The last year of inflation has disproportionately hurt low-income and nonwhite families — those with the least flexibility in their monthly budgets to absorb higher prices.
Is the cure for inflation worse than the disease?
Tag: Great Recession
How Wall Street Is Funding The Culture War
The leading right-wing pugilist against “critical race theory” is backed by Wall Street execs whose financial crisis crushed communities of color.
How Wall Street Is Funding The Culture War
If you’re kid is learning critical race theory, congratulations on them getting into law school! 🤡
Railway Workers Fight Shows Need for Paid Sick and Family Leave + More Updates
“It staggers the imagination that in September 2022 the workers who keep the trains running did not have even one sick day to care for themselves.”
Railway Workers Fight Shows Need for Paid Sick and Family Leave, Says Economist
Related:
Live updates: Railroad workers livid over deal brokered by Biden and unions to prevent strike
The Origin of Student Debt: Reagan Adviser Warned Free College Would Create a Dangerous “Educated Proletariat”
In 1970, Ronald Reagan was running for reelection as governor of California. He had first won in 1966 with confrontational rhetoric toward the University of California public college system and executed confrontational policies when in office. In May 1970, Reagan had shut down all 28 UC campuses in the midst of student protests against the Vietnam War and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. On October 29, less than a week before the election, his education adviser Roger A. Freeman spoke at a press conference to defend him.
Freeman’s remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”
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In retrospect, this period was the clear turning point in America’s policies toward higher education. For decades, there had been enthusiastic bipartisan agreement that states should fund high-quality public colleges so that their youth could receive higher education for free or nearly so. That has now vanished. In 1968, California residents paid a $300 yearly fee to attend Berkeley, the equivalent of about $2,000 now. Now tuition at Berkeley is $15,000, with total yearly student costs reaching almost $40,000.
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That brings us to today. Biden’s actions, while positive, are merely a Band-Aid on a crisis 50 years in the making. In 1822, founding father James Madison wrote to a friend that “the liberal appropriations made by the Legislature of Kentucky for a general system of Education cannot be too much applauded. … Enlightened patriotism … is now providing for the State a Plan of Education embracing every class of Citizens.”
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,” Madison explained, “and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Freeman and Reagan and their compatriots agreed with Madison’s perspective but wanted to prevent Americans from gaining this power. If we want to take another path, the U.S. will have to recover a vision of a well-educated populace not as a terrible threat, but as a positive force that makes the nation better for everyone — and so should largely be paid for by all of us.
Census Bureau: 3.8 million renters will likely be evicted in the next two months — why the rental crisis keeps getting worse
For the first time ever, the median rent in the U.S. topped $2,000 a month in June — and the increases show no sign of stopping.
Census Bureau: 3.8 million renters will likely be evicted in the next two months — why the rental crisis keeps getting worse
U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve Falls To 35-Year Low as American crude heads overseas at a record pace
U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve Falls To 35-Year Low
According to the Institute of Energy Research, the SPR is expected to shrink to a 40-year low by the end of October, with inventories then at 358 million barrels, compared to 621 million barrels a year ago.
Related:
US oil exports to China and India jump as American crude heads overseas at a record pace
The only thing that climbed as high as gas prices earlier this year was the disapproval of US President Joe Biden 😂
Biden was wrongly blamed for rising gas prices. But he doesn’t deserve much credit for the drop
The energy crisis will divide Europe
The energy crisis will divide Europe
German economic power is waning, and with its industrial base getting weaker and its population poorer, the willingness to support other members of the Eurozone will be more limited. This is not a recipe for stability, and it seems more likely than not that European solidarity is already past its high point.
The scissors of slump
Last week, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the US Congress that “We now are entering a period of transition from one of historic recovery to one that can be marked by stable and steady growth. Making this shift is a central piece of the President’s plan to get inflation under control without sacrificing the economic gains we’ve made.”
It’s true that the US economy since the depths of the pandemic slump, (which remember in terms of national output, incomes and investment was the worst since the 1930s – even worse that the Great Recession of 2008-9) has made a recovery. But it could hardly be described as ‘historic’. And as for the claim that the US economy, the best performing of the major economies in the last year, is heading towards ‘stable and steady growth’, that is not supported by reality.
The scissors of slump
Everywhere You Look, American Empire Is Crumbling
‘Prolonged Recession’ Could Be on Horizon as Covid Economic Crisis Leads to State and Local Budget Shortfalls
“We know from the experience of the recovery following the Great Recession just how powerful the economic drag from state and local austerity can be.”
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 