Here's the good news. The economic pie is growing again. Growth in the 4th quarter last year hit 3 percent on an annualized rate. That's respectable. But here's the bad news: The share of that growth going to American workers is at a record low.
Jobs are coming back fast enough to blunt Republican attacks against Barack Obama on the economy and to rob Mitt Romney of the issue he'd prefer to be talking about. But they're not coming back fast enough to significantly reduce the nation's jobs backlog.
Let Santorum and Romney duke it out for who will cut taxes on the wealthy the most and shred the public services everyone else depends on. The rest of us ought to be having a serious discussion about a wealth tax.
There is moral rot in America but it's not found in the private behavior of ordinary people. It's located in the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump.
The rise in gas prices has almost nothing to do with energy policy. It has everything to do with America's continuing failure to adequately regulate Wall Street. But don't hold your breath waiting for Republicans to tell the truth.
The problem isn't excessive greed. If you took the greed out of Wall Street all you'd have left is pavement. The problem is endemic abuse of power and trust.
What are Republicans doing now that they're out of options? What they always do when they have nothing else to say. Call for a tax cut, of course. It doesn't matter that their new "tax reform" plan has as much chance of being enacted as Herman Cain has of being elected president.
The Paul Ryan plan would give the wealthiest Americans an average tax cut of at least $150,000 a year, paid for by cutting programs for the elderly, lower-middle families, and the poor. This is pure Social Darwinism. Reward the rich and cut off the help to anyone who needs it.
It won't be nearly as easy for Mitt to "shake it up and start all over again" for the general election of 2012, should he get the nomination. Try as he might, Romney won't be able to twist the Etch-A-Sketch knobs and create a brand new picture.
With a bit of political jujitsu, the president could turn any defeat handed to him by the Supreme Court in the Affordable Care Act case into a victory for a single-payer healthcare system -- Medicare for all. Here's how.
The Dallas Fed argues that the Fed's easy money policy can't be much help to the U.S. economy as long as Wall Street is "still clogged with toxic assets accumulated in the boom years." So what's the answer? It's "breaking up the nation's biggest banks into smaller units."
The economy grew at a 3 percent annual rate last quarter. Personal income also jumped. Americans raked in over $13 trillion. Yet it's almost a certainty that all the gains went to the top 10 percent, and the lion's share to the top 1 percent.
