Can someone -- anyone -- tell me why the Republicans in Congress keep saying 'no new taxes'?

It can't be because they think our economy is improving. It's clear to everybody -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- that our economy is wheezing and mired in a nearly...

With all the sturm und drang in recent weeks over raising the debt ceiling -- and with the mediocre agreement now reached between the administration and Congress which irresponsibly only cuts without responsibly raising any new revenues -- it's more than clear that we've lost sight of the greatest economic...

America is facing a catastrophic jobs crisis. Not since the Great Depression has official unemployment hovered above nine percent -- where it is today -- for more than 20 months. Millions of American have given up looking for a job altogether. Even worse, real unemployment is more than 18%. Yet...

The number of American workers and friends of labor who, for all the right factual reasons, continue to stand against the three pending Free Trade Agreements (or FTAs) with South Korea, Panama and Colombia are legion. Many just aren't as public as the likes of Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH); Tom...

Back in March I penned a piece titled "Unions present best path back to prosperity" (Financial Times, 3-01-11), and followed it later with a piece titled "Note to Boeing's Jim McNerney: All we are saying is give the truth -...

Just over a week ago, in the same four-day period:

(1) Government figures confirmed that income inequality in the country remains at its most extreme since 1928, when we first began to track this statistic.

(2) Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican majority leader, walked out...

Anyone deeply concerned about the current almost unprecedented real unemployment rate of more than 18% and about the ongoing jobless recovery must first focus on resuscitating our depleted manufacturing sector. Especially given the current political mood in Washington concerning new federal expenditures, this focus will necessarily require the Obama administration...

A U.S. Senator friend of mine suggested that the ongoing 'Debt Ceiling' versus 'Jobs Creation' battle underway in Congress -- that began in spades within hours of the polls closing last November -- can be best understood if you envision Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Paul Ryan sitting on a...

Back in 1969, John Lennon famously wrote, "All we are saying is give peace a chance."

Well, here in May 2011, while labor peace is not always at hand, maybe we can at least give labor truth a chance. Unfortunately, telling the truth seems to be increasingly difficult for the...

In my previous blog on April 26, I decried President Obama's obvious abandonment of the 'core' of voters who had come together with almost unprecedented political faith to give him a clear mandate on the domestic issue most concerning them: creating the nearly 20 million high-quality stable jobs...

"Body by Jake" Steinfeld -- the first and still most prominent television 'personal trainer' (and an old friend) -- always says that everything starts and stops with an individual's 'core'. Jake obviously means that part of the body -- your 'gut' -- from which most other strength emanates.

Unfortunately, in...

The tax man and Santa Claus have two things in common. Every year they 'cometh' -- just not for everybody. Santa doesn't visit those who've been 'bad,' and the tax man doesn't visit those who have high-priced lobbyists working for them.

The current best example of the latter -- best...

The 2011 Federal Budget, which should have been passed at the latest during the pre-Christmas 2010 lame duck session of Congress, has been shoved forward two times through the use of what's called a "continuing resolution." However, the latest deadline of April 8 appears now to be locked in stone....

We just saw a pretty good 'official' unemployment report for February, wherein for the first time since April 2009 the official unemployment rate dropped below 9.0% (to 8.9%). However, the real unemployment rate, which is the only rate that really matters, remains at 17.8%, including all categories of the 28.4...

When the Obama-McConnell-Boehner tax bill was put forward in mid December, I described it as "hiding the pea," for despite the lofty rhetoric of the three named individuals about fairness and progressive taxation, at least 25 percent and up to a third of the earned income tax savings from the...

For fully two decades, the American people have been fed the canard that the offshoring of literally millions of American manufacturing jobs is an acceptable price to pay for lower cost imported consumer goods. Yet indisputably, we now know from work done by the non-partisan Center for Economic and Policy...

It's hard to 'grade' a President's State of the Union (SOTU) speech, and some would say it's inappropriate to do so, without the insights that only the President himself has. But the sad state of our economy today -- and the specificity of President Obama's campaign promises across the entirety...

There've been ten recessions since the Second World War -- I've lived through nine of them, and although the Great Recession of 2007 is "officially" over only because GDP growth is again (modestly) positive, it persists in most everyone else's view with a jobless recovery of a magnitude not seen...

This is the time each year when new resolutions are in everyone's mind.

I'm especially struck this year, however, by how sad it is that so many of the Democratic Congress' and administration's resolutions for 2010 -- and for 2009 -- went for naught, in whole or in part....

Union and non-union blue-collar workers alike walked into voting booths in 1932 and pulled the lever for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Twenty-eight years later, their sons and daughters -- union and non-union, organized and non-organized -- pulled the lever for JFK. Yet in the 2010 elections just held, while union workers...