Aug 17 Watch Amid Attention From Obama, GOP, How Is Midwest’s Economy Doing? On the last day of his bus tour through the Midwest, President Obama's aides said he will outline a national jobs plan after Labor Day. Jeffrey Brown discusses the state of the economy in Midwestern states with Iowa State University's… Continue watching
Aug 17 Children in Poverty: How Are Kids in Your State Faring? The latest numbers on poverty among U.S. children are so striking that they make you do a double take. In 2009, 31 million kids were living in families with incomes below twice the federal poverty threshold. That's… Continue reading
Aug 17 Sweden’s Super-Duper Rich By Paul Solman // Update: Watch Land of the Free, Home of the Poor and Americans Facing More Inequality, More Debt and Now More Trouble? to see the first two parts of Paul Solman's ongoing series of reports on U.S. economic… Continue reading
Aug 16 Watch Land of the Free, Home of the Poor Financial gains over the last decade in the United States have been mostly made at the "tippy-top" of the economic food chain as more people fall out of the middle class. The top 20 percent of Americans now holds 84… Continue watching
Aug 16 Watch ‘No Clear Path Forward’ for Eurozone as Economic Woes Continue A new report out Tuesday showed overall growth in 17 eurozone countries increased just two-tenths of a percent in the second quarter. Judy Woodruff discusses what Europe's crisis means for the world with George Washington University's Scheherazade Rehman and the… Continue watching
Aug 16 Europe’s Stuttering Economy With the eurozone in such obvious economic turmoil, we turn to former chief IMF economist and longtime friend and favorite of Making Sen$e, Simon Johnson (Peterson Institute, MIT). We asked him a series of pressing questions: Paul Solman:… Continue reading
Aug 16 Europe’s Stuttering Economy By Paul Solman With the eurozone in such obvious economic turmoil, we turn to former chief IMF economist and longtime friend and favorite of Making Sen$e, Simon Johnson (Peterson Institute, MIT). We asked him a series of pressing questions: Paul Solman: Is… Continue reading
Aug 15 Watch News Wrap: Google Plans $12.5 Billion Takeover of Motorola Mobility In other news Monday, Google announced its largest-ever acquisition with the planned purchase of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. The cellphone maker controls thousands of patents and builds devices that run on Google's Android platform. Also, a wave of bombings… Continue watching
Aug 15 In Defense of Flogging: Controversial Conversation on Prisons and Punishment By Paul Solman We were curious: is flogging — beating someone solidly on the behind with a wooden cane — a reasonable, effective alternative to sending that person to jail for two, five, 10 years? That’s exactly what Peter Moskos, a police… Continue reading
Aug 13 Big Think: 5 Takeaways From Economists After Market’s Wild Ride It may not be nearly as bad as the financial crisis of 2008, but this was undoubtedly the most frenzied week on the markets since then. And yet while we spent much of our week asking people to… Continue reading