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When Walmart broke the bad news to shareholders last week about declining same-store sales and cuts to their profit and sales projections, the company offered a glib explanation. "The retail environment was challenging," asserted Walmart Stores President and CEO Michael Duke. Company executives pointed to weather conditions and the January payroll tax increase to justify the disappointing sales, but larger questions about why consumers weren't buying were never addressed.

A tight labor market is the great conservative answer to the low-wage jobs crisis. If we can just get the economy booming again, the logic goes, wages will rise along with demand for low-skilled workers. 

Bill O'Reilly told me that earlier today, when I taped a segment at Fox on the economy. 

Of course, many progressive economists will tell you the same thing, even if they have very different ideas about how to spur growth and how to share prosperity. 

“Demos applauds President Obama for using the bully pulpit to shine a light on the college affordability and student debt crisis facing our nation. While Congress and state legislatures have failed to lead on this issue, the President’s tour promises to help highlight the dangers of tying opportunity to debt.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, is pushing the idea that being poor and living on government benefits in America is actually living high on the hog.

When Walmart broke the bad news to shareholders last week about declining same-store sales and cuts to their profit and sales projections, the company offered a glib explanation. "The retail environment was challenging," asserted Walmart Stores President and CEO Michael Duke. Company executives pointed to weather conditions and the January payroll tax increase to justify the disappointing sales, but larger questions about why consumers weren't buying were never addressed.

Here's something alarming to imagine: One day, your investment advisor at Merrill Lynch doesn't show up to his job. No warning, no nothing. He just doesn't show. 

We probably don’t need to be reminded that the economy is a critical problem. Yet the nation’s political conversation still founders on the question of what it is about the nation’s economic performance that is holding back the middle class and people trying to work their way into it. Into the fray steps the Economic Policy Institute, with straight-forward, clarifying data in a new study that should help to focus the political debate.

Graphic artist Nickolay Lamm's remapping of Manhattan's skyline based on net wealth.

The post-recession party line at the American Bankers Association (ABA) is something like, “Hey Jane/Joe Briefcase. We're just as mad at gosh darn Wall Street as anyone. But only some bankers are evil. A lot of us are honest and work hard, just like you.” Maybe. But this isn’t a reason to lose track of ABA’s political agenda and who pays to set it: Wall Street, coincidentally.