Harold Meyerson

There are two ways to look at the new four-year contract between the United Auto Workers and General Motors that was unveiled yesterday. The first is to note that by the standards of today’s economy, the auto workers got about as good a deal as anyone could imagine. The second is to note that the […]

President Obama’s address to Congress tonight was really two speeches in one. The first laid out his jobs plan — substantively, an attempt to forestall a double-dip recession. The second laid out a longer-term economic vision that promised, however vaguely, to restore American manufacturing. Politically, both plans are aimed at shoring up the president’s support […]

Fully 57 of Mitt Romney’s 59 policy proposals to fix the American economy are as indistinguishable as Heinz’s 57 varieties of ketchup (and a lot less fun than Hitchcock’s 39 Steps). They are absolute standard-issue Republican dogma — reduce corporate taxes, pass the free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama (have you ever seen […]

In an economic downturn — in fact, at anytime — no one disputes that an individual state lacks the capacity of the federal government to stimulate the economy. Not even Jerry Brown, the governor of America’s mega-state, whose economy is larger than all but seven nations, disputes that. “We’ve got the plan Obama has been […]

David Callahan notes today that with its conversion to an adjunct of the Tea Party, the Republicans — historic home of the nation’s financial elites — have sent those elites streaming (and screaming) toward the Democrats. David is surely right, and, as he notes, this is the latest step in the decades-long story of Wall […]

Good thing the debt-ceiling deal reassured the market. Stocks, which have been declining steadily for the past two weeks, plunged today on poor job-creation reports in the U.S., a slowdown in manufacturing in both the U.S. and Europe, apprehension about China’s ability to keep buying construction and manufacturing equipment, the poor economic performance of Southern […]

One of the many things left out of the debt-ceiling deal that cleared Congress was an extension of the payroll tax cut that Congress enacted as part of the 2009 stimulus package and subsequently agreed to extend for one more year — this year — beyond its initial expiration date. Both the Obama White House […]

As a card-carrying columnist for the past couple decades, I feel compelled to note the most recent index of the public’s regard for my profession. In this month’s Advertising Age/Ipsos Observer American Consumer Survey, released on Tuesday, my countrymen and women — at least, those who still subscribe to newspapers — were asked the main […]

Let’s see, now. Unemployment is above 9 percent and shows no indication of descending anytime soon. The share of working-age Americans who are even in the workforce is lower than at any time since the early 1980s, when far fewer women worked outside the home. American multinational corporations are increasingly doing their hiring overseas, where […]