The Washington Post has a striking analysis of the growing wealth gap between members of Congress and average Americans. It finds that the "median net worth of a member of the House in 2009 was more than 2 1 / 2 times greater than it was in 1984 — $725,00 vs. $280,000 — when adjusted for inflation. . . .
Where is John Maynard Keynes when you need him? While mainstream economists have long agreed that government spending is crucial for stimulating demand amid economic downturns, many elected leaders have pushed for the exact opposite approach—trying to slash government spending just when we need it most.
We owe much to the Occupy movement. In less than a month, protestors across the country (and the world) ignited a conversation about the destructive nature of inequality in our lives and in our democracy. With a motto that created a big tent—We Are The 99%—the leaderless movement seemed to resonate with Americans from the beginning.
Does $9.04 an hour sound like a lot of money to you? Probably not. But it's a $1.79 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 and, starting January 1, $9.04 be the new minimum wage in Washington State.
Lots of us hate Christmas shopping, so it's nice to have some moral support for these Grinch-like sentiments from an organized campaign called Buy Nothing Christmas. This group has lots of ideas about how to celebrate Christmas without a pile of Chinese-made presents that, chances are, the recipents don't even want.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who calls himself “America’s toughest Sheriff”, claims that harassing Latino immigrants is good for America. His actions, however, are pretty far from what America is all about.
It’s been a politically and socially tumultuous year, with far too many setbacks and too few victories on the key challenges facing Americans today. Our Year in Review captures some of those ups and downs, with a focus on the events that defined the boundaries of our political debate and the actions that most impacted the lives of the 99%.
Not two weeks after September 11, 2001, when the stock market was still all over the map and plans for and unfunded war in the offing, President Bush famously told Americans to "[d]o your business around the country" and
When someone from another country goes through the difficult process of becoming a naturalized American citizen, he or she should be entitled to full participation in our nation's democracy.
Multinational corporations have pushing hard over the last year for a repatriation tax holiday that would allow them to bring foreign profits back to the U.S. at a very low tax rate. They argue that such a giveaway would be a boon to the economy because those accrued profits -- over $1 trillion -- are now "trapped" overseas and can't be used for productive purposes here in the United States.
Today marks the formal end of the nine-year U.S. military intervention in Iraq, although of course we are far from fully disentangled there with two military bases remaining on Iraq soil and 4,000 troops.
Recommended Reading: Bloomberg Businessweek's "How Inequality Hurts the Economy" by David J. Lynch. People have been making this argument for a while now -- inequality hurts growth because channeling wealth to the few simultaneously concentrates risk -- but Lynch's piece overwhelms because it lays out the full range of harms done to the economy by inequality.