Media

How long do working mothers stay home after having their first child? If you guessed the answer might be 12 weeks (not an unreasonable assumption, since that’s the amount of time allotted by our national family leave law), you’d be sadly mistaken. According to recently released census numbers, a majority of mothers who worked during pregnancy go back before that, some way before. More than a quarter are at work within two months of giving birth and one in 10—more than half a million women each year—go back to their jobs in four weeks or less.

We are at a crossroads: do we choose economic growth or environmental sustainability?

Not two weeks after September 11, 2001, when the stock market was still all over the map and plans for and unfunded war in the offing, President Bush famously told Americans to "[d]o your business around the country" and

Multinational corporations have pushing hard over the last year for a repatriation tax holiday that would allow them to bring foreign profits back to the U.S. at a very low tax rate. They argue that such a giveaway would be a boon to the economy because those accrued profits -- over $1 trillion -- are now "trapped" overseas and can't be used for productive purposes here in the United States.

It's finally over.

Today marks the formal end of the nine-year U.S. military intervention in Iraq, although of course we are far from fully disentangled there with two military bases remaining on Iraq soil and 4,000 troops.

Recommended Reading: Bloomberg Businessweek's "How Inequality Hurts the Economy" by David J. Lynch. People have been making this argument for a while now -- inequality hurts growth because channeling wealth to the few simultaneously concentrates risk -- but Lynch's piece overwhelms because it lays out the full range of harms done to the economy by inequality.  

Chalk one up for Occupy Wall Street.

Last Thursday, the New York State legislature voted to raise taxes on high-earners after Governor Andrew Cuomo reversed his longstanding opposition to such a move. Cuomo cited a large budget gap in explaining his about-face, but that gap is hardly new. What is: taxing the top 1 percent is far easier now than it was a few months ago.