Media

When voters go to the polls in Florida tomorrow for the GOP Presidential primary, the economy and jobs will weigh heavily on their minds and rightfully so. The state’s unemployment rate is close to 10 percent, down from a peak 12 percent in 2010, and the state was hit hard by the housing market crash.

You’d be hard pressed to find a New Yorker who thinks a full-time adult worker can survive in this state on $7.25 an hour. In a state with as high a cost of living as New York, this would be a laughable concept, if the consequences weren't so serious.

Not long ago, it seemed the stars were aligned for President Obama to mount a serious bid for corporate tax reform. I have argued often that this is an area ripe with opportunity for Obama -- not to mention a reviled Congress desperate to show it can get something done. 

The 2011 fourth quarter GDP numbers released today show a 2.8 percent growth in economic activity, due in part to the increase in spending around the holidays. But, what do GDP numbers really show? A new report from Demos, Beyond GDP, looks at the flaws in our dependence on GDP as the sole measure of progress and highlights important economic and social measures that are not captured by GDP.

In the State of the Union address the President sketched out a blueprint that would reduce economic inequality, demanding that wealthy play by the same rules as ordinary Americans. What we didn't hear, though, was a blueprint for attacking political inequality so that the voices of the wealthy stop overpowering those of everyone else here in the world's oldest democracy. 

If powerholders in the New York State government have any decency, they will “…spare New Yorkers further hypocrisy and keep to themselves ridiculous claims that their bold-faced power grab was done in the name of minority enfranchisement.” This is just one of the dozens of bitter statements that came out of yesterday’s proposed NYS Assembly and Senate district maps.

President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address was a mixed bag with regard to this nation’s clean economy future, as detailed here yesterday. The President laid out some ideas that were cogent and compelling, and which could act as the pillars of a credible energy policy. Other proposals, however, would help further entrench an antiquated economy dependent on dirty energy.

David Brooks recently wrote, contrary to my last blog, that Mitt Romney is neither too rich nor elite to truly represent the American people.