The verdict in the Trayvon Martin case brought with it another volley of criticism of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right’s now not-so-secret legislative workshop. Coming on the heels of the Supreme Court’s rebuke of the Voting Rights …
If the recession were a bout of the flu, we would be at about that point where the fever has broken—but we still feel like throwing up most of the time. The “recovery,” now in its fifth year, has yet …
The economy added 195,000 jobs in June, and revisions to the May and April reports pulled the average for the last three months up to 196,000. All of this was reported with an audible sigh of relief, and the hope that—at …
As we fire up the grills for the Fourth of July, I am reminded of the famous evocation of our last Gilded Age as “the great barbeque.” All were presumably invited, as the Progressive historian Vernon Parrington noted in 1927, …
By any measure, the rich are getting richer. The now-iconic Piketty and Saez data (based on a century of tax returns) show the income share of the richest 1 percent suspended between two Gilded Ages: claiming over 8 percent of …
There is no conceivable benchmark by which one could sustain the argument that Americans—especially corporations and the wealthy—are taxed too much.
Monetary and fiscal policy, according to conventional political wisdom, amounts to a choice between encouraging growth and restraining it, between policies that lower the unemployment rate (but risk a higher rate of inflation) and those that control prices (but risk …
Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office released its budget projections for the next decade. Its finding, that both the budget deficit and the debt-to-GDP ratio are recovering nicely from their recessionary spikes, is unsurprising. But its timing is impeccable. …
What happened to the good jobs? This is the question posed by fast-food workers who walked out in New York and Chicago in recent weeks. It is the question posed by activists in those corners of the economy—including restaurants and …
Organized labor in the United States has always been an urban institution. But new estimates of union density in American metropolitan settings show that relationship unraveling.
If pressed to reduce the last century of economic history into one graphic, I would go with something like this. The blue line traces the rise and decline of organized labor since the end of the First World War. The …
Almost four years into the “recovery,” the employment picture is still grim. It’s not just the unemployment rate’s agonizingly slow descent. We still face persistently high rates of underemployment (including those who would like to work but have given up …
Last month the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released an exhaustive survey of U.S. Health Care in International Perspective, measuring the United States against sixteen peer countries (other high-income democracies) on a wide range of health outcomes. The results—summed up in …
It hasn’t been a good year for American organized labor. Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual estimate of union membership in the United States. The graphic below summarizes the major trends, drawing on the work of …
In recent posts I’ve suggested various ways of looking at the national job numbers. In “Unemployment Numbers: The Long View,” I used a simple “back to pre-recession jobs” threshold to compare the 2007 recession and recovery to the trajectories of all …
