Total deaths from suicide, alcohol, or drugs, what some call “deaths of despair,” increased by 51 percent from 2005 to 2016 in the United States, and drug overdose deaths increased by 16 percent per year between 2014 and 2017. These statistics reflect the well-documented opioid crisis and what some experts have called a national “mental […]
Trump just gave away the Republican game on Social Security and Medicare
Davos went to President Trump’s head. Perhaps it was the rarefied air of the annual World Economic Forum, a place where billionaires congratulate one another on what they see as their unique virtues and smarts. Perhaps it was the ego boost, as Trump basked in acceptance by a high-end business crowd that once held him […]
Social Security: Where Do the 2020 Candidates Stand?
The C-SPAN video from 1995 is grainy, but the audio is clear: Senator Joe Biden is heard bragging about his support for freezing spending on Social Security as part of broader deficit reduction legislation. “I’m up for re-election this year, and I’m going to remind everybody what I did, at home, which is going to […]
The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America
In the 2010s, the national unemployment rate dropped from a high of 9.9 percent to its current rate of just 3.5 percent. The economy expanded each and every year. Wages picked up for high-income workers as soon as the Great Recession ended, and picked up for lower-income workers in the second half of the decade. […]
How Private Equity Buried Payless
The financiers who had taken over Payless ShoeSource didn’t have much experience selling low-priced footwear, but they had big ideas about how things ought to be done. One was capitalizing on enthusiasm for the 2018 World Cup in the Latin American countries where the company had hundreds of stores. When they saw an opportunity to […]