Political Calculations gives us this chart of median new home prices versus median incomes over the last 46 years. The rising tip at the upper right (!) is May 2013. What do you think: sustainable? Here’s the zoomed-in version of recent years, from inside the red dashes: As they say, …new homes are, virtually by definition, at the […]

U.C.-Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu’s nomination to the Ninth Circuit Court of appeals was killed a couple years ago by Senate Republicans upon the pretext that Lui had trashed Alito to the Senate Judiciary Committee in testimony during Alito’s confirmation hearing.  Lui predicted that Alito as a justice would be exactly what Alito as a […]

Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He is the founding co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). This is via Real News: I want to refer to an article that was in the global–the leading global financial newspaper The Financial Times last week by one of their […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Cap per Procedure Some employer health plans are experimenting with a cap-per-procedure system, allowing $X for a certain procedure and forcing employees to pay any difference. This is not as harsh for employees as it first sounds, as the plans are using this as leverage to cap fees […]

As if the scene was taken out of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, the 13 hour filibuster by Texas State Senator Wendy Davis succeeded in killing SB537 by minutes. The vote failed to happen in the allotted time killing the bill for the time being. While filibustering the passage of the bill, Texas State Senator […]

Now the shoe is on the other foot, and it is time for the court to strike down a federal statute in order to advance a liberal policy goal rather than a conservative policy goal. Justice Scalia’s paean to the democratic process* in his dissent sounds a little hollow, coming in the wake of his votes to […]

Guest post by Edward Lambert as taken from his Blog Effective Demand Yes, the economy is a concern. There are problems to sort out. The problems run deep. What is the solution? The solution to the problems of the economy will be found through “Social Efficiency” and raising the social standards that have been declining […]

From the New York Times comes this note a way to rent a car for short time periods and convenience. I am not personally acquainted with this system, although I have used Zip cars. Car sharing has been around for decades in Europe and has caught on in the United States with Zipcar. These station-based […]

Part 1 Part 2 First off, I want to thank Mark Sadowski for contributing, in a gadfly sort of way, to my thinking on this issue with his comments in Parts 1 and 2.  So, this is not the part 3 post I had intended to write. Mark suggested using a different transformation of the […]

by Linda Beale Redistribution and public production of public goods–not “let the markets handle it” In recent posts, the Importance of Distribution and Markets, Minimum Wages, and the Sins of Friedmania,  I have noted the centrality to sustainable democratic institutions of corraling the market so that the power and wealth of the elite few does […]