Economy and Business
‘Tis the Season to Celebrate Mammon
Here come Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas. It's a month-long season of friends and family, spiritual reflection, and time to decompress from our usual helter-skelter lives, right? Good lord, shout the corporate bosses, are you nuts? Do you think America is some...
Upgrading Our Clunker Economy
Pondering America's economic system is a bit like going to the mechanic with your old heap and being told there's nothing more he can do. It's time for a new economy, but we're going to keep our clunker economy that persists only because so many bigwigs profit...
The Swiss Take Aim at Executive Excess
Something astounding is happening in Switzerland. For the first time ever, citizens in a modern nation are voting on whether to create what essentially amounts to a "maximum wage." On November 24, the Swiss will vote on a ballot initiative that bans any Swiss...
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...
