Economy and Business
Picturing Inequality
Inequality and the Social Security Debate
Rhonda Straw is one of millions of Americans who do important work every day but still have a hard time saving for retirement. As a home health aide, Straw administers medication, changes bandages, and performs other vital services to the elderly and disabled. With an...
How Should We Confront the Corporate Greed Grab?
In America today, The New York Times reports, we're living in "a golden age" — for corporate profits. These earnings have been soaring at a 20 percent annual clip. In fact, to find a year when corporations were grabbing as great a share of America's income as they're...
Big Can Be Beautiful
I 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...
The Luxury Fortress in Your Future
A 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, wealthy Brazilians...
Stalling the Incomplete Recovery
How 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...
A Triumph of Sewage and Stench
Just 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, Carnival...
Segregation 2.0
Our 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...
Putting Some Real Pop in Populism
"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 real pop in populism, but it...
Downwardly Mobile Nation
Work my butt off Plain to see, Bootstraps are No help to me. Bridgeport — Connecticut's largest city — is also my affluent state's capital of poverty. Even though it's part of the nation's richest region, the rapidly rising number of children living in poverty in...
