Category: Politics
Increasing the Minimum Wage Can Create Jobs—If It’s Enforced
by Polly Cleveland | Feb 19, 2014 | Economy(Source: The Gazette) Back when I first studied economics, we “proved” in class that a minimum wage causes unemployment. You just draw supply and demand curves for labor, add a horizontal line for a wage above the “market clearing” competitive equilibrium wage, and—bingo!—a gap appears between labor supply and labor demand. Employers routinely violate current […]
What Happens When the Man Standing His Ground Isn’t White?
by Simon Balto | Feb 18, 2014 | PoliticsPhoto Credit: Florida Times-Union This is a question about Jordan Davis and Michael Dunn and about us. Davis should’ve turned 19 on Sunday. Instead, he’s dead, the victim of a middle-aged white man named Michael Dunn outside a Jacksonville, Florida, gas station who, to break down the steps: a) took issue with the volume of […]
Why There’s No Outcry
by Robert Reich | Feb 10, 2014 | PoliticsPeople ask me all the time why we don’t have a revolution in America, or at least a major wave of reform similar to that of the Progressive Era or the New Deal or the Great Society. Middle incomes are sinking, the ranks of the poor are swelling, almost all the economic gains are going […]
CBO Report Shows How Obamacare Helps Working Poor
by Jeff Madrick | Feb 10, 2014 | EconomyThe attack on the Affordable Care Act by conservative Republicans after the release of the Congressional Budget Office’s new report was desperate. Bravo to much of the media for setting the story straight almost immediately. But so strong is the anti-government bias involving social policy that critics hardly stopped to think. No, businesses were not […]
For USA Today, Illegal Settlements Are a Matter of Opinion
by Peter Hart | Feb 9, 2014 | Economy, Foreign PolicyThe football game part of the Super Bowl was a non-event, but there was serious controversy over one of the commercials: Actress Scarlett Johansson was appearing in an ad for SodaStream, a maker of carbonated beverage dispensers whose main factory is in the West Bank, Palestinian territory that has been occupied by Israel since 1967. […]