Marketplace, December 24, 2003 It’s holiday gift time. And the biggest gift-givers this holiday season areRepublican members of Congress. The huge omnibus spending bill that’s passed the House and will be voted on inthe Senate when it reconvenes in Washington is loaded with special gifts. Knownin Washington as “earmarks,” and known to the rest of […]
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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Iraq’s Debt
Marketplace, December 17, 2003 Iraq owes about $120 billion to the rest of the world. Unless that debt isreduced, there’s almost no chance Iraq can get back on its feet. A lot ofIraq’s future earnings would have to be spent servicing the debt rather thanmodernizing itself. This is why James Baker, President Bush’s new envoy, […]
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The Last Word
To hear Democratic contenders in this final stretch before the primaries, you’d think the biggest economic question facing America is whether to repeal all or part of George W. Bush’s tax cuts. How utterly pathetic. This lets Bush frame the issue, casts Democrats as taxers and fails to put forward a positive vision of what […]
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Steelyard Blues
Marketplace December 3, 2003 Bush lost Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2000 and barely won Ohio and West Virginia — so these will almost certainly be battle-ground states in 2004. Onething they have in common is steel. Only a few hundred thousand steel workers remain but they’re politically active, as are the owners and executives of […]
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Seniors Up, Juniors Still Down
Marketplace, November 26, 2003 Most Democrats would have preferred a Medicare bill that gave less money to pharmaceutical and insurance companies and more directly to seniors. But regardless of whose side you were on in this epic battle, there was never any doubt that a new multi-billion dollar drug benefit would be available to Medicare […]
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Watching Over Fannie and Freddie
Marketplace, November 18, 2003 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the unofficial names of two huge publicly-traded, government chartered companies that buy mortgages and mortgage-backed securities to boost the flow of capital through the U.S. mortgage market. In plain English, they allow you and me and millions of other Americans to get mortgage loans relatively […]
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The Religious Wars
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect yesterday’s ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The original version of the piece can be found in the December issue of the print magazine. Since last summer’s Supreme Court decision in Lawrence vs. Texas, overturningTexas’ anti-sodomy law, evangelicals have grown louder. Now that theMassachusetts Supreme […]
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High-Tech Jobs Are Going Abroad! But That’s Okay
Washington Post, November 2, 2003 There’s good news and not-so-good news in the American workplace. The good newsis that the economy is growing and businesses are spending once again, on high technology. The Commerce Department reported last Thursday a sharp pickup in spending on equipment and software in the third quarter. Not so good is […]
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Drug Money
Marketplace, October 29, 2003 Prescription drugs are the largest single health-care expense for most Americans, especially seniors. And drug prices are rising at a whopping 17 percent a year, more than four times faster than inflation. Pharmaceutical prices are higher in the United States than in any other country in the world. That’s why increasing […]
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The Ethical Collapse Continues
Marketplace October 22, 2003 At this week’s Senate Finance Committee hearing, witnesses described tax avoidance plans sold by major accounting firms and bought by America’s biggest companies with no fear that the IRS would uncover the deals or impose meaningful penalties on them. According to a report from the General Accounting Office released at the […]
