Economy and Business
How the 1 Percent Can Camp Out with the 99 Percent
Perhaps you’re part of Wall Street’s richest 1 percent, yet, deep in the deepest part of your hedge-fund heart, you secretly support the “We Are the 99 Percent” people.
A Main Street Jobs Agenda
Most Americans are now waking up from the Thanksgiving holiday and the bruising Washington battles of a failed congressional “supercommittee” with a giant hangover. The hangover results from the lack of clear answers to the most important question facing most of us: Where are the jobs that our children, our communities, and our nation so desperately need?
Chump U
The colleges, especially the for-profit variety, are there waiting with open arms and elaborate lures.
Occupy the Budget
Some lawmakers are trying to give America the cartoon image of a penniless hobo, circa 1932, with holes in his pants and nothing but a cold can of beans for dinner. We’re broke, they say, with no choice but to slash spending on public services.
Occupy Your Bank
The First Amendment guarantees the right to “peaceably” assemble. Unfortunately, that right seems to be in some type of Orwellian limbo at the moment. Eighteen cities participated in a conference call about the Occupy movement before they simultaneously cracked down on occupations in their cities, according Oakland Mayor Jean Quan.
Big Banks are Doing Just Fine, Thank You
When grouchy columnists write of the pernicious effects of banks on the economy, we’re generally not referring to your local county bank whose vice-president coaches your son’s Little League team. No, we mean the big guys whose vice-presidents commute to Wall Street from Greenwich, Connecticut and whose kids attend fancy boarding schools.
Thanksgiving on Wall Street
America’s Real Poverty Rate
The Census Bureau recently released a highly-anticipated report suggesting ways to improve the measurement of poverty in America. It found that adjusting for medical expenses, the value of benefits payments, regional differences in the cost of living, and other technical factors raised the poverty rate to 16 percent, up from the official count of 15.1 percent.
Luck Matters
In their unbending opposition to raising a penny more in taxes from even the wealthiest Americans — even in the midst of a government debt crisis and shrinking public budgets — extremist politicians paint all rich people as self-made, entrepreneurial “job creators.” If we ask any more in taxes from such paragons of industry, they argue, we’ll not only crimp the economy, but perversely “punish success.”
The Class War is So Over
Between 1979 and 2007, the after-tax household income of America’s most affluent 1 percent ballooned by 275 percent, while the bottom 20 percent’s income inched up just 18 percent. The top 1 percent now owns more than an entire third of the nation’s wealth, which is more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.
