Media

today’s New York Times has news of another secretive, unverified and unverifiable database that is shutting American workers out of jobs.

A funny thing happened on Fox Business News last night, where I appeared on a panel to discuss President Obama's new initiative to map the human brain, spending $100 million next year to get started: Everyone on the show gave a thumbs up to the plan, including my two conservative co-panelists and the host. 

That's the first time I've ever been on the same side as everyone else on Fox. 

In an country where there are 3.3 job seekers for every one available job, one would hope that those lucky enough to have a full time job would be earning a salary they can live on. Unfortunately, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it's just the opposite. America's most common jobs are usually the worst paying ones.

Nowadays, whenever Social Security comes up in policy debates around Washington, the discussion often focuses on how best to cut benefits in order to shore up the program’s finances.

With comments straight out of President Reagan's "welfare queens" playbook, Paul Ryan is attempting to justify his proposed budgets cuts to various programs that help the poor, claiming the safety net "provides a powerful disincentive to get ahead." Never mind that since the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Welfare Reform Act, aka, "welfare reform," most of the remaining income assistance programs are both means-tested and work-based. 

It's a tradition at this point: At least once a year, Google incurs the ire of (primarily) American conservatives because of a doodle (or sometimes even the absence of a doodle!) on its homepage. In 2006, the multibillion-dollar, multinational corporation chose not to mark Memorial Day, which The National Review pronounced "kind of sad." In 2007, the magazine asked, "What, no Easter?

Chris Christie hasn't been very popular in GOP circles since he praised Barack Obama at the Jersey Shore on the eve of the presidential election. But Christie's national luster should be fading for a much better reason: He has one of the worst economic records of any governor in the United States. 

New Jersey has the seventh highest unemployment rate in the country -- 9.3 percent.

President Obama's proposal to spend $100 million next year mapping the human brain, as part of a larger multi-year project, is already drawing firing from critics of government spending. 

But if there were ever a clear payoff from government spending, it's spending for science. Consider a the findings of a 2011 study of the economic benefits of the government's massive Human Genome Project, which took 13 years to complete.

The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 would peg the minimum hourly pay for tipped workers to 70% of the standard, federal rate over the next three years. Supporters like Restaurant Opportunities Centers United believe few parts of the workforce stand to gain as much from the success of such legislation as servers.