Economy and Business
CEOs Against Grandmas
David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell, has more than $134 million in his personal retirement fund. If I were sitting on a nest egg that big, I might feel a bit sheepish about telling ordinary grandmas and grandpas to take a cut in their Social Security payments. But Cote —...
Drawing a Lesson from Colorado’s Conflicting Tax Votes
“School Tax Fails.” That was the Denver Post’s lead headline the day after two-thirds of Colorado voters defeated a ballot initiative that would have raised the state’s income tax to fund K-12 public education. In smaller type, readers found news of another state-wide...
Taking Stock of the Most Affluent Among Us
How unequal have workplaces in the United States become? Our best answer happens to come from a source you might not expect: the Social Security Administration. Social Security statisticians each year tally up how much compensation gets reported on W-2s, the forms...
Paying for Corporate Crime on the Taxpayer’s Dime
Sometimes, a news story can be so crammed with irony that it boggles the mind. Consider just the headline on one such story that ran recently in my town's daily paper: "Man gets 10 years for defrauding banks." That just screams for a rewrite, doesn't it? I yearn for a...
Fixing Social Security
Heartless for the Holidays
Scrooge has come early this year. He's already kicking our Tiny Tims. This holiday season, kids in America's poorest families will have less to eat. November 1 brought $5 billion in new cuts to the nation's food stamp program, now officially known as the Supplemental...
5 Million Missing American Workers
Wall Street analysts, corporate lobbyists, and front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce form an exuberant cheering squad for maintaining the status quo of America's do-nothing jobs policy. "Hooray!" they shout to our lawmakers, "The unemployment rate is...
Tidings of Discomfort for the Poor
Where Are the Celebrations for Corporate America’s $100-Million Paychecks?
In 1930, an obscure lawsuit against Bethlehem Steel unearthed some corporate data that would quickly outrage Great Depression-era America. Bethlehem CEO W. R. Grace, Americans learned, had grabbed $1.6 million in personal compensation the year before. That revelation...
Every Day is May Day at McDonald’s
Where is the intellectual heir to Henry Ford, the great entrepreneur and inventor? He hated unions but famously boosted his workers' pay so they could afford to buy the cars they built. There are far more jobs now assembling burgers than cars. And the people who run...
