Washington -Joe Biden’s stunning victory on his boldly ambitious $1.9 trillion corona relief package and its striking popularity with voters, including grassroots Republicans, now tempts many Congressional Democrats to think that they can go-it-alone and leave Republicans on the sidelines. But will it work? Senate filibuster rules are a formidable, if not insurmountable barrier. The […]
Washington – While you and I have focused on the economic havoc of job losses, pay cuts and business failures caused by the corona pandemic, we missed noticing that the tiny sliver of super-super-rich at the apex of our economy was simultaneously fattening their already phenomenal fortunes, thanks to the pandemic. A surprise perhaps because […]
Washington – Maybe you’ve forgotten, as I had, how snidely candidate Donald Trump declared war on Wall Street back in 2016, savaging Hillary Clinton as ”the puppet” of Wall Street – “they pull the strings” – and personally vowing to generate an economic renaissance that would lift the American middle class out of stagnation and […]
Washington – Alan Krueger, the Princeton professor and economic adviser to two presidents who died last weekend, rang the alarm bell for me as a reporter six years ago with a disturbing speech that he gave, of all places, at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Museum. Krueger was one of those rare economists who break out […]
Over the last three decades, we’ve lost something precious and essential in the American concept of capitalism – the idea that shared prosperity is good business and smart economics because it generates long-term economic growth and competitiveness for the nation as a whole. High economic inequality is a drag on economic growth, economic studies show. […]
Washington – The most lethal damage to American society embedded in the Republican tax plan now being rushed through Congress is that it will metastasize the cancerous economic inequality that has been eating away at the health and fabric of American democracy over four decades – an issue some Democrats plan to take to voters […]
Washington – Economists call it “the Virtuous Circle of Growth.” It’s the dead opposite of “trickle down economics.” The core idea is that a well-paid middle class is the engine of America’s economic growth. In other words, America’s job creators are the 99%, not the 1%. That was the economic concept that powered America’s remarkable […]
Washington – Given Donald Trump’s gutter politics – his foul mouth, his racist bigotry, his dark nativism, you have to ask yourself, “How does he keep winning?” and “Why does he so alarm the Republican Establishment?” And the answer lies not so much in personality politics, but in something more explosive: Trump’s heresy against orthodox […]
Hedrick Smith, who conceived this website and is its principal writer and architect, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and Emmy award-winning documentary producer for PBS and PBS FRONTLINE. more »
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