(Larry Summers | Kevin Moloney/Flickr/Creative Commons) The reason Larry Summers has become a leading candidate for Federal Reserve chairman is because President Obama is now leaning his way. No, I don’t have direct proof of that, but some journalists claim they have heard this from insiders. And the reason this is credible is that Obama […]

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(Kevyn Orr | Source: Fox News Sunday) Detroit’s bankruptcy and a high profile lawsuit in San Jose highlight a nationwide effort led by fiscal conservatives to undo the basic promise embodied in public employee pensions—a guaranteed, defined retirement benefit. If they succeed in unraveling public pensions, as they have to retirement benefits offered by private […]

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  In this age of mass migration, U.S. immigration policy has mixed relative openness to immigration (since 1965) with nativist hostility toward immigrants. On the state level, we have seen a wave of anti-immigrant legislation (like the Arizona “papers, please” law). On the federal level, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border coupled with spasms of […]

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(Image courtesy of Just Economics) Residents of the small city of SeaTac, Washington, will vote in November on a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. If approved, it would surpass the highest minimum wage in the country, San Francisco’s $10.55, by $4.45. Home of Washington’s biggest airport and thousands of […]

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Imagine you hear gunshots down the street and you call the police, but they take an hour to show up. Imagine the victim is your son, and you don’t call the ambulance because you know it isn’t coming, so you drive to the hospital yourself. These are real stories from Detroit, a city so broke […]

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