Economic Growth Program

It might be called the "World's Scariest Chart."  It is a snapshot of the fragile foundations of the American economy and the epic boulder it now finds itself trapped beneath. The graph shows total debt outstanding in the United States, both secured and unsecured, as a percentage of GDP. In 1981 it was a manageable 168 percent, in 1996 253 percent, and by the first quarter of 2009 with the collapse of the housing and credit bubbles it had reached a staggering 373 percent of GDP.

 

Samuel Sherraden, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan New America Foundation in Washington, DC, said the industry is too new to benefit from job creation ... and more »

Today is Labor Day, when we celebrate the wealth destroyers--at least if the libertarian right is to be believed.

Sherle R. Schwenninger, director of the economic growth program at the New America Foundation, said that while it is good to make it easier for people to ... and more »

... staffed by government employed doctors and health care providers, see Phillip Longman's book Best Care Anywhere, Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours ... and more »

Federal government purchases make up about 20% of the U.S. economy, yet the United States is almost alone among the major developed nations and China in not having a significant "buy domestic" government procurement program.

No single economic stimulus initiative would do more in the short and long term to resuscitate U.S. employment, especially manufacturing employment, and to materially reduce our economy-zapping massive trade deficit than a fair "buy American" program.

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering," President Franklin Roosevelt told an audience in Madison Square Garden in 1936. "They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they

Phillip Longman, the author of "The Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours," recounts in a 2005 Washington Monthly article the horrific ... and more »

"The Koizumi reforms" was one of the portmanteau concepts most commonly bandied about in Japanese political debates in the summer of 2009 as the parties geared up for the August election. Japan had in fact embarked on its neo-liberal agenda of deregulation and privatization well before the charismatic Mr. Koizumi laconically offered his "no gain without pain" recipes, but it was pushed with most enthusiasm during his premiership from 2001 to 2006.