IF YOU OWN A reasonably balanced asset portfolio, there’s good news. Stock prices continue to climb in a post-New Year rally. Your recession is over. If you’re a working stiff, the news is not so good. There are 50 percent fewer job opportunities today than there were at the recent job-market peak in 2007. Your […]

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Make Wall St. Pay to Play—President Obama’s proposed tax on big Wall Street banks, to recover $117 billion taxpayers lost on the bank bailout, is actually a fee. It’s revenue neutral, sets out to recover a specific amount of money lost in the bailout, and ends in ten years. In contrast, two hundred economists have […]

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Do the Numbers—While New York Times polling had 65 percent of the American public supporting a public option—a public health insurance company that would compete with private insurers—two amendments that would have provided a public option were rejected by the Senate Finance Committee. The defeat of Sen. John J. Rockefeller IV’s (D-WV) amendment (15-8) at a September […]

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Bomb Iran?—Swine flu kept the story off the front pages of American newspapers, but the Israeli press is engaged in a robust public debate over the prospect of an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. That line of discussion continues in the Israeli press. “As far as Netanyahu is concerned, a decisive […]

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CONGRESSMAN HENRY B. GONZÁLEZ once asked me if I could name the largest transfer of wealth in our country’s history. I stumbled through a couple of New Deal acronyms and had moved on to the defense budget when González stopped me. “Mortgage lending,” he said. González was a liberal Democrat from San Antonio who chaired […]

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