LA Times The Congressional Budget Office reported this week that the federal budget is completely out of control. Even if spending doesn’t grow as a share of the national economy, the green eyeshades at the budget office forecast $400-billion deficits as far as the eye can see. The last time the budget was nearly this […]
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 Permanent Election
One of the things that distinguishes advanced democracies from banana republics is that winners and losers accept the results of elections. Losing candidates and parties don’t initiate coups. Winners don’t kill off the losers and their supporters. The winning party has an opportunity to govern. Both sides go back to their respective corners — winners […]
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Media Ownership Redux
The conventional wisdom used to be that Congress is in the pockets of Big Media. So of course Congress would support the FCC’s decision to allow Big Media to own even more media. At the very least, a Republican-controlled Congress would follow the Republican White House’s lead in getting behind the FCC’s new rules. And […]
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A National Minimum Vacation
It’s summer. The weather’s beautiful. You’d like to take a couple of weeks off work, right? But you already took a week last winter between Christmas and New Years. And then there was that four days you took off for your friend’s weddinglast March. So you’re not entitled to two weeks now. Maybe a week, […]
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The Honeymoon Continues For George
The Observer (London), Sunday August 3, 2003 Blair is pilloried while the US President is praised for his Iraq strategy. But if Americans continue dying, things could get tough for Bush No weapons of mass destruction have yet been found and Saddam Hussein’s putative links to al-Qaeda remain unverified. Moreover, there’s reason to believe that […]
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Have Corporate Earnings Really Turned Around?
It’s second-quarter earnings season, and all eyes are glued to the quarterly reports. Last year at this time, only about half the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index showed revenue growth. This year so far, more thanthree-quarters are showing increasing revenues –evidence that the nation’s economic prospects have brightened. The good news […]
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The Recession’s Over! Or Is It?
You can relax now. The recession is over. You see, the economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an independent group that tracks the business cycle, looked carefully at the numbers and decided that the recession that began in March 2001 ended just eight months later. Those economists pay a lot of attention to […]
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Sheltering Everything Except America
Remember the days when corporate executives were paid in stock options? Well, those days won’t be with us for long. Although it’s doing a bit better than it was, the stock market is not exactly roaring. An option to buy a share of stockat last year’s price is not a terrific deal when this year’s […]
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Baseball’s Favorite Game
Take me out to the ball game, and we’ll see a lot of empty bleacher seats. And graying heads. Baseball is in trouble. Attendance is down again this year. And fans are aging. If this keeps up, in a few years our national pastime will have passed. If baseball were a competitive business, it would […]
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Housing Trouble
In all the frenzy over first-half of 2003 economic data — and all the soothsaying it’s inspired about whether the American economy is going to go up or stay down — one salient fact has been left out: Household debt. Two out of every three American families now own the homes they live in — […]
