking giant has just disclosed. Typical employees at Goldman, of course, didn't take home anything near that $383,374. Bank clerks nationally only average $24,100 a year. In...
