One Utah

I’ve described the last eight years as a long recession for ordinary Americans.
This account from Campaign for America’s Future captures the experience:
So far as I can tell, in my labor law practice, every year is a recession for working people, even in a boom. In 2007, over 15 million were out of work at some [...]

In The Return of Depression Economics, Paul Krugman argues that we’re facing an economy in which the dynamics of the Great Depression have been recreated - excess capacity, insufficient demand, and a banking system meltdown.
What exactly does it mean to deal with a banking system meltdown?

Via Matt Yglesias and NBC News: With President Bush set to leave the White House less than two weeks from now, here’s a “Then and Now” to show what the United States looked like when Bush was entering office and what it looks like now as he’s leaving. The “Then” is the best-available figure as [...]

Conservatives, as David Sirota noted, have a new favorite talking point: FDR and the New Deal made the great depression worse. Conservatives are arguing fervently in a desperate attempt to derail a major economic stimulus plan from the incoming Obama administration. A number of writers - UC Davis Professor Eric Rauchway and UC [...]

Oh yeah, this just keeps gettin’ better ‘n better.
Eugene Robinson:
To recap: We’re in the midst of a global financial crisis. The housing bubble has burst and prices have collapsed. The economy has been in recession for a year. Unemployment has risen to 6.7 percent, and if “marginally attached” workers are included — those who have [...]

In a post provocatively entitled The Great Crash of 2008, Robert Reich writes:
f this isn’t a Great Crash I don’t know how to define one. Stocks were down another 7 percent today. Since the peak of last year, major stock indexes have dropped 47 percent. We’re in range of the Great Crash of 1929.
Consider the [...]

What do you do when your demand driven economy is saddled with a demand side that is under-performing?
The reality we face is summed up by Robert Reich:
. . . when the economy has as much underutilized capacity as we have now, and are likely to have more of in 2009 and 2010 (in all likelihood, [...]

Pure free-marketers argue that the automakers should be allowed to fail and go bankrupt without any taxpayer aid. I’m predicting this lame duck congress will do nothing, but that as soon as the new president and congress are seated in January, help for the industry will be forthcoming.
As I listen to various [...]

Today’s Tribune has an article: More low-income Utahns go hungry
Do you ever feel hunger? Have you ever been hungry because you couldn’t afford to buy food? As a parent, have you ever been unable to provide food for your child?
As my astute friend was pointing out to me last night, the [...]