In the new global economy, almost everything’s connected to everything else. Case in point: China will let its currency rise against the dollar and America’s housing bubble will burst. Let me explain. The housing bubble has been pumped up by low mortgage rates which have made it easy for lots of people to buy a […]
Robert Reich
Robert B. Reich, a co-founder of The American Prospect, is a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, one of the books featured in the Prospect’s High School Essay Contest.
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The Wrong Litmus Test
The battles over George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees are about to be waged on the wrong terrain — on the bloody fields of America’s culture wars. Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote on many of the nation’s most divisive social issues, and activists on both right and left are mobilized for the fight […]
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Balance Sheets Still Unbalanced
The Securities and Exchange Commission says the quality of corporate accounting is still flawed — especially when it comes to accounting for workers’ pensions on corporate balance sheets. You see, under current accounting rules, companies can report that investments in their pension plans earn money even in years when they don’t. Then they can include […]
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Beyond “No”
“Just say no” has been a winning strategy for Democrats. Social Security privatization looks dead. Ditto with “progressive indexing” of Social Security benefits. CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement) is on its last legs. Tax “reform” is a nonstarter. But if the Democratic Party is to win back the Senate or the House in […]
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Good for the Street?
It’s been only three years since Enron, WorldCom, and other corporate scandals burst through Wall Street like a volcano — spewing revelations of self-dealing, corporate looting, and fudging of numbers. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley law, New York’s crusading attorney general Eliot Spitzer went into high gear, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, under its newly […]
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Take it to the Banks
The National Association of Realtors reports that sales of existing homes reached a record in April — at an annual rate of 7.18 million sales. And the median price of a home had shot up 15.1 percent from a year earlier. That’s the biggest jump since 1980. Sure looks like a bubble. So where’s the […]
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Minimum Commitments
No issue brings out more sheer orneriness than trade. Next up: The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). On one side are opponents who say CAFTA will just magnify the “giant sucking sound” of disappearing American jobs. How can American workers compete against Central Americans eager to work for a small fraction of American wages? […]
Posted in15th Anniversary
1992: As I Predicted, Only Worse
In December 1992, according to Bob Woodward’s The Agenda, President-elect Bill Clinton was about to announce Laura Tyson’s appointment as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, when Tyson mentioned she and Robert Reich had debated in The American Prospect whether the nationality of a firm was important. Suddenly recalling the debate, Clinton said, “You […]
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Changing the Subject
The probability of a major Social Security overhaul is now approximately a snowball’s chance in Houston. According to polls, the public doesn’t believe Social Security is in a crisis or that it needs major overhaul. The real tragedy here is that the nation has some big domestic problems that need attention right away — not […]
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The Democrats and the China Card
The United States depends on China to finance a big portion of our federal budget deficit as well as our insatiable desire to buy everything under the sun on credit. So it’s a strange time to start a trade war with China. But some Senate Democrats seem to want to. They’re pushing a proposal to […]
