Sy Slavin: This Canadian study shows that as far as creating new jobs and generally decreasing unemployment, the way to go is increasing governmental infrastructure expenditures.
Trigger Deficit Cuts When Unemployment Drops to 5 Percent
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Robert Reich: So the best of all worlds is to have a big jobs plan now, and also commit to automatic cuts triggered when unemployment falls to 5 percent.
Wal-Mart Heiress Opens Lavish Art Museum As Company Cuts Worker Health Care
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Randy Shaw: Alice Walton and her family have earned riches by denying workers adequate benefits and living wages. What the museum really needs is a large painting of a Wal-Mart worker suffering from unmet health problems,
Cuts to Higher Education Shortchange California’s Future
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Caitlin Vega: How is it that we cannot reward kids who have done everything right, overcome tremendous hardship, and beat the odds with a decent and affordable education?
Budget Cuts Obama’s Transparency Sites
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Marian Wang: Though the budget deal struck by lawmakers over the weekend averted a shutdown of the federal government, it still has open-government advocates worried about a shutdown of another sort: a shutdown in transparency.
Public School Budget Cuts Herald End of Equality
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Mark Naison: If the only schools that can function well are in communities where parents have the resources to compensate for the budget cuts, then we are basically creating a social order where children will remain in the social position of their parents into the next generation, and where poor and working-class children are doomed by inferior training to be a servant class for the rich, if they are lucky enough to find jobs at all.
Across-the-Board Cuts Needed to Avoid Fiscal Armageddon
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Ivan Eland: To keep with the bipartisan spirit after the Gabrielle Giffords’ assassination attempt and also to avoid partisan fighting over spending priorities, which will bog down and probably eventually kill any significant budget cuts, all government programs should be cut by 15 percent from last year’s budget level, including heretofore sacred defense and entitlement programs.
Obama Fights Fire with Gasoline
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Robert Reich: The President has to reframe the debate around the necessity of average families having enough to spend to get the economy moving again. He needs to remind America this is not 1995 but 2011 — and we’re still in a jobs crisis brought on by the bursting of a giant debt bubble and the implosion of total demand.
Californians Benefit from Funding Higher Education
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Tracy Emblem: California taxpayers should carefully consider the cost-benefit analysis, because when we cut public funding for these institutions, we cut our state’s economic advantage and future prosperity.
Why Obama Is Proposing Corporate Tax Cuts and Why He’s Wrong
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Robert Reich: The economy needs two whopping corporate tax cuts right now as much as someone with a serious heart condition needs Botox.
Why Freeze Spending on Only Part of the Budget?
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Ivan Eland: President Obama’s rationale for not including these security expenditures in his discretionary spending freeze is that he is prosecuting two wars. Aside from the obvious solution of ending the two conflicts—which are part of the “war on terror” but have had the counterproductive effect of increasing retaliatory terrorism—and cutting back the defense budget, defense spending could be reduced even if the two war efforts are sustained.
Budget Cuts Hurt Kids & Destroy Public Education
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Budget Cuts Destroy Public Education. How can we make people understand that underfunding is destroying our public school systems? And that the children who suffer because of education cuts will also be hurt by proposed social services cuts — a cruel double whammy unbefitting a civilized society? I’m a second-grade teacher at Esperanza Elementary School, [...]
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