Media

The CBO has updated its figures for 2013, showing that if we don’t engage in reckless austerity, the economy will continue to recover next year. But if not, well, we would enter a deep, double-dip recession.

By now, regular readers know how we feel about the reliance on GDP as the main economic indicator and its inability to measure our economic and social well-being.

In a speech at the University of Kansas in February of the tumultuous year 1968, Robert F. Kennedy spoke of the plight of the poorest Americans, those struggling in devastated rural areas, and on Indian reservations and in the tenements and housing projects of the inner cities. He was blunt. “We must begin,” he said, “to end this disgrace of the other America.”

Last week, TransCanada began construction on the southern section of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Despite serious concerns about the environmental impact of the pipeline, the Obama Administration backed building the southern portion earlier this year. It’s not hard to see how this is just the first step to building the entire pipeline.

This morning, The Washington Post reported on a new study -- commissioned by the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI) -- that finds federal regulations that impact the manufacturing sector on a perilous rise.

MIAMI – In just three years Florida’s higher education funding per student decreased 40 percent, according to a new report by national public policy center Demos and the Florida-based Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy (RISEP). As a direct result, Floridian families now spend 25% of median income on the cost of a single year of attendance at a public four-year college. The situation is only looking grimmer, with the recent $300 million cut to public four-year universities.

Some eight years ago, I was at a presentation by Vanguard founder Jack Bogle at a business journalists' conference in Denver, and when his PowerPoint crashed, and he had to use transparencies on a vintage 20th-century overheard projector. After the presentation, he let me keep them, and they still serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone for me for enlightened investing.

Economic inequality is a famously complex phenomenon, but some parts of this trend are quite simple: Like how today's rich are benefiting from a rare confluence of record high compensation and record low taxes.