I find it bizarre that on a day when there is at least a small scrap of good news about the job market, the stock market goes into free fall because all of these supposed disciples of free market capitalism are nervous that good news may lead a quasi-government agency to actually stop intervening in the economy. Of course, the stock market often ( Read more... )

In spite of the prevailing dogma that America operates under a free market economy governed by an almighty "invisible hand" that government should not interfere with in any way, there has been a slow trickle of stories pointing to a reality that many -- including myself -- have long suspected: the "free markets" are actually rigged to benefit the ( Read more... )

The conservative cliche that government should be run as if it were a business has been repeated so many times that it's become tiresome. This is in spite of the fact that comparing the management of a nation-state to the management of a local kid's lemonade stand is a completely irrelevant analogy. But let's consider an example a little closer ( Read more... )

To hear a lot of people talk, you'd almost think that the government was giving away truckloads of money to enable the lowest income Americans to live it up without having to worry about such things as working or paying bills. You'd think that we didn't have problems with crushing poverty or food insecurity or a vastly underfunded social safety ( Read more... )

I've been reading Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, which is an intriguing exploration of the complexities of globalization and outsourcing. I'm not that far into it yet, but a paragraph from the first chapter jumped out at me. It's about Mr. Friedman's visit to Dalian, a city in northeastern China ( Read more... )

For anyone who's ever been involved with or given to or been interested in a non-profit or charitable organization, Dan Pallotta's TED talk is well worth listening to. He dissects one fundamental assumption of how these organizations operate -- that they should spend as little as possible on what negatively gets termed "overhead" -- and shows how ( Read more... )

Austerity has created turmoil all around the world. Austerity is the justification used by the international bankers to demand that countries such as Greece and Ireland slash government spending and social programs that their citizens depend on. It's the foundation of budgets proposed by right-wing policy wonks like Paul Ryan who want to import ( Read more... )

The old joke about the South and other Republican-leaning states was that they were too wrapped up in wishy-washy "social issues" -- guns, gays, and God -- and not concerned enough with matters of actual public policy. But what have I heard dominating the national conversation ever since President Obama got re-elected ( Read more... )

. . . And by things falling apart, I'm talking about that international ponzi scheme known as the global financial markets, which could be on the brink of yet another meltdown triggered by some Russian money launderers in Cyprus ( Read more... )

An obscure city government agency in Washington DC known as the Office of Revenue Analysis decided to take a look at the differences in tax burdens among major cities. The agency released a report, as obscure government agencies are prone to do. Typically, such reports get ignored by the media, but since this one highlights a crucial tenet of ( Read more... )