Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Integral and Indispensable to the regular duties, Your govenment says this defines if you get paid

Update below. From a Salon interview with  Catherine Ruckelshaus, general counsel and program director for the National Employment Law Project comes this case being argued today in the Supreme’s Court: Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk We tend not to hear much about Supreme Court cases until there’s an imminent ruling, much less before oral arguments have […]

Explaining Class Warfare

  Last month one hundred and fourteen thousand unemployed moochers…suddenly yank the government teat out of their mouths, get off the couch for forty hours a week? Why?     I say follow the money; cause I found out, that right around the time those people got those jobs…they started getting paid!   And just […]

Wages driven down, now relative to market you’re over paid!

Update: spelling corrected in title. I heard and then went to look see that Caterpillar is working hard to control it’s costs. “Despite earning a record $4.9 billion profit last year and projecting even better results for 2012, the company is insisting on a six-year wage freeze and a pension freeze for most of the […]

Define Rich V: Looking at the historical labor economy

We are taking a little side trip inthis series of defining rich based on the prior tax rate schedulesbut, this post is keeping with the process of looking at history formarkers as to the definition of rich. For any new readers, I believeas a society we knew and had definite boundaries as to what definedrich. […]

I resemble those remarks!

By Daniel Becker (DOLB) Following up on Robert’s post which at it’s core is discussing the article: Economic Enlightenment in Relations to College-going…. I find it interesting (not alarming at all, at least not regarding the data) that the following combination is the ultimate economically enlightened member of society if you are: very likely to […]

Would Have Been Hoisted from Comments Elsewhere

But Steve Randy Waldman already did the heavy lifting: several of the other officers had been stationed at the height of the housing bubble at facilities located near D.C. in Northern Virginia. They lived in very modest homes which were removed from their workplaces by substantial driving distances, but these homes were nevertheless particularly pricey […]

Overcoming Classism, a four-minute lesson

Ken Houghton Consider this a bright, cheerful post, as opposed to my next one. As long as TAPPED is talking about “classism,” let’s recall that the easy solution was Common Knowledge by the early 1980s: When I was in school I ran with kid down the streetBut I watched him burn himself up on bourbon […]

Class War; Appropriateness of the Wealthy’s strategy

A research review by: Divorced one like Bush Introduction: This review was initiated after reading the report linked at the 25 indicators post. A review of the data regarding accepted economic performance indicators for business cycle peaks of year 2000 and 2008 is presented along with a discussion of the relevance to the strategy of […]

A Brilliant Comment that Deserves a Larger Audience

In the grand tradition of “pulled from comments,” I’m pulling this one—from Brad DeLong’s blog, in response to this post: …Manzi does not seem to have a consistent view of the concavity of instantaneous indirect utility functions. He argues that it would be absurd to consume the proceeds of the IPO of a successful startup […]

What’s old is New Again

This NY Times piece is making a comparison to yesteryears when those mansions in Newport, RI were built. It starts with Sanford I. Weil of Citigroup and how he compares to Andrew Carnegie. First, how does this period compare: Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to […]