Want to Understand the Labor Shortage? Ask a Shrink.

People are quitting their jobs, and there’s an uptick in labor unrest. A labor market shortage that I predicted would be gone by early September (or...

Executive Privilege Was Out of Control Even Before Steve Bannon Claimed It

We can all agree that it’s ridiculous for Steve Bannon to dodge testifying before the House committee investigating January 6 with a claim of...

Tragedy Kept Alan Krueger From Claiming a Nobel Prize, but He’s Not Forgotten

Here’s a sad Zen riddle. If your work wins the Nobel and you’re no longer alive when the prize is awarded, are you a laureate? The Royal Swedish...

The Democrats’ Fear of Assigning a Number to the Debt Ceiling Is Lame and Ridiculous

Washington, D.C. is the only place where the word “reconciliation” is an invitation to fight. I advised the Democrats last week (“Nobody Gives A...

Nobody Gives a Rat’s Ass Whether the Debt Ceiling Gets Folded Into Reconciliation

In victory, it’s advisable to be magnanimous. This sentiment, typically attributed to Winston Churchill (it’s in the frontispiece to his...

South Dakota Is a Moral Sewer and Should Be Abolished

South Dakota is in the news because a consortium of journalists exposed shady doings there that take advantage of the state’s status as a...

Kyrsten Sinema Should Reread Her 2009 Manifesto on Compromise

When we let go of our attachment to specific outcomes and instead focus on our shared values, we can think creatively about solutions to the many...

The Democrats Can’t Get to $2.5 Trillion? Here—I Just Did It.

For those who say the budget framework I proposed costs ‘too much,’ what would you cut? Combatting climate change? Childcare? Universal Pre-K?...

Wait—Is Kyrsten Sinema About to Do Something Good?

The carbon tax is back, sort of. A possibility has emerged that the tax will be folded into the budget reconciliation bill. It’s almost certainly a...

Stop Fretting About the Reconciliation Bill

The budget reconciliation bill has reached a “potentially devastating impasse” ( New York Times ) and “the fate of the Biden presidency” is...

Climate Change Is Killing American Workers, and Biden Needs to Act Quickly

The Biden administration’s decision Monday to issue a regulation that limits workers’ exposure to extreme heat didn’t come soon enough to save...

The Right’s New Argument Against Redistribution Is Stuck in the 1970s

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, says Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion...

Direct Democracy Is Breaking California

The foolishness of California’s recall system—which failed this week to replace California Gov. Gavin Newsom with a right-wing talk radio...

Taxing Wealth Is a Fool’s Errand

“TAX THE RICH,” blared the red lettering on the back of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s white evening gown at last night’s Met...

Why Won’t the Chamber of Commerce Support Biden’s Vaccine Mandate?

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce would like everybody to get vaccinated against Covid, because the Delta variant is seriously screwing with the economic...

The Big Question About Biden’s New Vaccine Mandates

President Biden is preparing to impose the most comprehensive Covid vaccine mandates thus far, requiring most federal employees and—this may be the...

Democrats, Don’t Go Wobbly on the Estate Tax

The budget reconciliation bill now before Congress raises the exciting possibility that the Democrats will become once again the party of the working...

Republicans Say the “Bernie Bill” Will Bring European Socialism to America. If Only!

A growing worry as Congress takes up the reconciliation bill is that expanding the welfare state as the Democrats hope to do will drag American...

The Dark Lesson of Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos Is That Corporate Bullying Works

Did Elizabeth Holmes’s signature black turtleneck hide bruises? The founder and chief executive of Theranos is preparing to stand trial for fraud...

The Democrats Are Finally Catching Up With Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich, who turns 80 today, began work on her best-known book, Nickel and Dimed, for a specific purpose that’s been largely forgotten:...

The End of the Four-Year Presidency—for Democrats, Anyway

Throughout history it’s been periodically suggested that America should amend the Constitution to make the president serve a single six-year term....

Richard Trumka Was Forthright Til the End

Liberals, said Richard Trumka, his lip curling. They’re killing us. That was about ten years ago. We were standing in the conference room of The New...

Jeff Bezos, Space Marxist?

“I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,” Jeff Bezos said Tuesday on returning from the edge of outer space,...

Why Democrats Should Fear Inflation

“I find the fixation on 1970s inflation puzzling,” the New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum wrote this past May on Twitter. “I...

A Sign That the Labor Shortage Is Vanishing

News travels slowly in the summer months, so you may have missed this week’s signal that the Great American Labor Shortage of 2021 is easing: Fewer...

Dismantle the NCAA

This week, the Supreme Court struck a blow for the unpaid professional athletes who pretend to be amateurs so they can play on college teams. In NCAA...

Let’s Tax Dead People

President Joe Biden has proposed a tax increase that you may not have heard about. It would make the tax code more progressive without extracting even...

We Regret to Inform You That Workers Are Not Suddenly Winning

How do you like the Great American Labor Shortage so far? Wages are rising faster than they have in nearly 40 years, reports Business Insider ,...

Republicans Are Accidentally Suppressing Their Own Voters

An unnamed Democratic congressional aide told The Washington Post this week that the mood in his party is “panic.” The cause of that panic is...

Who Does J.D. Vance Think He’s Fooling?

There’s an arresting scene in J.D. Vance’s moving 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy , in which Vance, a second-year student at Yale Law School,...

It Shouldn’t Take a Pandemic to Boost Worker Wages

A central problem in labor economics is how to raise wages without first killing off a significant portion of the workforce. Plagues have historically...

If Corporations Are People, Tax Them Like People

As if by magic, corporations were rendered human by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United and 2014 Hobby Lobby decisions. They may now...

Walter Mondale Wasn’t Scared of Raising Taxes. Is Biden?

Walter Mondale, who died Monday at 93 , was the last presidential nominee to tell the truth about taxes. This experiment was judged a failure, and no...

Is Biden Ditching His Promise to Protect Workers From Covid-19?

Among the various ways President Donald Trump caused more Americans to die needlessly from Covid-19 was by failing to issue a legally enforceable...

Republicans Are Too Subservient to Corporate America to Wage War on “Woke Capitalism”

“From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the Second Amendment, parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like...

Repair the Crumbling Infrastructure of the American Labor Movement

A former public affairs aide for the AFL-CIO once told me he spent most of his day fielding queries from conservatives. Most liberals outside the Rust...

Why D.C. Is Failing at the Vaccination Game

How the Top 0.01 Percent Became America’s Criminal Class

“We don’t pay taxes,” the hotel magnate and 1980s “queen of mean” Leona Helmsley famously said. “Only the little people pay taxes.” That...

Republican Brats Are Complaining About Getting Billions in Covid Relief

One of the more puzzling developments in states’ rights conservatism has been the combination of don’t-tread-on-me militancy with a determination...

The Covid Relief Bill Also Raises Taxes on the Rich

Everybody knows that top corporate executives get paid much more than they’re worth — and that ever-rising income inequality is the result. It’s...

Congress Ends Welfare Reform as We Know It

The Covid relief bill ends a decadeslong pivot away from cash benefits. And both parties are sort of OK with it.

Biden’s Support for Unionizing Amazon Is a B.F.D.

My morning newspapers were so transfixed by Sunday night’s vindictive speech by the president who lost reelection in November that they neglected...

Meltdown at CPAC as Conservatives Struggle to Reconcile Property Rights With Mask Mandates

I am scanning in vain the “Locke’s notebook” blog of Conservatives for Property Rights for any discussion of Friday morning’s unpleasantness...

The Rise and Fall of the L. Brent Bozells

In The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp , a classic 1943 film that traces, in vaguely allegorical fashion, half a century’s evolution in...

Don’t Believe the Bad Press About the Economic Impact of a $15 Minimum Wage

The reviews for a $15 hourly minimum wage are in, and they’re brutal. “Biden’s $15 Wage Bid Hits Headwind,” says Bloomberg . “Don’t...

Why Biden and Harris Are Right About “Equity”

All Americans believe in equality, but they don’t believe in it equally—an awkward circumstance that politicians have always struggled to paper...

The End of the 40-Year War on Government

Joe Biden’s inaugural speech was primarily about unity, an appropriate theme after the pathologically divisive presidency of you-know-who. But Biden...

I Went to High School With Biden’s Homeland Security Team

“Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.” ...

The Case Against the $2,000 Checks

Now that the Democrats have won control of the Senate, with a 50–50 split and a tie-breaking vote for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, they...

Republicans for Recession

Do congressional Republicans want to prolong the recession to hurt President-elect Joe Biden? Four years ago, I might have judged any such...