Have you heard? Our economic policy debate is getting some spring cleaning. President Barack Obama has signaled that he’s had it with all that talk about America being broke and the belt-tightening austerity measures that went along with that chatter. His proposed budget for the 2015 fiscal year will reflect this reality. You know what […]

Read more

Back in the infancy of the Internet Age, our hippest policy wonks orated endlessly about the emerging “information superhighway.” But that mouthful of a moniker would soon fall out of fashion. Anyone today who talks about the “information superhighway” comes across as a hopelessly uncool 1990s throwback. The irony here? If we truly treated the […]

Read more

Like a computer’s virtual rendering of himself as neoliberal consciousness-shaper of the hour, Fareed Zakaria returned triumphally yesterday to his “Yale family,” as his host at the Center for the Study of American Politics called it, and delivered a most excellent stump speech on the very important question, “Is the American Dream Dead?” Forgiven and […]

Read more

The debate over the federal minimum wage is scarcely a debate. President Barack Obama has proposed lifting it from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour, and a majority of Americans agree, even many Republicans. About the only holdouts are Congressional Republicans. John Boehner, long before he was House Speaker, once famously declared he’d rather kill himself […]

Read more

  The precariat is the growing class of insecure workers whose wages and working conditions do not provide economic stability. It ought to be getting more attention in American political discourse. I have urged mainstream journalists covering labor issues to use the term, which is increasingly being used in Europe. Several reporters have told me […]

Read more