Posts under ‘Economics’

I’ve subscribed to The Baseline Scenario for over a year now. I find it to be a very balanced and informative source of information about how we got into the financial straits that we are in. The authors (Simon Johnson and James Kwak), along with a number of well-read readers who leave comments, also provide [...]

I subscribe to a feed from Off-Grid, a source of information for people who are into self-sufficiency, gardening, building their own homes, photovoltaics, solar energy, and related topics. The most recent issue to land in my in-box featured a link to a Time Magazine article by Reihan Salam, entitled The Dropout Economy. I read the [...]

I usually agree with Jim Wallis, though I often wish that he would go further in his critique of the current order. But, as he says in the following article, he is a conservative Christian (and I am not). As a nation, is it too much to hope that we may be approaching a new [...]

Brian McLaren is a controversial figure in the Emerging Church movement. Whatever you might think of his theology, you have to respect his appeal to many who belong to Generation X. I found this commentary by Brian and thought that it expressed some ideas that deserve wider consideration. I’m posting it here in the hopes [...]

I’ve held off on posting the final part of Sara Robinson’s series of essays on fascism in America for fear of turning off my readers. The popular picture of fascism, with references to Hitler and Mussolini, just clashes too harshly with our national mythology, doesn’t it? Fascism is sneaky – it doesn’t always look like [...]

In a comment on my post “Tea Party Tax Protests and Reality”, Debi asks, “Jeff, what is wrong with the Fair Tax?” I replied without really investigating the Fair Tax and made some assumptions that were probably not correct. You know what assume does, don’t you? Makes an a** out of you and me, right? [...]

A good friend of mine, who has friends who are active in the Tea Party movement, stopped to chat today and asked me if I could find a source of information that would refute her friend’s claim that no part of the personal income tax that we pay goes towards anything other than paying the [...]

Some day, I really should read more of the classics, including The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. This morning, a friend sent me a link to an OpEdNews post by Ed Martin in which he wrote that “paranoid Republicans [were] projecting their own evil ways onto liberals.” In the essay, he wrote that Michelle [...]

For a few years now, the right wing talking heads have been all up in arms about something called the “Nanny State.” I’ve not paid a lot of attention to their whining, because I don’t have a lot of respect for their rants – they don’t have a coherent philosophy as a foundation for their [...]

In times of economic hardship, it seems that right wing populism often rears its ugly head. Current events certainly give credence to that truth. However, this time around, right wing populism has had at least a decade-long running start, because the talking heads on Fox TV and talk radio pundits like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Beck [...]