Most People, I Suspect, Still Have In

The World Economy Is In A Nosedive, And Understanding What I Call "depression Economics" - The Weird World You Get Into When Even A Zero Interest Rate Isn't Low Enough, And A Messed-up Financial System Is Dragging Down The Real Economy - Is Essential If We're Going To Avoid The Worst.

There's One Thing That The Fed Has Been Really Good At Cracking Down On, And That's Inflation.

What Happened After 9/11 - And I Think Even People On The Right Know This, Whether They Admit It Or Not - Was Deeply Shameful. The Atrocity Should Have Been A Unifying Event, But Instead It Became A Wedge Issue. Fake Heroes Like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, And, Yes, George W. Bush Raced To Cash In On The Horror. And Then The Attack Was Used To Justify An Unrelated War The Neocons Wanted To Fight, For All The Wrong Reasons....the Memory Of 9/11 Has Been Irrevocably Poisoned; It Has Become An Occasion For Shame. And In Its Heart, The Nation Knows It.

Most People, I Suspect, Still Have In Their Minds An Image Of America As The Great Land Of College Education, Unique In The Extent To Which Higher Learning Is Offered To The Population At Large. That Image Used To Correspond To Reality. But These Days Young Americans Are Considerably Less Likely Than Young People In Many Other Countries To Graduate From College. In Fact, We Have A College Graduation Rate That's Slightly Below The Average Across All Advanced Economies.

Many People ... Prefer To Describe Themselves As Progressives Rather Than Liberals. To Some Extent That's A Response To The Decades-long Propaganda Campaign Conducted By Movement Conservatives, Which Has Been Quite Successful In Making Americans Disdain The Word Liberal But Much Less Successful In Reducing Support For Liberal Policies.