Are Republicans inconsistent when they sometimes support using offsets and indexing and sometimes don’t? Not at all. They’re actually very consistent. When capital comes asking for gifts Republicans act like Santa Claus. When labor is the supplicant they conduct themselves more like Scrooge. Consider the Republicans’ different approach to the estate tax, the minimum wage, and … Read More
The natural tendency of the private sector, when unrestrained, is to strip us of our personal physical and psychic space. Just look at what has happened in the airline and broadcasting industries. When it comes to air travel, private companies’ profits depend on maximizing revenue per cubic inch of space inside a plane. Fifty years ago, … Read More
The private sector has had a very bad month. Its most widely publicized failure occurred when UPS and FedEx fumbled their Christmas deliveries while the U.S. Postal Service scored a touchdown. “An unlikely Star of the Holiday Shipping Season: The U.S. Postal Service” is how Business Week described the clear victory of the public over … Read More
In the recent issue of the American Prospect editor-at-large Harold Meyerson has written what may be the single best piece on the reasons behind the decline and fall of the American worker since the 1960s and the rise of the age of anxiety. The disparity between then and now is stark. In the 25 years before … Read More
In November, in what history may judge the ultimate triumph of ideology over evidence, the U.S. Department of Justice dropped its lawsuit against the merger of American Airlines and US Airways. It is altogether fitting that the green light for allowing just 4 airlines to control 85 percent of the domestic market was given by a … Read More
Schools have a lot to learn from business about how to improve performance Bill Gates declared in an Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2011. He pointed to his own company as a worthy model for public schools. “At Microsoft, we believed in giving our employees the best chance to succeed, and then we … Read More
I support foreign aid because it reflects a willingness of rich nations to share resources with those less fortunate. I criticize foreign aid because it tends to go from government to government, often encouraging corruption and wastefulness. Or is driven primarily by self-interest, often undermining rather than nurturing a country’s independence (e.g. U.S. food aid that … Read More
The announcement that the US Postal Service will deliver packages for Amazon on Sundays came just a few days after a federal judge halted USPS’ sale of Stamford’s historic downtown post office. The juxtaposition of the two events throws into stark relief the new Janus-like philosophy of the postal service: a big hug to big business, … Read More
On November 7 New York Times business columnist Floyd Norris writes about a study of a 2009 federal law intended to force down the hidden fees credit card companies impose on their customers. When Neale Mahoney, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, set out to evaluate the effect of that law, he … Read More
