Media

Why it's as if there were a tax on the non-financial portions of the economy that redistributes wealth to the financial sector.

The Center for American Progress is out with a budget plan that would reduce deficits by $4.1 trillion over the next decade and, at first glance, seems to makes a good deal of sense.

A few months ago, I wrote about the fracked up logic used by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to outsource reviewing the health impacts of fracking to the Health Commissioner. The ramifications of this decision are now becoming clear.

Before the Great Recession, the financial sector had consistently been eating up a greater and greater share of the economy. In 2007, it accounted for a whopping 40 percent of corporate profits. Before 1950, the financial sector made up less than 3 percent of GDP; now it makes up more than 8 percent.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren is likely to focus her efforts on the Senate Banking Committee in areas that go far beyond her bread-and-butter expertise in consumer protection, analysts say.

We’ve been talking a lot this year on PolicyShop about the work of groups like Fast Food Forward, OUR Walmart, the Retail Action Project, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers,

Four-year-old John Kaykay is a serious and quiet boy—“my thoughtful one,” his dad calls him. When the official greeters at the front door of the McClure early-childhood center in Tulsa welcome him with their clipboards and electric cheer—“Good morning, John! How are you today?”—he just slowly nods his small chin in their direction. When he gets to Christie Housley’s large, sunny classroom, he focuses intensely on signing in, writing the four letters of his name with a crayon as his dad crouches behind him.

In response to my short primer on the corporation, Professor Colleen Dunlavy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison sent her interesting article, From Citizens to Plutocrats: Nineteenth-century  Shareholder Voting Rights and Theories of the Corporation.

NEW YORK -- The United States faces a retirement crisis that threatens future retirees and the next generation of workers. The voluntary employer-sponsored retirement system covers fewer and fewer Americans, often leaving Social Security, originally intended as a supplement to other forms of retirement, as the major source of income for 40 percent of older Americans. Even workers still covered by an employer retirement plan have had their benefits weakened.