Economy and Business
The Race to the Bottom
Is the love of money the root of all evil? OK, so Jesus may have played down bigotry and megalomania when he said that, but overall his observation holds true 2,000 years later.
Fix the Minimum Wage
In most states, working full-time in a minimum-wage job pays $7.25 per hour. That’s just $15,000 a year for full-time work. It’s not enough to live on. In fact, a breadwinner for a family of four earning the minimum wage would be a full $7,000 below the federal poverty line.
We’re All Subsidizing Free Lunches for America’s CEOs
A generation ago, on National Secretary’s Day, America’s top corporate executives used to take their prized office assistants out to lunch. Times change, and National Secretary’s Day has become Administrative Professionals’ Day. But something else has changed. These days, CEOs are getting the free lunches. Secretaries and all the rest of us are picking up the tab. And not at Burger King either.
Belt-Tightening Time
The 64-Gazillion-Dollar Question
Peter Edelman has battled poverty for nearly half a century, first as a top aide to Senator Robert Kennedy, later as a state and federal official, and currently as a key figure at a widely respected law and public policy center in Washington.
Caution, Fiscal Cliff Ahead
Crashing the GDP
At 9 p.m. on June 12, there was a collision on the freeway between Baltimore and D.C. The first car, a beige Prius. The second, a gigantic 18-wheeler tearing down I-95. The truck knocked the Prius sideways, sending it spiraling down the road and into the guardrail, the only thing that stopped it from plunging over the edge into the river below. The truck kept going.
Shortcut to Nowhere
It seemed that Joseph Holman, a 51-year-old redhead from Brooklyn, had climbed into the middle class the old-fashioned way: by the sweat of his brow.
Grabbing Bigger Slices of Pie
What happens when nations cut taxes for their richest citizens?
Turning College Students into a Commodity
Free-market purists want us to have another ungodly religious encounter with their omnipotent deity. Looking at America’s trillion-dollar student debt crisis, these spiritualists had a burning-bush revelation.
