UBI Without Quality Public Services Is a Neoliberal’s Paradise
Why should governments give cash-handouts before providing free, quality public services to all?
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
Beware Billionaires Bearing Gifts
Billionaires’ gifts are too often intended to remake society along their preferred lines.
Read more...Trump’s Sneak Attack on Social Security
Trump budget proposal incorporates an attack on Social Security, advocating a switch to the chained Consumer Price Index (CPI) to index the federal definition of poverty, a step that would result in lower benefits.
Read more...Public-Private Partnerships Fad Fails
After the failure and abuses of privatization became apparent, public-private partnerships have since been promoted to mobilize private finance for the public purpose. PPPs have socialized costs and losses while ensuring private financial gains.
Read more...Bill Black: Ocasio-Cortez & Sanders Introduce Bill to Cap Credit Card Interest Rates at 15%
Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders introduce legislation: they call it Loan Shark Prevention, which would allow post offices to act as banks and cap interest rates at 15%, but credit card companies claim it would hurt the poor.
Read more...The Lost Ones: The Opportunities and Outcomes of White, Non-College-Educated Americans Born In The 1960s
This column shows that white, less-educated Americans born in the 1960s are worse off than the generation born 20 years previously, based on wage changes, increased medical costs, and shorter life expectancy. This disparity could be worth as much as $132,000.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Subprime Bites – Auto-Loan Delinquencies Spike to Q3 2009 Level, Despite Strongest Labor Market in Years
A high level of auto-loan delinquencies challlenges the cheery spin the Fed and the financial press is putting on the state of the ecoomy.
Read more...”Who Says Violence Doesn’t Solve Anything?” A Review of Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment by Cory Doctorow
Radicalized presents uncomfortable truths about the neoliberal vise.
Read more...Four Industries Big Tech Has Ruined
Rather than confine themselves to operating systems and PC software like they did in the 1980s and 1990s, the tech industry has figured out that the real money lies in being a middleman.
Read more...The Roots of Health Inequality and the Value of Intra-Family Expertise
Having doctors in the family is good for your healh. Who’d have thunk it?
Read more...Why You Should Back the Sanders/AOC Plan to Cap Credit Card Interest Rates at 15%, Re-Launch the Postal Savings Bank
A new bill by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seeks to limit credit abuses and make banking more accessible.
Read more...Student Loan Forgiveness Program Offers False Hope, Rejects 99% of Applications
The infamous HAMP program, which the Administration revised so many times on the fly as to give incompetent and mendacious mortgage servicers air cover for failing to modify mortgages, at least had a stealth purpose. As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said to the SIGTARP’s Neil Barofsky, it was to foam the runway for banks by […]
Read more...War on Cash: UK’s First Till-Free Grocery Store
War on cash- issues and complications undermine business case for till-free stores.
Read more...Bill Black: Thousands Die, Millions Injured on the Job, and No Businesses Prosecuted
Bill Black describes how OSHA’s few underfunded inspectors can’t do their jobs, and prosecutors don’t prosecute businesses for non-compliance.
Read more...Buttigieg’s Small Donor Surge: Less There Than Meets the Eye?
A first look at the data about Buttigieg’s donors raises some uncomfortable questions.
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