Month: November 2011

A flat Social Security tax would generate over $100 billion more every year than the current regressive tax. In a time of high debt and budget deficits, that’s money the government could desperately use.

Now that the Deficit Reduction Supercommittee has apparently failed to reach a consensus on how to cut the trillion-dollar federal budget deficit, the field is open for new ideas.

Latvia will have to follow one of the three paths that other middle-income countries around the world have used to grow (or try to grow) into the top tier of the world-economy.

Since 1969 the poverty line has not been updated for changes in the standard of living. When we say that a family lives in poverty today, what we really mean is that that family lives in what was considered to be poverty in 1969.

Everyone knows that America’s unemployment rate is high. At 9.0%, it’s so high that 1 out of every 11 people is unemployed. Unfortunately, the real situation is worse than the official statistics suggest.

Centralized labor agreements in Finland have served the country well. The Finnish system delivered a cumulative 37% increase in real wages for Finnish workers over the past ten years.

There has always been a gender gap in jobs and wages, but until recently it was narrowing. In the 1980s and 1990s, American women’s wages rose rapidly toward – but never reaching – parity with men’s. Since the year 2000, however, women’s wages have stagnated.

Outrageous CEO pay is tearing apart American society. Only a few people are CEOs, but CEOs set the tone for pay and expectations for top professionals in all fields.