Employment

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Who is at fault for a standoff on the debt ceiling? Republicans are the obvious choice because when in power deficits don’t matter but out of power deficits and a growing debt are the path to hell. Deficits will burden our grandchildren and so we must accept […]

Corporations

Our Future vs. Neoliberalism

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

( Code Pink) – In country after country around the world, people are rising up to challenge entrenched, failing neoliberal political and economic systems, with mixed but sometimes promising results. Progressive leaders in the U.S. Congress are refusing to back down on the Democrats’ promises to American voters to reduce poverty, expand rights to healthcare, […]

Employment

How Finding that immigrants don’t reduce the wages of native-born workers won the Nobel Prize

The Conversation

By Arvind Magesan | – Applied economists spend a large fraction of their time trying to squeeze meaningful answers — causal effects — out of observational data. Unlike the natural sciences, we can’t run experiments in order to answer the big questions in our field. If we want to know, for example, how raising the […]

Employment

Unemployment Insurance Isn’t Holding Back the Economy. Inequality Is.

OtherWords

By Rebekah Entralgo | – An estimated 9 million Americans got the rug pulled out from under them over Labor Day weekend as enhanced pandemic federal unemployment benefits expired, leaving millions of families in the lurch during a record-breaking season for COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. Some 35 million people — nearly 1 in 10 Americans […]

Debt

Only $3 Bn. of Federal $46 Bn rental assistance dollars reach renters, as eviction moratorium ends

Cronkite News Arizona PBS

By Brooke Newman | – ( Cronkite News) – WASHINGTON – The federal government’s COVID-19 moratorium on renter evictions ended Saturday, leaving thousands of Arizona renters vulnerable while state and local officials have distributed just a fraction of the funding aimed at keeping people in their homes. Government agencies in Arizona received almost $495 million […]

Climate Crisis

Top Four ways extreme heat hurts the economy

The Conversation

By Derek Lemoine | – Summer 2021 will likely be one of the hottest on record as dozens of cities in the West experience all-time high temperatures. The extreme heat being felt throughout many parts of the U.S. is causing hundreds of deaths, sparking wildfires and worsening drought conditions in over a dozen states. How […]

Banking

This time, it is the Students and the Unions that the Gov’t Needs to Bail out for a Healthy Economy

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Digging our way back out of the pandemic recession will not be easy, but we have the advantage of knowing what worked and did not work in the 2008 crisis. Any policy choice today does not operate on a blank slate. No one knows this more than […]

Employment

Dear National Public Radio: The Stock Market is not the Economy– Tell us about Hunger and the Real Unemployment Rate

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – I have a pet peeve with NPR. Why do so many of its top- of- the- hour five minute newscasts begin and end with short stock market updates? Is there no more important factoid its news editors could be passing along to us? NPR likes to portray […]

Employment

On How there is no Restaurant Worker Shortage, only a Shortage of Safe Jobs with Adequate Pay

John Buell

From the earliest days of the Pandemic relief initiatives business lobbies and conservative pundits have griped about the $600 Federal Unemployment Insurance supplement. They complained that combined state and federal programs would give many employed workers more income than they received in their current jobs. Workers would have an incentive to stay home to sit […]