John Boehner says that unemployed Americans are pretty clearly malingerers, bums on welfare who have decided that they don’t feel like working: “This idea that has been born, maybe out of the economy over the last couple years, that you know, I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I think […]
Via Alternet comes this disturbing story. Deborah Calley told WITI that she paid cash for her dream home in 2010. She had thought that it would make raising two children easier while she was recovering from the traumatic car accident. But that dream was shattered when she was notified that the county was foreclosing on […]
Having raised a family in Mad City, Wisconsin (a place former governor Dreyfuss called “77 square miles surrounded by reality” and others calling it the Left Coast of Wisconsin, I found the state to be open to new ideas and more so than what is found in other states. Of course things have changed with […]
The White American Dream Game Just listening to the level of noise coming from some posters complaining about low income workers, how they caused their own predicament, and this is why they are unable to move upwards on the ladder of mobility. Low income and unskilled workers do not work hard enough, they did not […]
by David Zetland on Aguanomics Time for a new boat OM writes from California: Have you thought or written about public purchase of water flows needed for the environment? We have a new water bond that includes a lot of funds for this sort of thing. It strikes me that it fits with the model […]
Lifted from an op ed e-mail from Stormy: A piece in the Guardian is interesting, dealing with poverty (real poverty) and inequality. I think that Angry Bear should really address what can be done about rising inequality. Here are the last two paragraphs: The prospect is one of a society such as the one we […]
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the first book to make a data-driven examination of economic inequality. Based on hundreds of years worth of data, it attempts to determine the long-term trends in inequality and the social and political consequences that follow from them. In this final post, I want to highlight the most […]
In the Open Thread, I pointed to the The Millennial Disruption Index and Millennials as a cohort which will be bigger then Baby-Boomers and are also the cohort which has suffered the most since 2001 when jobs started to disappear and wages crashed. The families at 35 years of age are struggling the most with […]
On September 4, Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval announced that electric car-maker Tesla had chosen Nevada for the location of its much sought-after Gigafactory. Contrary to its claim that it wanted $500 million, Tesla in fact wanted speed plus the highest bidder. As I analyzed last month, a $500 million subsidy would have been relatively low […]
Okay, so most of you who don’t live in Iowa (and most of you don’t live in Iowa, since it’s not a populous state) probably are unaware that the outcome of the election to replace retiring progressive Iowa senator Tom Harkin—which in turn may determine party control of the Senate—may turn on a dispute between […]