Robert Kuttner
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Robert Kuttner

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, as well as a distinguished senior fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week and continues to write columns in The Boston Globe. He is the author of Obama's Challenge and other books.

Recent Articles

Time for a Financial Transaction Tax

Robert KuttnerMay 21, 2012

Despite the Camp David G8 summit’s support for a shift from austerity to growth, there is no agreement among major western leaders on what growth requires.

Here is an idea whose time has come: a Financial Transactions Tax.

The tax would do two things urgently required by the crisis. It would take some of the profit out of the pure speculation that has created such hardship for countries like Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland whose economies have already been pummeled by recession and by perverse demands for belt tightening.

And a tax on financial trades could raise some serious revenue, which could be put back into green investment and other forms of economic stimulus to help the economies of Europe revive.

Is a Vote Against Austerity Enough?

Robert KuttnerMay 15, 2012
(AP Photo / Michel Spingler)

 

The voters in France and Greece have rejected the parties of austerity. But it is not yet clear that the party of growth can deliver the recovery that the citizenry wants. On both sides of the Atlantic, the obstacles are more political than economic.

In Europe the conventional wisdom, enforced by Germany and the European Central Bank, still holds that the path to growth is budget restraint. Unfortunately, the more that budgets are tightened, the more economies shrink and the more revenues fall. No large economy has ever deflated its way to recovery.

Hard Times, Scary Prospects

Robert KuttnerMay 07, 2012

For the first time in the history of the American republic, the far right has captured one of our two major parties. Whether the issue is denial of science, restriction of fundamental rights and liberties, the substitution of big money for the vote, the destruction of the middle class, or the wreckage of even modest social supports, we live in ominous times.

Unfortunately, it is also a precarious time for one of America’s core progressive institutions—this magazine.

As a founding editor of The American Prospect, I have never written a column like this one, and I hope never to write another. 

The Prospect could cease publication if we don’t bridge a serious funding gap.

The Joys of Recession

Robert KuttnerApr 24, 2012
(Flickr/jima)

The Social Security Trustees have just projected that the date by which the system will no longer be able to meet all of its payouts has been moved up three years from 2036 to 2033. This has prompted the usual clucking about the need for drastic benefit cuts of partial privatization right now. 

What nobody seems to have noticed is that the primary reason for the pessimistic forecast is the lousy economy, particularly the high unemployment and depressed wages. Social Security is of course financed by payroll taxes. There’s no better way to put the system into the red than to have a recession and to have 93 percent of the gains to go to the top one percent (whose payroll taxes are capped).

Part Two: Charles Murray, the Long View

Coming Apart caps three decades of faux concern for the poor.

Robert KuttnerApr 05, 2012
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The following is the second in a two-part series on Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. For part one, please click here.

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