The two most important pieces of the 2001-2011 tax cuts for low-income families were the reduced refundability threshold of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the 2 percentage point cut in payroll taxes. The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA) extended the former for 5 years and dropped the ...

The Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz wrote of action in war that it must “be planned in a mere twilight, which - like the effect of a fog or moonlight - gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance.” As I attempted to research and write an article that ...

We face a dangerous new kind of economic uncertainty—uncertainty in the rule of law. After settling with the banks, the government wants the system to snap back into the old rules, with everyone acting as if widespread institutionalized theft never happened. It doesn’t work that way. What assurance do we have that the rules won’t be rewritten again, when more blind forgiveness is needed for us to "look forward, not back"?

Unfortunately for the political- and ruling-classes, cold weather will not make this go away. The focus has shifted away from a small park in Manhattan and landed squarely on every working class kitchen table.

To let the banks fail means wiping out the investments of the stockholders completely. Will Congress champion capitalism and let the banks fail, or will they rush to the rescue of their Wall Street benefactors from self-inflicted ruin? Either way, they're looking at "Socialism!"

Capitalists, when they buy stock (or “invest”) their cash, are really just pooling their property (money) with the property of other capitalists with the express purpose of gaining the economic advantages which a larger pool of resources will command. Labor has every right to do the very same “pooling”.

Originally published at All Education Matters. In July of 2008, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a piece entitled, "Suicide Spreads as One Solution to the Debt Crisis."  The article touched upon the housing crash, and Ehrenreich highlighted several cases in which people took their lives when they knew they were losing their homes. Ehrenreich ...

Last week, Chris Bertram speculated some about the predicament of the European left, observing that nowadays "the only thing that unites the various lefts is hostility to a neoliberal right", and that "the differences of policy and principle at the heart of the so-called left are so deep that an ...

I paid my first real visit (rather than an airport stop) to New Orleans in 2002. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina, one of the five deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history, devastated the southern coast, particularly New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish.  In 2010, the Gulf oil disaster exacerbated the five year-old ...

  All environmental groups are not created equal. Some of them are created, sustained, and shaped in corporate boardrooms, and we shouldn't be surprised at the consequences.   World’s Greatest Magic Trick   “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” - ...