While income inequality in the United States has hit record highs, so too has the decibel level from the tragically rich protesting their victimhood in the new class warfare. After walking back his "Kristallnacht" Holocaust analogy, legendary venture capitalist Tom Perkins nevertheless fretted that the 1 percent faces "economic extinction." Sam Zell, the billionaire chairman […]
Category: Economy
And now for today's math quiz. Let's say you decide to work 2 percent fewer hours this year. At the end of the year, your total compensation is 1 percent lower. Does that mean you got a pay cut? If you answered "yes," you might want to reread the question. Or, you might be Marc […]
Days after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its latest projections House Republicans on Friday announced their latest ransom demand for raising the debt ceiling. John Boehner's minions will vote to avoid a U.S. default and a global economic calamity if the Medicare "doc" fix is patched for nine months and cuts to veterans' […]
Income inequality is not a disease, but rather a symptom of a disease. For over four decades, the United States has suffered from an atrophying of the great American middle class. The decline of post-World War II American economic dominance, the rise of new international competitors, the withering (and the smothering) of trade unions and […]
Their losing 2012 presidential ticket warned that America is becoming a nation of "makers and takers" as self-identified "victims" seek "free stuff" from their government. In 2013, Republicans in Congress voted to gut food stamps, blocked the extension of jobless benefits to 1.3 million long-term unemployed Americans and supported drug testing for recipients. Now on […]
The Senate on Tuesday morning voted 60-37 to advance a bill extending long-term unemployment benefits for three months. Despite the support from six Republican Senators, its fate in both Houses is still uncertain. To secure final passage, Susan Collins (R-ME) told President Obama he'd have to "help us find an offset" for the $6.4 billion […]
On January 1, 2014, the Affordable Care Act went fully into effect. But for all of the furious fighting over the law these past five years, Obamacare was always an evolutionary reform grafted onto the existing American health care system. The Medicaid public insurance program has been extended to roughly four million lower income Americans […]
On Monday, the federal government announced it had sold off the remaining shares from its $49.5 billion bailout of General Motors in 2009. But the $10.5 billion loss on paper obscures the massive total return on investment for the U.S. economy overall and American taxpayers in particular. As a new analysis from the Center for […]
Karl Marx famously said that historical events occur twice, first as tragedy and then as farce. So it would seem with the reaction of American conservatives to Evangelii Gaudium, the new 85-page apostolic exhortation issued by Pope Francis. Just days after Sarah Palin fretted that some of the Pope's statements "sound kind of liberal," Rush […]
Six years after the start of the Great Recession, there should be little disagreement what America's number one domestic priority should be. With unemployment still stuck around 7 percent four plus years after that recession was declared "over," creating jobs has to be Job #1. That urgency is underscored by the new analyses warning that […]