On Monday, the White House announced that President Bush will leave his successor an estimated $482 billion budget deficit for the next fiscal year. But that sea of red ink isn't only an indelible mark on Bush's legacy going forward. It's a reminder of one of George W. Bush most cynical ploys - and broken […]

On Thursday, Americans saw the minimum wage jump to $6.55 an hour. Boosted by the second of three 70 cent increases passed by the new Democratic majority in Congress after the 2006 mid-term elections, the minimum wage will move to $7.25 next year. But to be sure, the two million Americans who got a raise […]

In 2007, Americans learned that they had relinquished their 200-year hold on the title of world's tallest people. Now a devastating new report shows that across a growing range of indicators of health, wealth and education, Americans simply aren't measuring up. The "Measure of America" study by the American Human Development Project (funded by Oxfam […]

Just two weeks after John McCain's latest declaration that the American economic slowdown is "psychological," his top adviser Phil Gramm also insisted the recession is all in our heads. The American people are not merely experiencing a "mental recession," Gramm announced, but are "a nation of whiners" for complaining about it. In an interview Wednesday […]

If John McCain has many more days like Tuesday, his only chance to get to the White House will be as a tourist. On the same day he dropped jaws with his joke about killing Iranians with cigarettes, McCain amazingly slammed Social Security as "an absolute disgrace." Then even as McCain's first-term balanced budget pledge […]

On Monday, John McCain repackaged his previous economic proposals in a mystifying document simply called "Jobs for America." More notable for what it lacked than what it included, McCain's latest rehash unsurprisingly left out his past admissions of ignorance on matters economic, his vision of eBay as Americans' economic future or his belief that the […]

On more than one occasion this campaign season, Republican John McCain claimed Americans' economic worries were all in their heads. So it's only natural that a man who described the economic downturn as "psychological" would have his own mental strategy for coping with spiraling gas prices and looming tax bills. Just forget them. That's the […]

John McCain isn't a psychologist, but he's playing one on TV. Again. For the second time in two months, the supposed maverick turned modern day Freud has diagnosed Americans' economic ills and concluded that it's all in our heads. And to be sure, his recommended therapy - offshore oil drilling and a gas tax holiday […]

Two months after I first highlighted John McCain's prescription of eBay as the cure for what ails the economy, economists are finally weighing in. As Bloomberg reports, the feedback isn't pretty. While McCain, who has admitted knowing little about economics and even less about computers, may envision a nation of auctioneers, "new people selling stuff […]

In his eternal quest for the Republican presidential nomination, the supposed maverick John McCain has repeatedly reversed long-held positions and compromised purportedly core principles. From the Bush tax cuts, the religious right and immigration reform to overturning Roe v. Wade, proclaiming Samuel Alito a model Supreme Court Justice and bashing France (just to name a […]