Why do we glorify “self-made” billionaires? Well, being “self-made” is a seductive idea —it suggests that anybody can get to the top if they’re willing to work hard enough. It’s what the American Drea...

Last August, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” and not just their...

With the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc on the global economy, here’s how massive corporations are shafting the rest of us in order to secure billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded bailouts.

If I asked you to name the biggest political party in the United States, what would be your answer? You probably have two guesses that come to mind: the Democratic party or the Republican party.Well,...

The biggest untold story about how we pay for government involves a big switcheroo by America’s wealthy.

Sorry to deliver the news, but it’s time to worry about the next crash. The combination of stagnant wages with most economic gains going to the top is once again endangering the economy.

Trump’s failure to accomplish little or any of his agenda during his first 100 days shouldn’t blind us to the vast harm he has done in this comparatively short time to our system of government, especi...

Donald Trump is proposing a 14.1 percent cut in the I.R.S.’s budget next year. This is incredibly dumb, for four reasons...

The White House war between Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner wouldn’t matter in a normal administration with a normal president.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, in his press conference following the demise of his bill to replace Obamacare, blamed Republicans who had failed to grasp that the GOP was now a “governing party.”

I spent much of this past week in Washington – talking with friends still in government, former colleagues, high-ranking Democrats

The theme that unites all of Trump’s initiatives so far is their unnecessary cruelty.

Watch your wallets. Republicans are pushing a new corporate tax plan that will end up costing most of you a bundle. Here’s what you should know about the so-called “border adjustment tax."

Donald Trump sold himself to voters as a successful businessman who knew how to get things done, a no-nonsense manager who’d whip government into shape.

With congressional Republicans in the majority in Congress and unwilling to cross Donald Trump, the job of containing Trump’s incipient tyranny falls to three centers of independent power

Donald Trump has reorganized the National Security Council – elevating his chief political strategist Steve Bannon

Our country is in dire need of massive investments in infrastructure, but what Donald Trump is proposing is nothing more than a huge tax giveaway for the rich.

Donald Trump is such a consummate liar that in coming days and years our democracy will depend more than ever on the independent press – finding the truth, reporting it, and holding Trump accountable...

Trump’s tweets are a new form of governing by edict. Incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer says “Whatever he tweets, he is going to drive the news.”

New evidence based on groundwater and stream flow reveals mixed messages for the United States, as flood and hurricane frequency depends on region.

A quarter more energy will be required in 23 years’ time due to population growth, and oil will remain the primary source, report estimates.

A sharp increase in the predicted global number of EVs prompts Brazil to rev up its promotion of low-carbon biofuels.

As tyrants take control of democracies, they typically:

President-elect Donald Trump is accusing President Obama of putting up “roadblocks” to a smooth transition.

A crowning achievement of the historic March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech, was pushing through the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What’s at stake this election year? Let me put as directly as I can. America has succumbed to a vicious cycle in which great wealth translates into political power, which generates even more wealth, a...

The great American middle class has become an anxious class – and it’s in revolt. Before I explain how that revolt is playing out, you need to understand the sources of the anxiety.

On Wednesday, 14 people were killed at a social services agency in San Bernardino, California. The gunman apparently was Muslim and was influenced by ISIS.

I’ve just returned from three weeks in “red” America. It was ostensibly a book tour but I wanted to talk with conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers.

Much of the national debate about widening inequality focuses on whether and how much to tax the rich and redistribute their income downward.

In 1928, famed British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would advance so far in a hundred years – by 2028 – that it will replace all work, and no one will need to worry about ma...

Not long ago I was asked to speak to a religious congregation about widening inequality. Shortly before I began, the head of the congregation asked that I not advocate raising taxes on the wealthy.

Many believe that poor people deserve to be poor because they’re lazy. As Speaker John Boehner has said, the poor have a notion that “I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I thi...

I know a high school senior who’s so worried about whether she’ll be accepted at the college of her choice she can’t sleep. The parent of another senior tells me he stands at the mailbox for an hour e...

Franchisees, consultants, and free lancers, construction workers, restaurant workers, truck drivers, office technicians, even workers in hair salons. What they all have in common is they’re not consid...

My recent column about the growth of on-demand jobs like Uber making life less predictable and secure for workers unleashed a small barrage of criticism from some who contend that workers get what the...

How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots’ owners?

Jobs are coming back, but pay isn’t. The median wage is still below where it was before the Great Recession. Last month, average pay actually fell. What’s going on?

Republicans who now run Congress say they want to cooperate with President Obama, and point to the administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, as the model. The only problem is the TPP would b...

We’ve made progress this year — raising the minimum wage in dozens of states and cities, providing equal marriage rights in a majority of states, limiting carbon emissions. But there’s far more to do.

I was phoned the other night in middle of dinner by an earnest young man named Spencer, who said he was doing a survey. Rather than hang up I agreed to answer his questions.

American kids are getting ready to head back to school. But the schools they’re heading back to differ dramatically by family income.

In the 1980s, corporate CEOs were paid, on average, 30 times what their typical worker was paid. Since then, CEO pay has skyrocketed to 280 times the pay of a typical worker; in big companies, to 354...

The pertinent question is not whether income and wealth inequality is good or bad. It is at what point do these inequalities become so great as to pose a serious threat to our economy, our ideal of eq...

More Americans than ever believe the economy is rigged in favor of Wall Street and big business and their enablers in Washington. We’re five years into a so-called recovery that’s been a bonanza for t...

We’re in a new gilded age of wealth and power similar to the first gilded age when the nation’s antitrust laws were enacted. Those laws should prevent or bust up concentrations of economic power that...

If wealth and income weren’t already so concentrated in the hands of a few, the shameful “McCutcheon” decision by the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court wouldn’t be as dangerous. But by t...

One of the worst epithets that can be leveled at a politician these days is to call him a “redistributionist.” Yet 2013 marked one of the biggest redistributions in recent American history. It was a r...

It’s often assumed that people are paid what they’re worth. According to this logic, minimum wage workers aren’t worth more than the $7.25 an hour they now receive. If they were worth more, they’d ear...

Do you recall a time in America when the income of a single school teacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family? I remember. My father (who just...

America has a serious “We” problem — as in “Why should we pay for them ?” The question is popping up all over the place. It underlies the debate over extending unemployment benefits to the long-term u...

Why has America forgotten the three most important economic lessons we learned in the thirty years following World War II? Before I answer that question, let me remind you what those lessons...

People ask me all the time why we don’t have a revolution in America, or at least a major wave of reform similar to that of the Progressive Era or the New Deal or the Great Society.

America’s savage inequality is the main reason equal opportunity is fading and poverty is growing. Since the “recovery” began, 95% of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, and median incomes have...

Usually it is better to assume the best of people for it really is difficult to know what is in someone's heart. That said many in the modern Republican "conservative" party show every sign of being e...

For almost forty years Republicans have pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy intended to convince working-class whites that the poor were their enemies. The big news is it’s starting to backfire.

For years political scientists have wondered why so many working class and poor citizens of so-called “red” states vote against their economic self-interest. The usual explanation is that, for these v...

Although it’s still possible to win the lottery (your chance of winning $648 million in the recent Mega Millions sweepstakes was one in 259 million), the biggest lottery of all is what family we’re bo...

Walmart just reported shrinking sales for a third straight quarter. What’s going on? Explained William S. Simon, the CEO of Walmart, referring to the company’s customers, “their income is going down w...

An old friend who has been active in politics for more than thirty years tells me he’s giving up. “I can’t stomach what’s going on in Washington anymore,” he says. “The hell with all of them. I have b...

As a child I was bullied by bigger boys who threatened to beat me up if I didn’t give them what they wanted. But every time I gave in to their demands their subsequent demands grew larger. First they...

Widening inequality thereby ignites what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style in American politics.” It animated the Know-Nothing and Anti-Masonic movements before the Civil War...

This week, Reich joins Moyers & Company to discuss a new documentary film, Inequality for All, Reich, who Time magazine called one of the best cabinet secretaries of the 20th century, stars in this dy...

Boehner ushers a bill through the House that continues to fund the government after September 30 but doesn’t fund the Affordable Care Act. Anyone with half a brain knows Senate Democrats and the Presi...

Congress will reconvene shortly. That means more battles over taxes and spending, regulations and safety nets, and how to get the economy out of first gear. Which means more gridlock and continual sho...

We are on the brink of a tragic decision to strike Syria, because, in the dubious logic of the President, “a lot of people think something should be done,” and American “credibility” is at stake. He a...

Yesterday a Walmart spokesman criticized the petition I’ve been circulating that asks Walmart (and McDonalds) to pay their employees at least $15 an hour. Walmart’s spokesman told the Huffington Post...

Congress is in recess, but you’d hardly know it. This has been the most do-nothing, gridlocked Congress in decades. But the recess at least offers a pause in the ongoing partisan fighting that’s sure...

Why is the nation more bitterly divided today than it’s been in eighty years? Why is there more anger, vituperation, and political polarization now than even during Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch...

Corporations want corporate tax reduction to be the centerpiece of “tax reform" come the fall. The President has already signaled a willingness to sign on in return for more infrastructure investment....

Americans are segregating by income more than ever before. Forty years ago, most cities (including Detroit) had a mixture of wealthy, middle-class, and poor residents. Now, each income group tends to...

A basic economic principle is government ought to tax what we want to discourage, and not tax what we want to encourage.

What’s less well-known is that you and I and other taxpayers are subsidizing this sky-high executive compensation. That’s because corporations deduct it from their income taxes, causing the rest of us...

Jobs are returning with depressing slowness, and most of the new jobs pay less than the jobs that were lost in the Great Recession.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can

The Fed’s policy of keeping interest rates near zero is another form of trickle-down economics. For evidence, look no further than Apple’s decision to borrow a whopping $17 billion and turn it over to...

Anyone who wants to understand the dis-uniting of America needs to see how dramatically we’re segregating geographically by income and wealth

We’re now witnessing what happens when all of the economic gains go to the top, and the rest of the population doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going.

Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower a...

The Republican Party makeover is breathtaking. Now, suddenly, instead of accusing Democrats of being “redistributionists,” the GOP is posing as defender of the middle class against corporate America —...

Raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 should be a no-brainer. When you add in the Earned Income Tax Credit and food stamps it’s possible to barely rise above poverty at this wage. Besides, the pro...

On one side are those who think of citizenship as a matter of exclusion and privilege — of protecting the nation by keeping out those who are undesirable, and putting strict limits on who is allowed t...

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat (he just celebrated his 98th.) What happened? “They lost me,” he says.

Polls show Americans angrier and more polarized than at any time since the Vietnam War. Yet paradoxically the presidential race that officially begins a few months from now is likely to be as passionl...

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has announced that 2014 was the hottest year in more than 120 years of record-keeping — by far. NOAA is expected to make a similar call in a couple of weeks and s...